EA PR is tricky, and so maybe you shouldn't do it?

In his recent post on hiring Caroline Elison, Austin has a comment defending his decision with the line: “‘The EA name & brand’ is kind of a tricky thing to reason about.” I think he’s somewhat right about this, but I want to distinguish between two types of trickiness or difficulty here and suggest that you should avoid much of it by not actively participating in EA PR debates.

PR is Tricky for the Decisionmaker

If you are making a decision and evaluating its PR impact, you have a lot of different frames you can use. In this case, you could consider the personal frame^[1], the direct impact frame^[2], the “would you want this on the front page of the NYT?” frame^[3], the norms and standards frame^[4], and many others. I think each of these frames gives a pretty straightforward answer, but things get tricky if you want to consider multiple frames and weigh them against one another. You can avoid all of this difficulty by just choosing one frame and sticking to it, although people might think this is very unconscientious of you.^[5] 

This trickiness seems unavoidable if you’re going to consider controversial things and maybe this should make you less confident you've made the right decision.

PR is Tricky for Everyone Else

If you disagree with someone’s decision on PR grounds, you have three options: publicly protest, publicly defer, or say nothing. The first two are tricky, and I think people should mostly do the latter.

If you decide to publicly protest, you have to decide who your audience is (the decisionmaker and/or some subset of everyone else) and what frame you’re using. This seems like a hard decision to make. In an online setting, your audience is mostly invisible to you, and whether they find you persuasive can be unclear. Even if you’re motivated by a genuine belief that someone is wrong to do something on PR grounds, you might find it tricky whether to use a more convenient frame or a more correct one.

If you decide to publicly defer to someone’s judgement, even though you think they’re wrong, you still have the same trickiness of choosing your frame and audience. Maybe it’s easier to elide this trickiness and just say what you feel when you’re deferring, but there are also some pretty complex questions about the relationship between EAs and the wider community that you might be tempted to try and answer.

You can also just say nothing. I think this has a lot to recommend it. You can avoid all the difficult decision making around what to say and how to say it. And really, as an EA, what do you really care about?

I can’t answer this for you^[6], but it probably isn’t or shouldn’t be EA PR. If you have a genuine desire to improve the EA community’s public perception through the application of evidence and reason, then go for it. But I suspect many people care about debates like these because it seems like they should care. They feel something important is happening and they should weigh in.

Caring about PR is a con for most people. You probably lack the skills to make the world a better place here. The frames that seem natural to you may not be natural to others, and your guesses at what frame to use instead are probably poor unless you have a lot of evidence. The reason we care about PR in spite of this is because public issues create a tension in us that we find hard to ignore. If this is the case, then the choice is obvious. Just relax the tension, decide to care less^[7], and focus on what actually matters to you.

1. ^{^}

   Austin does a lot of this in the post, and I wouldn’t have thought much about it otherwise.

2. ^{^}

   Ex: “Will Caroline contribute positively as an employee of Manifund?”

3. ^{^}

   Obviously not.

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See a pointed example here.

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For example. I think Matt pretty consistently uses the frame: “EAs should do what they think is best and not apologize for it”.

^{^}

I describe what I actually care about at the end of this post.

^{^}

I get that writing a post about it is a sign I’m failing on this front, but I think publicly saying people should care less will make me care less in the future.

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