I was the “friend” mentioned in the ‘Noisy fuckers’ section and I think it’s a warped summary of events written to paint CEA in a bad light.
My own (inline) summary
“Shortly after CEEALAR (then the EA Hotel) was founded, I was contacted by an Economist journalist excited about the project who wanted to write about it. Not knowing then of the CEA policy I invited him to come and view it.”
An Economist journalist wanted to write about the EA Hotel and the OP planned to (but didn’t?) invite him to stay for a few days. I was running retreats there at the time. [And AFAICT I never saw any sign that the journalist was “excited about the project” or cared about us at all.]
“I mentioned this to a friend, who informed me of the CEA policy and, on the basis of it, strongly urged us not to engage.”
I was wary because of my and my friends’ experiences with journalists and “a few thoughts from CEA” [where did “policy” come from?]. I was also worried on the Hotel’s behalf about attracting freeloaders and was frankly too exhausted to host a journalist. I wasn’t sure what to do.
“So we backtracked and asked the journalist not to visit. He did anyway, and we literally turned him away at the front door.”
We couldn’t get hold of the hotel owner so I politely refused the journalist’s requested visit [AFAICT there was no invite to “backtrack” on], discouraged engagement and invited the guests to share their opinions. I also gave the owner and journalist the opportunity to connect and offered to connect the owner with a more respectable Economist journalist who wanted to write more on EA. The journalist visited anyway, we turned him away, the owner spoke to him off the record, he refused to share a draft with us, he published the piece.
“You can read the article here[1] and form your own opinions—mine is that the last paragraph feels very like a substitution for what would have been an engaged look at what people were doing in the hotel if we hadn’t both reduced the substance of the journalist’s story and presumably pissed him off in the process.”
My opinion is that it’s not clear if I made the right call.
My longer summary
1. The OP plans to invite the journalist to stay at the hotel “for a few days” where I am already approaching breaking point trying to run three retreats. I don’t think he actually ever did.
Which I’m grateful for, incidentally.
2. The OP shares my view with other EA Hotel representatives: “she was wary that there might be some stuff there that wouldn’t be great for him to see. She also echoed the concern [of another EA Hotel rep] that it would net us a bunch of would-be freeloaders”
It looks like the OP and I chatted on the phone so I don’t know what I actually said to him, but he doesn’t mention CEA when communicating my views.
3. If the OP did invite the journalist to stay, it’s max. two hours before I tell the journalist (cc the OP) that we can’t receive visitors because we’re full, busy and the owner is away, but I give him and the owner the opportunity to connect for an interview.
“Unfortunately with [the owner] away and full occupancy, the current Hotel Manager is extremely busy as are the guests, and we are not currently in a position to receive visitors. However, [the owner] has informed us that he will be contactable once again from this weekend at the earliest, and you are welcome to contact him directly yourself: [email address]”, forwarding to the owner, “Hope that was an okay response. Personally I don’t see much upside to coverage but I do see risks. Thought I’d let you make the call.”
4. Three days later, the journalist says he’s coming anyway.
“I’m planning to come up to Blackpool tomorrow.” No one has been able to get hold of the owner so I repeat a few hours later that, “I’m sorry that I can’t be more helpful, but as I said, we are not currently in a position to receive visitors. All residents are agreed on this, so I don’t want you to waste a journey tomorrow.” The following morning the journalist replies, “I’m afraid I’m already on my way and my editor definitely wants the piece this week.”
5. I express my doubts to the owner based on a CEA doc, my own experiences with journalists and worries about attracting freeloaders, but say I’m unsure. I offer to connect the owner with another Economist journalist I know who seems a lot more decent and wants to write more about EA.
I say to the owner, “It’s not clear if publicity in media outlets is generally good for EA” and link to an old CEA advice doc that has since been updated (so I don’t know what it said at the time). I also share details of my and others’ mixed experiences with journalists and advise, “I think it mostly turns on: How much they get it, how much they support it, and the track record of the particular idea being communicated in a helpful way. With this piece, if Hamish is a supporter of EA then it could be good publicity for EA, not clear (maybe it makes us look more like a cult, or maybe Hamish makes too many rookie errors in describing the ideas and gives the impression that we’re all about killer robots / sticking plaster solutions / massaging the egos of the elite etc). But wrt the hotel specifically, I’d have thought that the last thing you want is publicity to non-EAs?...Actually, if you actively want publicity in The Economist, maybe a better shout is to reach out to [other Economist journalist] with the idea—we know at least that he’s done a seemingly good job of this before.”
6. I tell the guests that a journalist may turn up uninvited tomorrow and invite them to share their views.
“I may well be being paranoid here, so I encourage others to share thoughts (I’ll paste some of mine below)...My argument against talking to him is basically that if coverage in The Economist is something we actively want, I already know a journalist there who did a pretty good of it before IMO, is genuinely enthusiastic about EA and puts in weeks/months of full-time research, and is looking to write more on EA. https://www.economist.com/international/2018/06/02/can-effective-altruism-maximise-the-bang-for-each-charitable-buck Given the riskiness of media coverage (a few thoughts from CEA here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jU4snbnAIq-q4Dl_mIF0JyTT_bQrvS1wdBhQC1H-Bv8), better to say “no” until [the owner] is in a position to think about this. Also someone just told me that [the owner] is contactable by now, so I’m taking his silence as a lack of enthusiasm for this article....Oh, and free[loaders], forgot to mention that, that’s a pretty big reason! I don’t know have a good sense of how easy this would be, but publicising free living for 2 years in a national media outlet when you already have access to publicity among your target audience seems like a recipe for disaster (not just because of the potential for accidentally accepting free[loaders], but because of the number of disgruntled, rejected applicants you might end up with who then might be interested in pursuing legal action on discrimination grounds)...To clarify, “attempting to pursue legal action” ;-) Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, it’s still a headache to deal with and if the number of attempts are high enough, one of them might succeed anyway.”
7. The journalist turns up, we turn him away, he goes knocking on doors.
8. Another EA Hotel representative joins the guests’ group chat and urges us to go and talk to the journalist.
The Hotel rep says he wants to talk to the journalist to get him “on our team”. Three people encourage the rep to ask for it to be off the record and the rep disagrees.
9. The owner talks to the journalist off the record but then tells us, “He’s writing the piece anyway...can’t run a draft by me first”
I say to the owner, “if you’re going to talk to him obviously feel free to paint me in whatever light is most useful (e.g. if you think it will help you to establish rapport by distancing yourself from me, saying I handled it badly etc, go ahead, he’s probably feeling pretty pissed off with us at the moment).” Other Hotel rep says, “I’ve looked into it, OTR is not a thing” and when challenged says, “It’s not legally binding.” A guests adds, “have had multiple friends, including various in EA e.g. MIRI, be screwed and misrepresented multiple times by journalists.” The Hotel rep says in a separate chat, “It’s a basic prisoner’s dilemma and we defected”.
10. I apologise to local hoteliers.
I write apology cards to local hotels “apologising for the recent noise and explaining that I’d been leading evening activities while the owner had been on holiday and I have no intention of returning, so I’d expect noise levels to be more reasonable going forward.”
Maybe I messed up. (In fact in my first draft of this comment I said I did.) Perhaps we changed our decision on him staying without me knowing, but if so it happened within two hours, it was three days before his visit, and it was with a polite email that offered an explanation and an alternative. He responded by coming up anyway and refusing to run a draft by us. I don’t know if this kind of journalist would have mocked us less or more if I’d let him observe and interview us for a few days.
Fwiw many of the details of this I didn’t know, and many of the rest I’d forgotten. But overall it seems consistent with what I said, with a couple of caveats:
I was wary because of my and my friends’ experiences with journalists and “a few thoughts from CEA” [where did “policy” come from?]
I’ve edited the OP to say that this was mostly based on your own experience. Re ‘policy’ - it was somewhere in the aftermath/discussion of this experience that I learned of CEA’s stance. Fwiw the guide you linked to looks very much like a policy to me, albeit a slightly differently emphasised one from the OP.
AFAICT I never saw any sign that the journalist was “excited about the project” or cared about us at all.
My memory is that on the phone, he came across as excited and very positive about the project. I didn’t have any further interaction with him after that.
The OP plans to invite the journalist to stay at the hotel “for a few days” where I am already approaching breaking point trying to run three retreats. I don’t think he actually ever did.
I think he already had the idea of visiting, and asked me about the possibility, and IIRC encouraged it at the time—I didn’t realise how overloaded you were, and if you told me since I’ve evidently forgotten, so rather belatedly, sorry for dropping that on you :(
it’s a warped summary of events written to paint CEA in a bad light.
I don’t think this is justified. I’m criticising the policy of isolating from the media that CEA have advocated for several years, and which the hotel de facto implemented on grounds that were, at least in part, informed by CEA writings. I’m not saying anyone involved did anything wrong at the time (including the journalist), just that this is some light evidence that CEA’s policy can be counterproductive—depending on your reading of the final article.
The tweaks above notwithstanding, even after reading your full description I would think it reasonable to write much the same synopsis and argue for much the same conclusion from it.
My reading of your original synopsis and conclusion: “The de facto EA policy is not to engage with journalists unless you’re CEA-sanctioned and extremely confident they’ll report your ideas exactly as you describe them. So CEA almost forced us to mess this nice man around, causing the situation to go much worse than it would have otherwise.”
My synopsis and conclusion: “As the decision-maker here I felt very unsure, sought input from others, and ultimately because of several reasons (one of which was CEA’s wariness of journalists in certain situations) I decided not to engage, but I did give the owner the opportunity to get interviewed by this Economist journalist or a nicer Economist journalist. Given that this journalist doesn’t seem very nice, that I didn’t have the spoons (or beds?) to host a journalist, and worries about a popular piece attracting too many freeloaders, it’s not clear whether welcoming him for a few days would have gone better.”
On thinking it’s deliberately written to paint CEA in a bad light: The whole post generally sounds quite exaggerated to me and only talks about downsides.
a) the thesis of the whole post, which is that CEA’s approach hasn’t been a good idea in retrospect;
b) the claim that CEA have previously used their influence on funding to enforce their policy, which I didn’t argue for and can’t publicly discuss, but stand by;
c) the approach of the post, which is to assume that linking to the case for the policy’s upsides was sufficient—and focus on the undiscussed downsides; and
d) the synopsis of that particular event, which wasn’t meant to imply that we did anything other than follow the advice of our own free will—I’ve edited it again to make that as clear as I can.
You can say I wrote the post badly—I only had a couple of days to spare on it—or that such a downside-focused approach was never a good idea (though since I don’t have anywhere near the time or resources to do the empirical research I’m advocating, that would amount to saying I just shouldn’t have criticised CEA’s media policy).
But no, I’m not going to ‘agree to disagree’ that I intentionally said anything misleading.
I was the “friend” mentioned in the ‘Noisy fuckers’ section and I think it’s a warped summary of events written to paint CEA in a bad light.
My own (inline) summary
An Economist journalist wanted to write about the EA Hotel and the OP planned to (but didn’t?) invite him to stay for a few days. I was running retreats there at the time. [And AFAICT I never saw any sign that the journalist was “excited about the project” or cared about us at all.]
I was wary because of my and my friends’ experiences with journalists and “a few thoughts from CEA” [where did “policy” come from?]. I was also worried on the Hotel’s behalf about attracting freeloaders and was frankly too exhausted to host a journalist. I wasn’t sure what to do.
We couldn’t get hold of the hotel owner so I politely refused the journalist’s requested visit [AFAICT there was no invite to “backtrack” on], discouraged engagement and invited the guests to share their opinions. I also gave the owner and journalist the opportunity to connect and offered to connect the owner with a more respectable Economist journalist who wanted to write more on EA. The journalist visited anyway, we turned him away, the owner spoke to him off the record, he refused to share a draft with us, he published the piece.
My opinion is that it’s not clear if I made the right call.
My longer summary
1. The OP plans to invite the journalist to stay at the hotel “for a few days” where I am already approaching breaking point trying to run three retreats. I don’t think he actually ever did.
Which I’m grateful for, incidentally.
2. The OP shares my view with other EA Hotel representatives: “she was wary that there might be some stuff there that wouldn’t be great for him to see. She also echoed the concern [of another EA Hotel rep] that it would net us a bunch of would-be freeloaders”
It looks like the OP and I chatted on the phone so I don’t know what I actually said to him, but he doesn’t mention CEA when communicating my views.
3. If the OP did invite the journalist to stay, it’s max. two hours before I tell the journalist (cc the OP) that we can’t receive visitors because we’re full, busy and the owner is away, but I give him and the owner the opportunity to connect for an interview.
“Unfortunately with [the owner] away and full occupancy, the current Hotel Manager is extremely busy as are the guests, and we are not currently in a position to receive visitors. However, [the owner] has informed us that he will be contactable once again from this weekend at the earliest, and you are welcome to contact him directly yourself: [email address]”, forwarding to the owner, “Hope that was an okay response. Personally I don’t see much upside to coverage but I do see risks. Thought I’d let you make the call.”
4. Three days later, the journalist says he’s coming anyway.
“I’m planning to come up to Blackpool tomorrow.” No one has been able to get hold of the owner so I repeat a few hours later that, “I’m sorry that I can’t be more helpful, but as I said, we are not currently in a position to receive visitors. All residents are agreed on this, so I don’t want you to waste a journey tomorrow.” The following morning the journalist replies, “I’m afraid I’m already on my way and my editor definitely wants the piece this week.”
5. I express my doubts to the owner based on a CEA doc, my own experiences with journalists and worries about attracting freeloaders, but say I’m unsure. I offer to connect the owner with another Economist journalist I know who seems a lot more decent and wants to write more about EA.
I say to the owner, “It’s not clear if publicity in media outlets is generally good for EA” and link to an old CEA advice doc that has since been updated (so I don’t know what it said at the time). I also share details of my and others’ mixed experiences with journalists and advise, “I think it mostly turns on: How much they get it, how much they support it, and the track record of the particular idea being communicated in a helpful way. With this piece, if Hamish is a supporter of EA then it could be good publicity for EA, not clear (maybe it makes us look more like a cult, or maybe Hamish makes too many rookie errors in describing the ideas and gives the impression that we’re all about killer robots / sticking plaster solutions / massaging the egos of the elite etc). But wrt the hotel specifically, I’d have thought that the last thing you want is publicity to non-EAs?...Actually, if you actively want publicity in The Economist, maybe a better shout is to reach out to [other Economist journalist] with the idea—we know at least that he’s done a seemingly good job of this before.”
6. I tell the guests that a journalist may turn up uninvited tomorrow and invite them to share their views.
“I may well be being paranoid here, so I encourage others to share thoughts (I’ll paste some of mine below)...My argument against talking to him is basically that if coverage in The Economist is something we actively want, I already know a journalist there who did a pretty good of it before IMO, is genuinely enthusiastic about EA and puts in weeks/months of full-time research, and is looking to write more on EA. https://www.economist.com/international/2018/06/02/can-effective-altruism-maximise-the-bang-for-each-charitable-buck Given the riskiness of media coverage (a few thoughts from CEA here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jU4snbnAIq-q4Dl_mIF0JyTT_bQrvS1wdBhQC1H-Bv8), better to say “no” until [the owner] is in a position to think about this. Also someone just told me that [the owner] is contactable by now, so I’m taking his silence as a lack of enthusiasm for this article....Oh, and free[loaders], forgot to mention that, that’s a pretty big reason! I don’t know have a good sense of how easy this would be, but publicising free living for 2 years in a national media outlet when you already have access to publicity among your target audience seems like a recipe for disaster (not just because of the potential for accidentally accepting free[loaders], but because of the number of disgruntled, rejected applicants you might end up with who then might be interested in pursuing legal action on discrimination grounds)...To clarify, “attempting to pursue legal action” ;-) Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, it’s still a headache to deal with and if the number of attempts are high enough, one of them might succeed anyway.”
7. The journalist turns up, we turn him away, he goes knocking on doors.
8. Another EA Hotel representative joins the guests’ group chat and urges us to go and talk to the journalist.
The Hotel rep says he wants to talk to the journalist to get him “on our team”. Three people encourage the rep to ask for it to be off the record and the rep disagrees.
9. The owner talks to the journalist off the record but then tells us, “He’s writing the piece anyway...can’t run a draft by me first”
I say to the owner, “if you’re going to talk to him obviously feel free to paint me in whatever light is most useful (e.g. if you think it will help you to establish rapport by distancing yourself from me, saying I handled it badly etc, go ahead, he’s probably feeling pretty pissed off with us at the moment).” Other Hotel rep says, “I’ve looked into it, OTR is not a thing” and when challenged says, “It’s not legally binding.” A guests adds, “have had multiple friends, including various in EA e.g. MIRI, be screwed and misrepresented multiple times by journalists.” The Hotel rep says in a separate chat, “It’s a basic prisoner’s dilemma and we defected”.
10. I apologise to local hoteliers.
I write apology cards to local hotels “apologising for the recent noise and explaining that I’d been leading evening activities while the owner had been on holiday and I have no intention of returning, so I’d expect noise levels to be more reasonable going forward.”
Maybe I messed up. (In fact in my first draft of this comment I said I did.) Perhaps we changed our decision on him staying without me knowing, but if so it happened within two hours, it was three days before his visit, and it was with a polite email that offered an explanation and an alternative. He responded by coming up anyway and refusing to run a draft by us. I don’t know if this kind of journalist would have mocked us less or more if I’d let him observe and interview us for a few days.
And maybe I shouldn’t have been a noisy fucker.
But you’re not blaming CEA for this.
Fwiw many of the details of this I didn’t know, and many of the rest I’d forgotten. But overall it seems consistent with what I said, with a couple of caveats:
I’ve edited the OP to say that this was mostly based on your own experience. Re ‘policy’ - it was somewhere in the aftermath/discussion of this experience that I learned of CEA’s stance. Fwiw the guide you linked to looks very much like a policy to me, albeit a slightly differently emphasised one from the OP.
My memory is that on the phone, he came across as excited and very positive about the project. I didn’t have any further interaction with him after that.
I think he already had the idea of visiting, and asked me about the possibility, and IIRC encouraged it at the time—I didn’t realise how overloaded you were, and if you told me since I’ve evidently forgotten, so rather belatedly, sorry for dropping that on you :(
I don’t think this is justified. I’m criticising the policy of isolating from the media that CEA have advocated for several years, and which the hotel de facto implemented on grounds that were, at least in part, informed by CEA writings. I’m not saying anyone involved did anything wrong at the time (including the journalist), just that this is some light evidence that CEA’s policy can be counterproductive—depending on your reading of the final article.
The tweaks above notwithstanding, even after reading your full description I would think it reasonable to write much the same synopsis and argue for much the same conclusion from it.
I think it is justified.
On thinking it’s a warped summary:
My reading of your original synopsis and conclusion: “The de facto EA policy is not to engage with journalists unless you’re CEA-sanctioned and extremely confident they’ll report your ideas exactly as you describe them. So CEA almost forced us to mess this nice man around, causing the situation to go much worse than it would have otherwise.”
My synopsis and conclusion: “As the decision-maker here I felt very unsure, sought input from others, and ultimately because of several reasons (one of which was CEA’s wariness of journalists in certain situations) I decided not to engage, but I did give the owner the opportunity to get interviewed by this Economist journalist or a nicer Economist journalist. Given that this journalist doesn’t seem very nice, that I didn’t have the spoons (or beds?) to host a journalist, and worries about a popular piece attracting too many freeloaders, it’s not clear whether welcoming him for a few days would have gone better.”
On thinking it’s deliberately written to paint CEA in a bad light: The whole post generally sounds quite exaggerated to me and only talks about downsides.
Perhaps we should agree to disagree.
You’re throwing together -
a) the thesis of the whole post, which is that CEA’s approach hasn’t been a good idea in retrospect;
b) the claim that CEA have previously used their influence on funding to enforce their policy, which I didn’t argue for and can’t publicly discuss, but stand by;
c) the approach of the post, which is to assume that linking to the case for the policy’s upsides was sufficient—and focus on the undiscussed downsides; and
d) the synopsis of that particular event, which wasn’t meant to imply that we did anything other than follow the advice of our own free will—I’ve edited it again to make that as clear as I can.
You can say I wrote the post badly—I only had a couple of days to spare on it—or that such a downside-focused approach was never a good idea (though since I don’t have anywhere near the time or resources to do the empirical research I’m advocating, that would amount to saying I just shouldn’t have criticised CEA’s media policy).
But no, I’m not going to ‘agree to disagree’ that I intentionally said anything misleading.