Iām a strategic communications professional interested in learning how to communicate complex things to people who arenāt by default very interested in learning about themāsomething I think is relevant to most EA cause areas.
I have communications and marketing experience across branding, audience strategy and targeting implementation, issue and audience research, creative campaign development, public relations, impact measurement, and media planning.
Some bottlenecks on improving communications:
What are we pushing for? E.g. What policies are good to aim for/ārealistic? What should we push labs to do?
What is a general idea we think the public could get behind and which sufficiently tracks AI risk prevention?
Big questions! It seems like the first is a question for everyone working on this, not just communications people. Iād be interested to know what comms can offer ahead of these questions being settled. What kind of priming/ākey understandings are most important to get across to people to make the later convincing easier?
Who is doing this kind of comms work right now and running into these bottlenecks? Through what orgs? Are they the same organizations doing the policy development work?
As a communicator thatās been repeatedly frustrated by how EA can inadvertently reinforce negative misperceptions about itself, Iām thrilled about this. Itās wonderful to see the way I experience EA more clearly reflected and see people and the impact they make (which is really what this is all about!) centered. I especially love how prominent the section with individual stories of impact is. Iād love to see some more examples of people working together, however. Iād hypothesize that feeling like you wonāt be alone in taking action is very important to people considering taking EA seriously, so Iād love to see more stories of partners and groups making impact mixed in with the individual stories. Iām curious if the work you did with Rethink Priorities would back that up.
All in all, this site is much more conducive to how the average person takes in information and feels called to act. I also think it does a really nice job of preemptively defending from some of the criticisms of EA that come from those who havenāt taken the time to try and understand it. I think the word choice updates are spot on and think itās so valuable that āhelping othersā is front and center rather than implied. Much more human. Much more warm and appealing!