Effective Altruism will need a rebranding. I anticipate it will be challenging to discuss the topic without SBF/FTX coming up and I’m afraid it will discourage new participants.
I strongly disagree—first, because this is dishonest and dishonorable. And second, because I don’t think EA should try to have an immaculate brand.
Indeed, I suspect that part of what went wrong in the FTX case is that EA was optimizing too hard for having an immaculate brand, at the expense of optimizing for honesty, integrity, open discussion of what we actually believe, etc. I don’t think this is the only thing that was going on, but it would help explain why people with concerns about SBF/FTX kept quiet about those concerns. Because they either were worried about sullying EA’s name, or they were worried about social punishment from others who didn’t want EA’s name sullied.
IMO, trying super hard to never have your brand’s name sullied, at the expense of ordinary moral goals like “be honest”, tends to sully one’s brand far more than if you’d just ignored the brand and prioritized other concerns. Especially insofar as the people you’re trying to appeal to are very smart, informed, careful thinkers; you might be able to trick the Median Voter that EA is cool via a shallow PR campaign and attempts to strategically manipulate the narrative, but you’ll have a far harder time tricking the sorts of extremely smart, educated, morally scrupulous people who EA is actually mostly trying to recruit and persuade.
And this is especially especially true insofar as you’re trying to get a huge diffuse community to all play along with your fake narrative! It’s not as though you can send out a memo to all EAs to dissemble in a specific way that furthers your narrative; the memo will just leak and cause more harm than good. EA needs to give up on this “have an immaculate brand” mirage and shift its mindset toward goals more like “exemplify real virtues”, “focus on the object level”, and “specialize in the niche of being The Group That Speaks Truth Even When It’s Uncomfortable”. You won’t win over everyone that way, but you’ll win more of the battles that matter, and that are actually winnable.
Every Fortune 500 company, sooner or later, faces some massive PR crisis. Very few change the name of the company, their brands, or their products. It’s worth thinking about why they don’t.
Partly this is because of the recognition heuristic: much of the value of the company and brand is simply in the name recognition in the minds of consumers, investors, suppliers, and workers—even apart from the emotional valence (positive of negative) attached to the company/brand.
EA has built up a moderate amount of recognition worldwide as a ‘brand’ of ethical thinking and cause prioritization. If we abandon the EA name, we lose the recognition benefits in millions of brains.
Valences attached to a name (like EA) fluctuate a lot over time, but recognition tends to remain. Remember in the 1990s, Microsoft and Apple were widely vilified for anti-competitive practices, but they’re still both leading tech companies with largely positive associations. Political parties can be tarnished by corrupt or incompetent leaders, but their name recognition remains.
Rebranding in response to a scandal suggests an attempt to brush the issue under the rug without dealing with the underlying problems. Surely you want to be able to respond “this is how we changed to prevent that happening again,” not “we were hoping you wouldn’t remember that”?
More importantly, this type of not remembering is exactly what led to this crisis, as a smaller failure likely happened, Kerry Vaughan provides the details.
Effective Altruism will need a rebranding. I anticipate it will be challenging to discuss the topic without SBF/FTX coming up and I’m afraid it will discourage new participants.
I strongly disagree—first, because this is dishonest and dishonorable. And second, because I don’t think EA should try to have an immaculate brand.
Indeed, I suspect that part of what went wrong in the FTX case is that EA was optimizing too hard for having an immaculate brand, at the expense of optimizing for honesty, integrity, open discussion of what we actually believe, etc. I don’t think this is the only thing that was going on, but it would help explain why people with concerns about SBF/FTX kept quiet about those concerns. Because they either were worried about sullying EA’s name, or they were worried about social punishment from others who didn’t want EA’s name sullied.
IMO, trying super hard to never have your brand’s name sullied, at the expense of ordinary moral goals like “be honest”, tends to sully one’s brand far more than if you’d just ignored the brand and prioritized other concerns. Especially insofar as the people you’re trying to appeal to are very smart, informed, careful thinkers; you might be able to trick the Median Voter that EA is cool via a shallow PR campaign and attempts to strategically manipulate the narrative, but you’ll have a far harder time tricking the sorts of extremely smart, educated, morally scrupulous people who EA is actually mostly trying to recruit and persuade.
And this is especially especially true insofar as you’re trying to get a huge diffuse community to all play along with your fake narrative! It’s not as though you can send out a memo to all EAs to dissemble in a specific way that furthers your narrative; the memo will just leak and cause more harm than good. EA needs to give up on this “have an immaculate brand” mirage and shift its mindset toward goals more like “exemplify real virtues”, “focus on the object level”, and “specialize in the niche of being The Group That Speaks Truth Even When It’s Uncomfortable”. You won’t win over everyone that way, but you’ll win more of the battles that matter, and that are actually winnable.
Rob—I strongly agree with this.
Every Fortune 500 company, sooner or later, faces some massive PR crisis. Very few change the name of the company, their brands, or their products. It’s worth thinking about why they don’t.
Partly this is because of the recognition heuristic: much of the value of the company and brand is simply in the name recognition in the minds of consumers, investors, suppliers, and workers—even apart from the emotional valence (positive of negative) attached to the company/brand.
EA has built up a moderate amount of recognition worldwide as a ‘brand’ of ethical thinking and cause prioritization. If we abandon the EA name, we lose the recognition benefits in millions of brains.
Valences attached to a name (like EA) fluctuate a lot over time, but recognition tends to remain. Remember in the 1990s, Microsoft and Apple were widely vilified for anti-competitive practices, but they’re still both leading tech companies with largely positive associations. Political parties can be tarnished by corrupt or incompetent leaders, but their name recognition remains.
Rebranding in response to a scandal suggests an attempt to brush the issue under the rug without dealing with the underlying problems. Surely you want to be able to respond “this is how we changed to prevent that happening again,” not “we were hoping you wouldn’t remember that”?
More importantly, this type of not remembering is exactly what led to this crisis, as a smaller failure likely happened, Kerry Vaughan provides the details.
https://twitter.com/KerryLVaughan/status/1590807597011333120
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xafpj3on76uRDoBja/the-ftx-future-fund-team-has-resigned-1?commentId=GoDd83K7ipktDtWWs#GoDd83K7ipktDtWWs