Journalist-in-residence at Tarbell Fellowship. Previously Head of Communications at the Centre for Effective Altruism; News Editor at The Economist; journalist and growth manager at Protocol; journalist at Finimize.
Shakeel Hashim
Karma: 2,843
This is great, thanks for highlighting. Evidence Action is another excellent charity that’s nominated, here’s the link to vote for them: https://charitynavigator.typeform.com/to/PsmPZTwp#organization=Evidence Action Inc.
Thanks for this. I agree that we’ve been neglecting social media; the main reason for this as far as I can tell is that no one at CEA was primarily focused on comms/marketing until I was hired in September; then other events proved to be attention-stealing.
Social media is going to be a major part of the communications strategy I outlined here; I expect you’ll see us being more active in the coming months. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mFGZtPKTjqrfeHHsH/how-cea-s-communications-team-is-thinking-about-ea
This is interesting and I broadly agree with you (though I think Habryka’s comment is important and right). On point 2, I’d want us to think very hard before adopting these as principles. It’s not obvious to me that non-violence is always the correct option — e.g. in World War 2 I think violence against the Nazis was a moral course of action.
As EA becomes increasingly involved in campaigning for states to act one way or another, a blanket non-violence policy could meaningfully and harmfully constrain us. (You could amend the clause to be “no non-state-sanctioned violence” but even then you’re in difficult territory — were the French resistance wrong to take up arms?)
I think there are similar issues with the honesty clause, too — it just isn’t the case that being honest is always the moral course of action (e.g. the lying to the Nazis about Jews in your basement example).
These are of course edge cases, and I do believe that in ~99% of cases one should be honest and non-violent. But formalising that into a core value of EA is hard, and I’m not sure it’d actually do much because basically everyone agrees that e.g. honesty is important; when they’re dishonest they just think (often incorrectly!) that they’re operating in one of those edge cases.
Thanks for this post, it’s a really important issue. On tractability, do you think we’ll be best off with technical fixes (e.g. maybe we should just try not to make sentient AIs?), or will it have to be policy? (Maybe it’s way too early to even begin to guess).
Makes total sense — thank you, and looking forward to the handbook!
This is really exciting, nice work on putting it together. Do you have any plans to put the teaching materials (even if that’s just a reading list) online at any point? I think I’m not the right sort of person to do the course but I’d love to slowly work my way through a reading list in my own time.
I think this is interesting but don’t think this is as clear cut as you’re making out. There seem to me to be some instances where making the “first strike” is good — e.g. I think it’d be reasonable (though maybe not advisable) to criticise a billionaire for not donating any of their wealth; to criticise an AI company that’s recklessly advancing capabilities; to criticise a virology lab that has unacceptably lax safety standards; or to criticise a Western government that is spending no money on foreign aid. Maybe your “personal attack” clause means this kind of stuff wouldn’t get covered, though?
Great question, to which I don’t have a simple answer. I think I agree with a lot of what Sjir said here. I think claims 2 and 4 are particularly important — I’d like the effective giving community to grow as its own thing, without all the baggage of EA, and I’m excited to see GWWC working to make that happen. That doesn’t mean that in our promotion of EA we won’t discuss giving at all, though, because giving is definitely a part of EA. I’m not entirely sure yet how we’ll talk about it, but one thing I imagine is that giving will be included as a call-to-action in much of our content.
Really great post, thanks for writing this! EA’s animal successes are indeed really impressive. I want to push back a bit on “no one cares about” this though. The “good things” forum post and Twitter thread I did back in December both did well; much of EAG programming is about wins; Animal Liberation Now, which has got a ton of attention, contains a whole chapter on progress in animal welfare; and indeed your own post got a ton of upvotes.
I do agree that we could always do more to celebrate and reflect on wins like this — I’m just pushing back because I think saying “no one cares about” can actually perpetuate the negative environment it’s trying to fight.
Definitely agreed that we need to showcase the action — hence my mention of “real-world impact and innovation” (and my examples of LEEP and far-UVC work as the kinds of things we’re very excited to promote).
Sorry that you’re struggling to find something here! I don’t have any great ideas, but some stuff that might be promising avenues to explore:
Tobacco control and taxation in LMICs (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RRm8vnmwjWK24ung2/taxing-tobacco-the-intervention-that-got-away-happy-world-no and https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/tobacco-control/) -- relatedly, alcohol policy https://www.givewell.org/research/grants/RESET-alcohol-December-2021
Telecoms and mobile money (https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/telecommunications-in-lmics/ and https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vjysioCANWNXFKipq/the-impact-of-mobile-phones-and-mobile-money-for-people-in)
Cash transfers https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/acBFLTsRw3fqa8WWr/large-study-examining-the-effects-of-cash-transfer-programs
You might also want to look at Charity Entrepreneurship’s research: https://www.charityentrepreneurship.com/research (road safety could be interesting?). Best of luck!!
How CEA’s communications team is thinking about EA communications at the moment
I wonder how much this is a US/UK thing because of the types of flights people are taking. My assumption is that in the US the vast majority of flights are domestic, and I’d agree that business class just isn’t worth it on those planes (aside from the length of the flight, the planes are also not that nice!). The equivalent would be UK-Europe flights, for which business class definitely doesn’t seem worth it. But most UK travel in my experience ends up being very long haul, normally transatlantic — and on those, business class is clearly much, much better than economy because you get a lie-flat bed. And on a night flight (especially coming back from the US), that can be the difference between sleeping or not, and that then gets you an extra day of work when you land.
I think this is a really great report — by far the most comprehensive set of policy proposals I’ve seen. I don’t agree with everything in it, but I do hope the UK government takes it seriously. I particularly like the Sentinel idea, and the proposals for tiered governance of AI systems.
OpenPhil likely has some research on this — they fund work in this area https://www.openphilanthropy.org/grants/university-of-california-berkeley-aging-research-irina-conboy-2023/
I agree with everything you said here, and would also add an analogy: in the for-profit world it is very common, and actively encouraged, for major investors to have board seats, because it ensures the investor has some level of control and visibility over how their money is used — which seems very reasonable to me.
I’m really glad you wrote this; I’ve been worried about the same thing. I’m particularly worried at how few people are working on it given the potential scale and urgency of the problem. It also seems like an area where the EA ecosystem has a strong comparative advantage — it deals with issues many in this field are familiar with, requires a blend of technical and philosophical skills, and is still too weird and nascent for the wider world to touch (for now). I’d be very excited to see more research and work done here, ideally quite soon.
This is a good idea! I think Longview and Effective Giving are already doing this to some extent, so it could be worth reaching out to them.
I’m really sorry you’re feeling this way!
I wanted to add my personal perspective. I joined CEA in September, after a career in journalism. One of the things I was most delighted by when I joined was just how good the work-life balance was — so, so much better than in any other job I’ve had. I didn’t feel any obligation to work evenings or weekends, and indeed was actively encouraged not to (my boss, Max, didn’t have Slack on his phone and left his work laptop at the office when he went home — which set a really good example for the rest of us). I also really liked the flexibility to build my work schedule around my preferences — I much prefer starting work a bit later and working later at night, or taking time off during the week and making up for it at the weekend, and I was able to do that here. I think those first couple months at CEA were the best and healthiest work time I’ve had.
Then… FTX collapsed, and everything got awful. My experience here was not representative of the average, but me and some others were working a horrific amount — there was a period of a couple weeks where I was doing ~18 hour days, 7 days a week. That wasn’t fun. My motivations here were a real mix — there was an endless mountain of stuff that needed doing, and I felt like I had to help do it both because it was my responsibility, because of my job, and also because I thought it was important for the world, because I care about EA. I did think about quitting back then, and I think people would have understood if I had; but I didn’t because I felt it was worth sticking around.
But as bad as that period was, I don’t think it’s at all representative of most people’s experience, or even my experience most of the time — in December/January/February things were a lot better, though I was still working a lot. I’m hoping that we get back to the September state though, and March has been promising so far. I just bring up the November period because it would feel disingenuous not to.
Even through the horrific crisis period, I’ve felt extremely supported by CEA. Caitlin, our head of people ops, actively encouraged me to drop down to four days a week for a while, which was a very good idea (my pay remained the same); she also pushed me to take a proper holiday as soon as I was able to (I’m taking next week off, and plan to be completely work-offline). When I’ve had similarly stressful periods in other, non-EA jobs, I received ~no support.
All of which is to say: in my experience, work-life balance has been very good at CEA, and even in the worst-imaginable periods, people have been looking out for me.
I don’t have an answer, but would suggest you talk to the folks at the Good Food Institute if you haven’t already — they might have advice, or at the very least be able to point you towards other people you could ask about this.