$130 million? Nice, I don’t know how that compares to the totals spent by other NGO’s or the US government or some organization like the WHO, but the number shows EA commitment to pandemic preparedness over time, well before SARS-COV-2 became a concern.
Frankly, the author of the Journal piece (who I called the OP, sorry if that was confusing) did do a bad job, because:
he attacked an organization that funds charitable giving. To do it well you gotta claim there’s loads of corruption or that the causes are something unpopular or obscure (like subsidizing tofu or saving endangered wild tree mammals in Borneo or whatever). The most he managed to insinuate is that you EA folks like to encourage public sector efforts and that your cause choices are redundant.
he downplayed efforts to help pandemic preparedness. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s a popular issue right now, isn’t it, you just need to mention that said EA folks had the foresight to begin work on pandemic preparedness in 2015.
he made an obvious attempt to align himself with folks that hate taxes. Unfortunately for him, those same folks like charitable giving, and the majority of EA involves philanthropy, not special interest work.
he went for unpopular (“liberal”) associations, and you folks are a bit weird, but that’s because you’re super-smart. His focus on the liberal, leftie associations also doesn’t really matter. It should be easy to ignore in your response, or tackle directly.
The only way to screw up a response to the guy would be to miss how he’s put himself in a corner and then write as weird a response as possible. For example, “with medium epistemic confidence we predict, with a 5% confidence interval based on scientific studies (see the footnotes), that the majority of our s- and x-risk causes conform to preference utilitarianism, meaning that both our longtermist and short-term outcomes are consistent with our aforementioned values of..” Don’t do that.
But other than that, whether you all decide to hire a marketing firm or not, or put a formal plan together or not, this isn’t a big deal. I think a great way to go is just a heated back and forth in the Journal op-ed section. I’ve read enough arguments to see that you can win this one easily.
$130 million? Nice, I don’t know how that compares to the totals spent by other NGO’s or the US government or some organization like the WHO, but the number shows EA commitment to pandemic preparedness over time, well before SARS-COV-2 became a concern.
Frankly, the author of the Journal piece (who I called the OP, sorry if that was confusing) did do a bad job, because:
he attacked an organization that funds charitable giving. To do it well you gotta claim there’s loads of corruption or that the causes are something unpopular or obscure (like subsidizing tofu or saving endangered wild tree mammals in Borneo or whatever). The most he managed to insinuate is that you EA folks like to encourage public sector efforts and that your cause choices are redundant.
he downplayed efforts to help pandemic preparedness. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s a popular issue right now, isn’t it, you just need to mention that said EA folks had the foresight to begin work on pandemic preparedness in 2015.
he made an obvious attempt to align himself with folks that hate taxes. Unfortunately for him, those same folks like charitable giving, and the majority of EA involves philanthropy, not special interest work.
he went for unpopular (“liberal”) associations, and you folks are a bit weird, but that’s because you’re super-smart. His focus on the liberal, leftie associations also doesn’t really matter. It should be easy to ignore in your response, or tackle directly.
The only way to screw up a response to the guy would be to miss how he’s put himself in a corner and then write as weird a response as possible. For example, “with medium epistemic confidence we predict, with a 5% confidence interval based on scientific studies (see the footnotes), that the majority of our s- and x-risk causes conform to preference utilitarianism, meaning that both our longtermist and short-term outcomes are consistent with our aforementioned values of..” Don’t do that.
But other than that, whether you all decide to hire a marketing firm or not, or put a formal plan together or not, this isn’t a big deal. I think a great way to go is just a heated back and forth in the Journal op-ed section. I’ve read enough arguments to see that you can win this one easily.
Good luck with it all.