Strong agree from FarmKind’s perspective. An equal bugbear for me is that to the extent EA orgs focus on comms, they’re insufficiently focused on how to communicate to non-EAs. There seems to be a resistance to confront the fact that to grow we need to appeal to normal people and that means speaking to them the way that works for them, rather than what would work for us
Strong agree. I think some of that resistance comes from past comms “dramas” — for example around earning to give. It was pushed quite hard at one point, and that ended up shaping the public perception as if that’s the EA message, which understandably made people more cautious afterward.
At the same time, I find it interesting that initiatives like School for Moral Ambition are now communicating very similar underlying ideas, but in a way that feels much more accessible to “normal” people — and they haven’t faced anything like the same backlash.
To me that suggests it’s not that these ideas can’t be communicated broadly, but that how we frame and translate them really matters.
Strong agree from FarmKind’s perspective. An equal bugbear for me is that to the extent EA orgs focus on comms, they’re insufficiently focused on how to communicate to non-EAs. There seems to be a resistance to confront the fact that to grow we need to appeal to normal people and that means speaking to them the way that works for them, rather than what would work for us
Strong agree. I think some of that resistance comes from past comms “dramas” — for example around earning to give. It was pushed quite hard at one point, and that ended up shaping the public perception as if that’s the EA message, which understandably made people more cautious afterward.
At the same time, I find it interesting that initiatives like School for Moral Ambition are now communicating very similar underlying ideas, but in a way that feels much more accessible to “normal” people — and they haven’t faced anything like the same backlash.
To me that suggests it’s not that these ideas can’t be communicated broadly, but that how we frame and translate them really matters.