I’ve been taking time off work and haven’t been looped into any of CEA’s discussions about media strategy, so here I’m speaking only for myself.
Clearly recent events have been a disaster in terms of media, which means we should reassess our strategies, so at a high level, I agree.
However, I think I mostly disagree with what I understand to be the more specific claims. I’ve tried to split these up as follows:
CEA has a policy of minimising the total amount of media engagement.
EA should have sought even more media coverage than it did in recent years.
CEA’s policy is effectively EA’s policy.
There should be a wider range EA public figures, but CEA has prevented this.
A significantly wider range of people in the community should speak to the media even if they don’t have approval or training from others in EA.
Here are some very brief comments on why I disagree or feel very unsure about these. These are big topics so it’s hard to give much of my reasoning.
On 1) my understanding (not speaking for them) is that CEA had a policy of minimising engagement around 2017-2019 (along the lines of the fidelity post), but my understanding is that from 2020 onwards they became significantly more pro media coverage. EA then received dramatically more media coverage 2020-2022 than it did 2017-2019. This uptick can be seen on 80k’s media page: https://80000hours.org/about/media-coverage/ and then there were also the campaigns for the Precipice, WWOTF etc.
That said, with regards to FTX they seem to have reverted to a policy of less engagement. What to do here just seems like a really hard call to me. You point out there’s a high proportion of negative coverage, but I don’t see a straightforward route to drowning that out with new positive coverage in the current environment. A more realistic option would be to try to more to make the coverage less bad (and there is some of this happening) or do more to tell our own narrative about what happened; but that could easily have the effect of EA being given greater prominence in the negative stories, or make whatever narrative the journalist has more credible etc.
On 2) I feel pretty unsure even more media coverage would have been better.
One point is that it seems likely that EA is getting way more negative coverage now because it was fresh in journalists’ minds from Will’s summer media campaign. If there had been less coverage of EA over the summer, I expect there would be fewer negative articles about EA now. So overall I’m tempted to draw the lesson from this that less media is better.
Another point is that most surveys I’ve seen show that only ~5% of people come into EA via the media, but the media is how most people have heard of EA. This means it creates only a small fraction of community members, but perhaps the majority of haters. I think that suggests there’s still a lot to be said for a strategy that involves a small media footprint (i.e. maybe you get 95% of the recruitment but with only 20% of the haters).
On noisy fuckers, I think the EA Hotel is a bad look for EA (Edit: I want to clarify that I don’t have a problem with the EA Hotel as a project, I just think it’s not a great media story) . Although turning the journalist away at the door also worked out badly in hindsight, I think the bigger mistake was accepting the journalist’s invite in the first place, so if anything I think this example updates me towards a stronger non-engagement policy.
(Also the fact that the journalist came even after you’d turned down the interview is pretty aggressive of him, suggesting the story could have been a lot worse.)
The way I agree with (2) is that it’s a big shame there wasn’t more positive coverage out about longtermism 1-2 years ahead of the launch of WWOTF, which would have meant Torres didn’t drive the discourse around it as much as they did.
More broadly, generating high-profile positive coverage is hard—pushing into more marginal opportunities can easily lead to stories that are more ambiguously positive, or simply have little reach, or require doing a ton of work, and there’s always the question of opportunity costs.
On 3), I think you’re overstating CEA’s influence. The large orgs (GiveWell, OP, FP, TLYCS, ACE, 80k, Singer etc) all have their own outreach people and decide their own strategy. CEA provides advice to some of these orgs, but I wouldn’t say it’s the main driver of what’s happened in recent years. Far more funding comes from OP than CEA. CEA does not ‘appoint’ the representatives of EA.
On 4), I agree it would be great if there were more EA public figures, and having a small number of faces of EA is a big risk for the reasons you say. But my impression is that Will, CEA and 80k have all been trying to find and encourage such people. (If you’re reading this and interested in trying, please apply to 80k advising asap.)
The reason it hasn’t happened isn’t because CEA doesn’t want it, but rather because it’s a shitty and difficult job. Even if someone can match e.g. Toby in terms of communication skills and charm, very few people can tell the kind of story he can, and match the level of coverage he’s able to get. And results are heavy-tailed – it’s almost bound to be that a couple of people receive the majority of the coverage. (Unless those people step back, in which case the total amount of coverage will likely drop.)
So I would really like this to change, but I think it’s going to be a slow process.
On 5), I disagree for similar reasons that others have said in the thread. It’s pretty hard to make media go well and generate positive coverage. I think if lots more people tried without making it a major focus of theirs, the results are as likely to be bad as good.
Since media coverage affects the brand of the whole movement, I think it’s an area where it’s easy to be unilateralist, so it’s reasonable to adopt a rule of thumb like “if a significant number of people think this coverage would be bad, don’t do it.” I’m not sure how this should be implemented in practice, and maybe right now things are too centralised, but I think something like having a media team who can provide quick guidance on whether something seems good or bad seems like a reasonable way to go.
I’m sorry I don’t have more positive suggestions about how things should change going forward (and they probably should) but maybe this helps identify the best criticisms of the old approach.
CEA has a policy of minimising the total amount of media engagement.
At the risk of sounding pedantic, I’m obviously not claiming they’ve sought to minimise it, but to control it.
2. EA should have sought even more media coverage than it did in recent years.
I don’t think they necessarily should have, and definitely not in a cavalier ‘all publicity is good publicity’ way. I think they should have experimented more, and been generally less willing to promote a doctrine laid out in a few hundred words based on nothing but anecdote for nearly as long as they did.
4. There should be a wider range EA public figures, but CEA has prevented this.
I would say more that they’ve strongly singled out Toby and especially Will for promotions than that they’ve prevented individuals from becoming public figures (with the caveat on their influence I discuss further down in this comment). For example, the majority of opening and closing talks at most EAGs until at least 2020 seem to have been by Will or Toby, as well as maybe half the fireside chats—with hardly anyone else seeming to have given more than one. Meanwhile, the promotion they’ve given What We Owe the Future, Doing Good Better and The Precipice is extreme. Many other books have been written on similar subjects without getting anywhere near the level of support (eg Reese’s On the Future, MacFarquahar’s Strangers Drowning, Russell’s Human Compatible—even Singer’s The Most Good You Can Do).
5. A significantly wider range of people in the community should speak to the media even if they don’t have approval or training from others in EA.
At the risk of sounding pedantic-er, I would restrict myself to the weaker claim that lack of training or official approval should not be a strong deterrent to people who are thinking of speaking to the media about EA-related subjects in a positive way and that, to the extent that CEA have publicly discouraged this (which, if I understood Shakeel’s comment on my original doc he agrees they have), they should stop doing so (which, again, it sounds like is what he intends).
Re your arguments:
my understanding is that from 2020 onwards they became significantly more pro media coverage
That might be true. I don’t know what their policy is internally, only what guidance they display publicly. That said,
Excluding those campaigns, which are a large part of the phenomenon I’m criticising, I don’t see an uptick. Just going by those links, and ignoring 2022 which was mostly WWOTF, there seems to have been a cycle of increased coverage every ~3 years, in 2013, 2015, 2018, and 2021.
That said, with regards to FTX they seem to have reverted to a policy of less engagement. What to do here just seems like a really hard call to me. You point out there’s a high proportion of negative coverage, but I don’t see a straightforward route to drowning that out with new positive coverage in the current environment.
I basically agree here. Now is probably a particularly bad time to talk to the media casually—I’m claiming (weakly, and more that these are claims we should be testing) that a) we would be in a better situation now had we had more exposure earlier, and b) once this stuff dies down, a more liberal policy will reduce the risk of such a negative-PR-singularity in future.
One point is that it seems likely that EA is getting way more negative coverage now because it was fresh in journalists’ minds from Will’s summer media campaign. If there had been less coverage of EA over the summer, I expect there would be fewer negative articles about EA now. So overall I’m tempted to draw the lesson from this that less media is better.
Fwiw I interpret this as supporting my case. The level of EA-media engagement in Will’s summer media campaign was, as you imply highly unusual. Had there been a steady stream of articles, some good, some bad, on a wide range of EA topics for years and then 2022′s articles happened to include (but not exclusively be) a large number about Will’s book, I think the ‘man-bites-dogness’ of EA = Will = FTX would have been much reduced.
Another point is that most surveys I’ve seen show that only ~5% of people come into EA via the media, but the media is how most people have heard of EA. This means it creates only a small fraction of community members, but perhaps the majority of haters. I think that suggests there’s still a lot to be said for a strategy that involves a small media footprint (i.e. maybe you get 95% of the recruitment but with only 20% of the haters)
I don’t update in either direction based on this. This sounds like standard marketing logic—you irritate the majority of people who see your ad and engage the minority who matter. I don’t see how that makes a case that less marketing means fewer people will buy your product.
I also think this kind of data is very hard to interpret, in much the same way—few people will consciously go through an internal monologue resembling ‘ah, I heard about EA in the New York Times, so I’ll donate some money to Givewell’, just as few people will say ‘Ah, having seen that ad for Coca Cola I’ll go out and buy a bottle’. It’s all about priming, which is incredibly hard to self-report, even if people are perfectly scrupulous about it (which they’re probably incentivised not to be). If marketing departments—both of for-profits and nonprofits—have for decades thought this was a good trade-off, I think we need some pretty robust evidence to confidently claim it won’t be in our case.
Non-rhetorically-intended question: other than producing bad media, do you know of any instances of ‘haters’ actually impeding EA activities? Otherwise, this claim seems to be ‘more media attention on EA will produce more of both good and bad media’, which seems uncontroversial—the question I want us to investigate is in what proportion it does.
Although turning the journalist away at the door also worked out badly in hindsight, I think the bigger mistake was accepting the journalist’s invite in the first place, so if anything I think this example updates me towards a stronger non-engagement policy.
I think this is fair (both in that I made a mistake and that that’s a reasonable interpretation). I presented it because it’s not my interpretation, and it seems a relevant discussion point.
(Also the fact that the journalist came even after you’d turned down the interview is pretty aggressive of him, suggesting the story could have been a lot worse.)
Without knowing what pressures he was under, having possibly told his boss he had been offered an interview, needing to get some article out by a deadline, I don’t think this is fair to him.
I think you’re overstating CEA’s influence. The large orgs (GiveWell, OP, FP, TLYCS, ACE, 80k, Singer etc) all have their own outreach people and decide their own strategy. CEA provides advice to some of these orgs, but I wouldn’t say it’s the main driver of what’s happened in recent years. Far more funding comes from OP than CEA. CEA does not ‘appoint’ the representatives of EA.
This is true, but somewhat misleading in that of these orgs, only CEA has meaningfully funded individuals . More subtly but IMO with similar effects, EA Funds have been the group most explicitly funding EA startup projects—the others you mention mostly review existing charities that would counterfactually exist, albeit with a reduced budget absent their support. So CEA has wielded existential power over orgs who are the most likely to be explicitly EA aligned. There also seems to have been some amount of deference from the other funders, who sometimes seem to contribute to some project if and only if CEA do it first.
Having said that, as I understand it EA Funds are now separate from CEA, so this is a primarily historical concern. But CEA still run the forum, the EAGs, and have a large hand in EAGxes. So they probably still have an outsized influence on the community comprising the most engaged non-billionaires. Also, they seem to have been much more proactive than the other orgs both in engaging and deterring engagement with the media. Lastly, there’s a huge amount of cross-pollination between these groups, with many of the staff at them having come via one of the other orgs, or being employed by one while being a trustee or advisor for another, etc.
Even if someone can match e.g. Toby in terms of communication skills and charm, very few people can tell the kind of story he can, and match the level of coverage he’s able to get.
I don’t buy this. I’m a big fan of Toby, but I don’t think he’s especially adept at public speaking, and I don’t think it’s a common view that he is. Sure, his story is ‘I started the movement’ (at least, I think so. Jonas is disagreeing below), which is worth a lot, but if you look through the thousands of actively engaged EAs I’m sure there are plenty of others with at least as good a human interest angle.
But my impression is that Will, CEA and 80k have all been trying to find and encourage such people. (If you’re reading this and interested in trying, please apply to 80k advising asap.)
The reason it hasn’t happened isn’t because CEA doesn’t want it, but rather because it’s a shitty and difficult job.
This is perhaps a quibble, but I think considering it as necessarily a ‘job’ is part of my concern. Often the story is just going to be ‘person X did something the media are interested in’ and the question is whether they do or should feel pressure not to speak to the media even if they feel like it’s a good idea.
On 5), I disagree for similar reasons that others have said in the thread. It’s pretty hard to make media go well and generate positive coverage. I think if lots more people tried without making it a major focus of theirs, the results are as likely to be bad as good.
I don’t think there’s a strong case to be made either way yet—again, I want to see more exploration, not sudden adoption of a policy with the opposite emphasis. Fwiw by my count more of the comments on this thread are positive than negative wrt the idea of at least somewhat liberalising the historical policy.
Hey Arepo,
I’ve been taking time off work and haven’t been looped into any of CEA’s discussions about media strategy, so here I’m speaking only for myself.
Clearly recent events have been a disaster in terms of media, which means we should reassess our strategies, so at a high level, I agree.
However, I think I mostly disagree with what I understand to be the more specific claims. I’ve tried to split these up as follows:
CEA has a policy of minimising the total amount of media engagement.
EA should have sought even more media coverage than it did in recent years.
CEA’s policy is effectively EA’s policy.
There should be a wider range EA public figures, but CEA has prevented this.
A significantly wider range of people in the community should speak to the media even if they don’t have approval or training from others in EA.
Here are some very brief comments on why I disagree or feel very unsure about these. These are big topics so it’s hard to give much of my reasoning.
On 1) my understanding (not speaking for them) is that CEA had a policy of minimising engagement around 2017-2019 (along the lines of the fidelity post), but my understanding is that from 2020 onwards they became significantly more pro media coverage. EA then received dramatically more media coverage 2020-2022 than it did 2017-2019. This uptick can be seen on 80k’s media page: https://80000hours.org/about/media-coverage/ and then there were also the campaigns for the Precipice, WWOTF etc.
That said, with regards to FTX they seem to have reverted to a policy of less engagement. What to do here just seems like a really hard call to me. You point out there’s a high proportion of negative coverage, but I don’t see a straightforward route to drowning that out with new positive coverage in the current environment. A more realistic option would be to try to more to make the coverage less bad (and there is some of this happening) or do more to tell our own narrative about what happened; but that could easily have the effect of EA being given greater prominence in the negative stories, or make whatever narrative the journalist has more credible etc.
On 2) I feel pretty unsure even more media coverage would have been better.
One point is that it seems likely that EA is getting way more negative coverage now because it was fresh in journalists’ minds from Will’s summer media campaign. If there had been less coverage of EA over the summer, I expect there would be fewer negative articles about EA now. So overall I’m tempted to draw the lesson from this that less media is better.
Another point is that most surveys I’ve seen show that only ~5% of people come into EA via the media, but the media is how most people have heard of EA. This means it creates only a small fraction of community members, but perhaps the majority of haters. I think that suggests there’s still a lot to be said for a strategy that involves a small media footprint (i.e. maybe you get 95% of the recruitment but with only 20% of the haters).
On noisy fuckers, I think the EA Hotel is a bad look for EA (Edit: I want to clarify that I don’t have a problem with the EA Hotel as a project, I just think it’s not a great media story) . Although turning the journalist away at the door also worked out badly in hindsight, I think the bigger mistake was accepting the journalist’s invite in the first place, so if anything I think this example updates me towards a stronger non-engagement policy.
(Also the fact that the journalist came even after you’d turned down the interview is pretty aggressive of him, suggesting the story could have been a lot worse.)
The way I agree with (2) is that it’s a big shame there wasn’t more positive coverage out about longtermism 1-2 years ahead of the launch of WWOTF, which would have meant Torres didn’t drive the discourse around it as much as they did.
More broadly, generating high-profile positive coverage is hard—pushing into more marginal opportunities can easily lead to stories that are more ambiguously positive, or simply have little reach, or require doing a ton of work, and there’s always the question of opportunity costs.
On 3), I think you’re overstating CEA’s influence. The large orgs (GiveWell, OP, FP, TLYCS, ACE, 80k, Singer etc) all have their own outreach people and decide their own strategy. CEA provides advice to some of these orgs, but I wouldn’t say it’s the main driver of what’s happened in recent years. Far more funding comes from OP than CEA. CEA does not ‘appoint’ the representatives of EA.
On 4), I agree it would be great if there were more EA public figures, and having a small number of faces of EA is a big risk for the reasons you say. But my impression is that Will, CEA and 80k have all been trying to find and encourage such people. (If you’re reading this and interested in trying, please apply to 80k advising asap.)
The reason it hasn’t happened isn’t because CEA doesn’t want it, but rather because it’s a shitty and difficult job. Even if someone can match e.g. Toby in terms of communication skills and charm, very few people can tell the kind of story he can, and match the level of coverage he’s able to get. And results are heavy-tailed – it’s almost bound to be that a couple of people receive the majority of the coverage. (Unless those people step back, in which case the total amount of coverage will likely drop.)
So I would really like this to change, but I think it’s going to be a slow process.
On 5), I disagree for similar reasons that others have said in the thread. It’s pretty hard to make media go well and generate positive coverage. I think if lots more people tried without making it a major focus of theirs, the results are as likely to be bad as good.
Since media coverage affects the brand of the whole movement, I think it’s an area where it’s easy to be unilateralist, so it’s reasonable to adopt a rule of thumb like “if a significant number of people think this coverage would be bad, don’t do it.” I’m not sure how this should be implemented in practice, and maybe right now things are too centralised, but I think something like having a media team who can provide quick guidance on whether something seems good or bad seems like a reasonable way to go.
I’m sorry I don’t have more positive suggestions about how things should change going forward (and they probably should) but maybe this helps identify the best criticisms of the old approach.
Hey Ben,
Let me clarify a couple of my views first:
At the risk of sounding pedantic, I’m obviously not claiming they’ve sought to minimise it, but to control it.
I don’t think they necessarily should have, and definitely not in a cavalier ‘all publicity is good publicity’ way. I think they should have experimented more, and been generally less willing to promote a doctrine laid out in a few hundred words based on nothing but anecdote for nearly as long as they did.
I would say more that they’ve strongly singled out Toby and especially Will for promotions than that they’ve prevented individuals from becoming public figures (with the caveat on their influence I discuss further down in this comment). For example, the majority of opening and closing talks at most EAGs until at least 2020 seem to have been by Will or Toby, as well as maybe half the fireside chats—with hardly anyone else seeming to have given more than one. Meanwhile, the promotion they’ve given What We Owe the Future, Doing Good Better and The Precipice is extreme. Many other books have been written on similar subjects without getting anywhere near the level of support (eg Reese’s On the Future, MacFarquahar’s Strangers Drowning, Russell’s Human Compatible—even Singer’s The Most Good You Can Do).
At the risk of sounding pedantic-er, I would restrict myself to the weaker claim that lack of training or official approval should not be a strong deterrent to people who are thinking of speaking to the media about EA-related subjects in a positive way and that, to the extent that CEA have publicly discouraged this (which, if I understood Shakeel’s comment on my original doc he agrees they have), they should stop doing so (which, again, it sounds like is what he intends).
Re your arguments:
That might be true. I don’t know what their policy is internally, only what guidance they display publicly. That said,
Excluding those campaigns, which are a large part of the phenomenon I’m criticising, I don’t see an uptick. Just going by those links, and ignoring 2022 which was mostly WWOTF, there seems to have been a cycle of increased coverage every ~3 years, in 2013, 2015, 2018, and 2021.
I basically agree here. Now is probably a particularly bad time to talk to the media casually—I’m claiming (weakly, and more that these are claims we should be testing) that a) we would be in a better situation now had we had more exposure earlier, and b) once this stuff dies down, a more liberal policy will reduce the risk of such a negative-PR-singularity in future.
Fwiw I interpret this as supporting my case. The level of EA-media engagement in Will’s summer media campaign was, as you imply highly unusual. Had there been a steady stream of articles, some good, some bad, on a wide range of EA topics for years and then 2022′s articles happened to include (but not exclusively be) a large number about Will’s book, I think the ‘man-bites-dogness’ of EA = Will = FTX would have been much reduced.
I don’t update in either direction based on this. This sounds like standard marketing logic—you irritate the majority of people who see your ad and engage the minority who matter. I don’t see how that makes a case that less marketing means fewer people will buy your product.
I also think this kind of data is very hard to interpret, in much the same way—few people will consciously go through an internal monologue resembling ‘ah, I heard about EA in the New York Times, so I’ll donate some money to Givewell’, just as few people will say ‘Ah, having seen that ad for Coca Cola I’ll go out and buy a bottle’. It’s all about priming, which is incredibly hard to self-report, even if people are perfectly scrupulous about it (which they’re probably incentivised not to be). If marketing departments—both of for-profits and nonprofits—have for decades thought this was a good trade-off, I think we need some pretty robust evidence to confidently claim it won’t be in our case.
Non-rhetorically-intended question: other than producing bad media, do you know of any instances of ‘haters’ actually impeding EA activities? Otherwise, this claim seems to be ‘more media attention on EA will produce more of both good and bad media’, which seems uncontroversial—the question I want us to investigate is in what proportion it does.
I think this is fair (both in that I made a mistake and that that’s a reasonable interpretation). I presented it because it’s not my interpretation, and it seems a relevant discussion point.
Without knowing what pressures he was under, having possibly told his boss he had been offered an interview, needing to get some article out by a deadline, I don’t think this is fair to him.
This is true, but somewhat misleading in that of these orgs, only CEA has meaningfully funded individuals . More subtly but IMO with similar effects, EA Funds have been the group most explicitly funding EA startup projects—the others you mention mostly review existing charities that would counterfactually exist, albeit with a reduced budget absent their support. So CEA has wielded existential power over orgs who are the most likely to be explicitly EA aligned. There also seems to have been some amount of deference from the other funders, who sometimes seem to contribute to some project if and only if CEA do it first.
Having said that, as I understand it EA Funds are now separate from CEA, so this is a primarily historical concern. But CEA still run the forum, the EAGs, and have a large hand in EAGxes. So they probably still have an outsized influence on the community comprising the most engaged non-billionaires. Also, they seem to have been much more proactive than the other orgs both in engaging and deterring engagement with the media. Lastly, there’s a huge amount of cross-pollination between these groups, with many of the staff at them having come via one of the other orgs, or being employed by one while being a trustee or advisor for another, etc.
I don’t buy this. I’m a big fan of Toby, but I don’t think he’s especially adept at public speaking, and I don’t think it’s a common view that he is. Sure, his story is ‘I started the movement’ (at least, I think so. Jonas is disagreeing below), which is worth a lot, but if you look through the thousands of actively engaged EAs I’m sure there are plenty of others with at least as good a human interest angle.
This is perhaps a quibble, but I think considering it as necessarily a ‘job’ is part of my concern. Often the story is just going to be ‘person X did something the media are interested in’ and the question is whether they do or should feel pressure not to speak to the media even if they feel like it’s a good idea.
I don’t think there’s a strong case to be made either way yet—again, I want to see more exploration, not sudden adoption of a policy with the opposite emphasis. Fwiw by my count more of the comments on this thread are positive than negative wrt the idea of at least somewhat liberalising the historical policy.