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)
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)