Thank you! Very kind.
I think, in an ideal world, what you end up with is an ecosystem of accounts that cover a lot of the niches you’ve raised.
Some are compatible, so you could do more than one on one account. Example: You could have an account that produces and shares accessible content on effective giving research and seeks donations (if done tastefully), but that account shouldn’t be getting into arguments.
Responding to criticism is important and is often done better by individual user accounts vs central orgs. A good rule of thumb has always been: don’t reply with anything that you wouldn’t be happy being taken as a good representation of your views, that you don’t think adds clarity or additional value, or that you wouldn’t want plastered above your name on a ballot paper (in the political context). It’s hard to do well, but good-faith actors appreciate it and trust and respect you more for doing it.
I think, purely from an outside perspective without having experimented, that a better route to respond to criticism more centrally would probably just be creating and sharing more accessible content that reaffirms where EA stands (where the criticism isn’t or isn’t entirely valid).
EA as a community has a habit of referencing EA texts and principles in response to criticism, and while this is great for people already within the community or adjacent ones like the rationalists, it isn’t necessarily accessible (plain language, core ideas explained, typical blog or news story format) to the general public, while a lot of the critique pieces are.
Will say that I commend the bravery of this position—I respect people who take bold stances on issues of moral importance, even if I don’t personally agree with them—but I do think it’s very brave and potentially at risk of being damaging in the current political climate.
Universities, particularly in the UK and the US at the moment, are peak culture war discourse source territory and the last thing you’re aiming for at the moment is being sucked into that all-consuming cheap political narrative. I get the appeal of universities (young people skewing more in favour of this stuff + climate action), but anything radical and left-coded coming out of universities these days is consumed by it all. Regrettably, the first I saw of this campaign was a press piece using the campaign as raw meat for cheap political point scoring. You don’t have to be supportive of the game to end up on the board, so best to understand the state of play.
Having previously been approached to sign a similar pledge but in a local government context, I ended up having to issue a fairly middle-of-the-road statement stating why we weren’t willing to sign it. The core of the problem wasn’t the ask, but the political backlash that taking a stance on a matter that’s very swept up in the culture war narrative would have cost us wasn’t a trade I was willing to make at the stage in the election cycle that we were at. We have taken stances on other issues in this cluster of political sensitivity, such as gender-neutral bathrooms and air quality improvement work, this cause just wasn’t the one we chose to spend our limited political capital on. Worth considering for anyone working on this sort of advocacy.
Reflecting on this, and the recent piece on the Pledge, I’m more optimistic about across-the-aisle campaigns focused on reducing the consumption of the worst for-welfare animal product options in the current climate until either A. The political climate around these issues improves or B. The window is shifted enough that such stances aren’t as ‘radical’ as they are at the moment.
Nonetheless, I wish the folks working on this well.