I really want to be in favor of having a less centralized media policy, and do think some level of reform is in-order, but I also think “don’t talk to journalists” is just actually a good and healthy community norm in a similar way that “don’t drink too much” and “don’t smoke” are good community norms, in the sense that I think most journalists are indeed traps, and I think it’s rarely in the self-interest of someone to talk to journalists.
Like, the relationship I want to have to media is not “only the sanctioned leadership can talk to media”, but more “if you talk to media, expect that you might hurt yourself, and maybe some of the people around you”.
I think almost everyone I know who has taken up requests to be interviewed about some community-adjacent thing in the last 10 years has regretted their choice, not because they were punished by the community or something, but because the journalists ended up twisting their words and perspective in a way both felt deeply misrepresentative and gave the interviewee no way to object or correct anything.
So, overall, I am in favor of some kind of change to our media policy, but also continue to think that the honest and true advice for talking to media is “don’t, unless you are willing to put a lot of effort into this”.
I think almost everyone I know who has taken up requests to be interviewed about some community-adjacent thing in the last 10 years has regretted their choice
Would be interested in hearing more, like what those interviews were about and whether the interviewed people were mostly from the Bay area and/or part of the rationality community. Could imagine that I wouldn’t want to strongly extrapolate from those experiences to potential media interviews for learning about EA in Germany, for instance.
In 2014 or 2015, several of us in Seattle talked to a journalist who we were told was doing an article on young philanthropists. 3 or 4 people had long interviews with her, and she also took over an EA meeting she’d been invited to observe. When the article came out, it was about how awful young people were for caring about 3rd world poverty instead of the opera.
I also sounded like a goddamn idiot. The journalist asked an absolutely ridiculous question, I worked to answer in a way that wasn’t “I’m sorry, you think what?”, and the quote got used. It accurately reflected my opinion (“no, opera outreach programs aren’t more important than malaria nets”) but I sound stupid because I couldn’t think fast enough to sound smart and not-hostile.
FWIW I remember reading that article and thinking that the net takeaway (from people we want to attract) is neutral or positive towards us. Like if someone doesn’t even believe in the idea of cause prioritization, we are not the right community for them.
Yes I don’t think you sound stupid at all Elizabeth, I think EA comes across reasonably well in the piece and the kind of person who’d be interested in effective giving might Google it because of you.
Yeah I think this was a relatively gentle introduction to misleading journalists, in that the article’s slant was so obvious and enough people were not on its side that it wasn’t damaging.
I’ve had a similar experience in Berlin around the same time. A journalist was there for presentations and in-depth discussions on EA topics at, I think, two meetups, and seemed perfectly genuine to me. And then she wrote an article that just poked fun at us. It was subtle enough that I didn’t notice it (it just sounded vacuous to me), but many friends of mine confirmed that the article was just making fun of us.
I stopped talking to journalists then, but I also had good experiences before that. One of the “good” journalists is involved with EA now and seems to have switched careers. :-D
This seems like the sort of thing where it would really help to have a public database of ‘journalists who we’ve discovered are sucky and journalists who we’ve discovered aren’t sucky’, both as a very mild deterrent and more importantly so future EAs can avoid talking to this particular person.
My guess is that there are far too many journalists in the world for this to be very useful. Though I like the idea, if only to give a more visceral sense of base rates (though obviously myriad selection effects)
In terms of understanding the causal effect of talking to journalists, it seems hard to say much in the absence of an RCT.
Someone ought to flip a coin for every interview request, in order to measure (a) the causal effect of accepting an interview on probability of article publication, and (b) the direction of any effects on article accuracy, fairness, and useful critique.
(That was meant as a bit of a joke, but I would honestly be delighted to see a bunch of articles about EA which include sentences like “Person X did not offer any comment because we weren’t assigned to the interview acceptance group in their RCT”. Seems like it sends the right signal to the sort of people we want to attract.)
In any case, until that RCT gets run, maybe it would be worthwhile to compare articles informed by interviews and articles uninformed by interviews side-by-side, and do what we can with the data we have. It’s easy to say “I talked to the journalist and the article was inaccurate”. But claiming that the article ended up worse than it would’ve been in the absence of an interview is harder. (There are also complicating factors: an article with quotes from relevant people may seem more legitimate to readers; no interview might mean no article.)
EA has a pathology of insisting that we defer to data even in situations where sufficient quantities of data can’t be practically collected before a decision is necessary.
And that is extremely relevant to EA’s media problem.
Say it takes 100 datapoints over 10 years to make an informed decision. During that time:
The media ecosystem, the character of the discourse, the institutions (there are now prediction markets involved btw) and the dominant moral worldviews of the audience has completely changed, you no longer need the answer to the question this data answers.
You have already been assassinated for not engaging in a principled and decisive way.
I should assume that I’m talking to someone who has this pathology and needs me to explain what the alternative to “defer to data” even is: Get better at interpreting the data you already have. Seek theories of communication that’re general enough and robust enough that you don’t strictly need to collect further data to validate them. Test them anyway, but you can’t wait for the tests to conclude before deploying.
You make good points, but there’s no boolean that flips when “sufficient quantities of data [are] practically collected”. The right mental model is closer to a multi-armed bandit IMO.
I think almost everyone I know who has taken up requests to be interviewed about some community-adjacent thing in the last 10 years has regretted their choice, not because they were punished by the community or something, but because the journalists ended up twisting their words and perspective in a way both felt deeply misrepresentative and gave the interviewee no way to object or correct anything.
Do you have thoughts about the idea of creating a thread on a site like the EA Forum or Less Wrong where someone takes questions from the media and responds in writing publicly? 3 birds with one stone: written responses can be more considered, public source material discourages misrepresentation, and less need to respond to the same question multiple times.
(This was Wei Dai’s idea for handling journalist questions about Bitcoin.)
I think something like that is a better idea. Or separately, for people to just write up their takes in comments and posts themselves. I’ve been reasonable happy with the outcomes of me doing that during this FTX thing. I think I’ve been quoted in one or two articles, and I think those quotes have been fine.
I agree that public communication is risky, but I think that plenty more people are qualified to do it than just CEA and the movement’s “big three” public intellectuals (MacAskill, Ord, and Singer). My comment here was partly a response to this one.
You might be right but just to add a datapoint: I was featured in an article in 2016. I don’t regret it but I was careful about (1) the journalist and (2) what I said on the record.
I think almost everyone I know who has taken up requests to be interviewed about some community-adjacent thing in the last 10 years has regretted their choice, not because they were punished by the community or something, but because the journalists ended up twisting their words and perspective in a way both felt deeply misrepresentative and gave the interviewee no way to object or correct anything.
I upvoted this comment because it matches my intuitions, however I think this section is exaggerrated.
When this was brought up on Twitter, someone brought up a survey for how much people who were involved in events felt journalists accurately characterized them. iirc it was something like 20% substantively/entirely accurate, 60% minor errors but broad gist is true, 20% majorly false.
I couldn’t find the study again and I don’t know how good it was. But at least your comment seems maybe an overestimate.
I’ve tended to be pretty annoyed by EA messaging around this. My impression is that the following things are true about EAs talking to the media:
-Journalists will often represent what you say in a way you would not endorse, and will rarely revise based on your feedback on this, or even give you the opportunity to give feedback
-It is often imprudent to talk to the media, at least if you are not granted anonymity first, because it shines a spotlight on you that is often distorted, and always invites some possible controversy directed at you
However, the advice is often framed as though a third thing is also true:
-It is usually bad for Effective Altruism if Effective Altruists talk to the media without extreme care
My personal impression has been that the articles about EA that are most reflective of the EA I know tend to involve interviews with EAs, and that the parts of those articles that are often best reflective of EA are the parts where the interviewed EAs are quoted. The worst generally contain no interviews at all. Interviews like this might grant unearned credibility, but at minimum, they also humanize us, depict some part of the real people that we are. I guess this might not be everyone’s experience, but it’s worth remembering that even if the parts where the EAs are interviewed are often misrepresentative, so are the parts, often to a greater degree, where they aren’t. This is especially true of articles that are written in relative good faith but by outsiders briefly glancing in for their impressions, and it is my impression that this describes the overwhelming majority of pieces written on EA, especially where interviewed EAs get quoted.
Still, I don’t think this advice is the main reason EA has failed so badly with PR recently. FTX was the obvious one, but in terms of actual media strategy I stand by this comment as my main diagnosis of our mistake. With some honorable exceptions, EA’s media strategy this past few months seems to me something like: shine highbeams on ourselves, especially this rather narrow part of ourselves, mostly don’t respond to critics directly in any very prominent non-EA-specific place, except maybe Will MacAskill will occasionally tweet about it, and don’t respond to very harsh critics even this much. I think pretty much every step in this strategy crashed and burned.
When is talking to journalists in the self-interest of an individual or very small org?
When is talking to journalists going to contribute positively to the world?
My gut instinct is that the latter will hold more often than the former, since it develops a wider public discussion, implying that sometimes altruists might want to talk to the media even if they feel it will cast them in a poor light. Over time, as a community we can share our experiences and and collectively decide which publications and individuals we trust to have a conversation with, possibly on which topics or in which broader contexts. One of CEA’s roles could then be to seek to build new such relationships to share with the community, widening our set of options rather than restricting it.
I really want to be in favor of having a less centralized media policy, and do think some level of reform is in-order, but I also think “don’t talk to journalists” is just actually a good and healthy community norm in a similar way that “don’t drink too much” and “don’t smoke” are good community norms, in the sense that I think most journalists are indeed traps, and I think it’s rarely in the self-interest of someone to talk to journalists.
Like, the relationship I want to have to media is not “only the sanctioned leadership can talk to media”, but more “if you talk to media, expect that you might hurt yourself, and maybe some of the people around you”.
I think almost everyone I know who has taken up requests to be interviewed about some community-adjacent thing in the last 10 years has regretted their choice, not because they were punished by the community or something, but because the journalists ended up twisting their words and perspective in a way both felt deeply misrepresentative and gave the interviewee no way to object or correct anything.
So, overall, I am in favor of some kind of change to our media policy, but also continue to think that the honest and true advice for talking to media is “don’t, unless you are willing to put a lot of effort into this”.
Would be interested in hearing more, like what those interviews were about and whether the interviewed people were mostly from the Bay area and/or part of the rationality community. Could imagine that I wouldn’t want to strongly extrapolate from those experiences to potential media interviews for learning about EA in Germany, for instance.
In 2014 or 2015, several of us in Seattle talked to a journalist who we were told was doing an article on young philanthropists. 3 or 4 people had long interviews with her, and she also took over an EA meeting she’d been invited to observe. When the article came out, it was about how awful young people were for caring about 3rd world poverty instead of the opera.
I also sounded like a goddamn idiot. The journalist asked an absolutely ridiculous question, I worked to answer in a way that wasn’t “I’m sorry, you think what?”, and the quote got used. It accurately reflected my opinion (“no, opera outreach programs aren’t more important than malaria nets”) but I sound stupid because I couldn’t think fast enough to sound smart and not-hostile.
FWIW I remember reading that article and thinking that the net takeaway (from people we want to attract) is neutral or positive towards us. Like if someone doesn’t even believe in the idea of cause prioritization, we are not the right community for them.
Yes I don’t think you sound stupid at all Elizabeth, I think EA comes across reasonably well in the piece and the kind of person who’d be interested in effective giving might Google it because of you.
Yeah I think this was a relatively gentle introduction to misleading journalists, in that the article’s slant was so obvious and enough people were not on its side that it wasn’t damaging.
I’ve had a similar experience in Berlin around the same time. A journalist was there for presentations and in-depth discussions on EA topics at, I think, two meetups, and seemed perfectly genuine to me. And then she wrote an article that just poked fun at us. It was subtle enough that I didn’t notice it (it just sounded vacuous to me), but many friends of mine confirmed that the article was just making fun of us.
I stopped talking to journalists then, but I also had good experiences before that. One of the “good” journalists is involved with EA now and seems to have switched careers. :-D
This seems like the sort of thing where it would really help to have a public database of ‘journalists who we’ve discovered are sucky and journalists who we’ve discovered aren’t sucky’, both as a very mild deterrent and more importantly so future EAs can avoid talking to this particular person.
My guess is that there are far too many journalists in the world for this to be very useful. Though I like the idea, if only to give a more visceral sense of base rates (though obviously myriad selection effects)
I appeared on a radio program on behalf of EA London in 2018 and don’t regret it. I thought the coverage was fair to positive.
Here’s another example I think went well, although I don’t know the people involved! https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/apr/25/how-we-met-i-had-another-date-lined-up-on-tinder-but-i-realised-i-wanted-to-be-with-ben
In terms of understanding the causal effect of talking to journalists, it seems hard to say much in the absence of an RCT.
Someone ought to flip a coin for every interview request, in order to measure (a) the causal effect of accepting an interview on probability of article publication, and (b) the direction of any effects on article accuracy, fairness, and useful critique.
(That was meant as a bit of a joke, but I would honestly be delighted to see a bunch of articles about EA which include sentences like “Person X did not offer any comment because we weren’t assigned to the interview acceptance group in their RCT”. Seems like it sends the right signal to the sort of people we want to attract.)
In any case, until that RCT gets run, maybe it would be worthwhile to compare articles informed by interviews and articles uninformed by interviews side-by-side, and do what we can with the data we have. It’s easy to say “I talked to the journalist and the article was inaccurate”. But claiming that the article ended up worse than it would’ve been in the absence of an interview is harder. (There are also complicating factors: an article with quotes from relevant people may seem more legitimate to readers; no interview might mean no article.)
It is a joke, but it’s an appropriate one.
EA has a pathology of insisting that we defer to data even in situations where sufficient quantities of data can’t be practically collected before a decision is necessary.
And that is extremely relevant to EA’s media problem.
Say it takes 100 datapoints over 10 years to make an informed decision. During that time:
The media ecosystem, the character of the discourse, the institutions (there are now prediction markets involved btw) and the dominant moral worldviews of the audience has completely changed, you no longer need the answer to the question this data answers.
You have already been assassinated for not engaging in a principled and decisive way.
I should assume that I’m talking to someone who has this pathology and needs me to explain what the alternative to “defer to data” even is: Get better at interpreting the data you already have. Seek theories of communication that’re general enough and robust enough that you don’t strictly need to collect further data to validate them. Test them anyway, but you can’t wait for the tests to conclude before deploying.
You make good points, but there’s no boolean that flips when “sufficient quantities of data [are] practically collected”. The right mental model is closer to a multi-armed bandit IMO.
That might at least be a good way of establishing a lower bound for EV from talking to journalists.
Do you have thoughts about the idea of creating a thread on a site like the EA Forum or Less Wrong where someone takes questions from the media and responds in writing publicly? 3 birds with one stone: written responses can be more considered, public source material discourages misrepresentation, and less need to respond to the same question multiple times.
(This was Wei Dai’s idea for handling journalist questions about Bitcoin.)
I think something like that is a better idea. Or separately, for people to just write up their takes in comments and posts themselves. I’ve been reasonable happy with the outcomes of me doing that during this FTX thing. I think I’ve been quoted in one or two articles, and I think those quotes have been fine.
I agree that public communication is risky, but I think that plenty more people are qualified to do it than just CEA and the movement’s “big three” public intellectuals (MacAskill, Ord, and Singer). My comment here was partly a response to this one.
You might be right but just to add a datapoint: I was featured in an article in 2016. I don’t regret it but I was careful about (1) the journalist and (2) what I said on the record.
I upvoted this comment because it matches my intuitions, however I think this section is exaggerrated.
When this was brought up on Twitter, someone brought up a survey for how much people who were involved in events felt journalists accurately characterized them. iirc it was something like 20% substantively/entirely accurate, 60% minor errors but broad gist is true, 20% majorly false.
I couldn’t find the study again and I don’t know how good it was. But at least your comment seems maybe an overestimate.
Is this an EA-adjacent sample?
And yeah, seems plausible that I have heard more about the negative cases than the positive cases.
No, I think it was a study that sampled relatively normal people.
I’ve tended to be pretty annoyed by EA messaging around this. My impression is that the following things are true about EAs talking to the media:
-Journalists will often represent what you say in a way you would not endorse, and will rarely revise based on your feedback on this, or even give you the opportunity to give feedback
-It is often imprudent to talk to the media, at least if you are not granted anonymity first, because it shines a spotlight on you that is often distorted, and always invites some possible controversy directed at you
However, the advice is often framed as though a third thing is also true:
-It is usually bad for Effective Altruism if Effective Altruists talk to the media without extreme care
My personal impression has been that the articles about EA that are most reflective of the EA I know tend to involve interviews with EAs, and that the parts of those articles that are often best reflective of EA are the parts where the interviewed EAs are quoted. The worst generally contain no interviews at all. Interviews like this might grant unearned credibility, but at minimum, they also humanize us, depict some part of the real people that we are. I guess this might not be everyone’s experience, but it’s worth remembering that even if the parts where the EAs are interviewed are often misrepresentative, so are the parts, often to a greater degree, where they aren’t. This is especially true of articles that are written in relative good faith but by outsiders briefly glancing in for their impressions, and it is my impression that this describes the overwhelming majority of pieces written on EA, especially where interviewed EAs get quoted.
Still, I don’t think this advice is the main reason EA has failed so badly with PR recently. FTX was the obvious one, but in terms of actual media strategy I stand by this comment as my main diagnosis of our mistake. With some honorable exceptions, EA’s media strategy this past few months seems to me something like: shine highbeams on ourselves, especially this rather narrow part of ourselves, mostly don’t respond to critics directly in any very prominent non-EA-specific place, except maybe Will MacAskill will occasionally tweet about it, and don’t respond to very harsh critics even this much. I think pretty much every step in this strategy crashed and burned.
It sounds like there are two main issues:
When is talking to journalists in the self-interest of an individual or very small org?
When is talking to journalists going to contribute positively to the world?
My gut instinct is that the latter will hold more often than the former, since it develops a wider public discussion, implying that sometimes altruists might want to talk to the media even if they feel it will cast them in a poor light. Over time, as a community we can share our experiences and and collectively decide which publications and individuals we trust to have a conversation with, possibly on which topics or in which broader contexts. One of CEA’s roles could then be to seek to build new such relationships to share with the community, widening our set of options rather than restricting it.
If EAs don’t talk to journalists they will miss out on one really important learning:
.… how to talk to journalists!