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[anonymous]2
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I think it would be straightforwardly bad if EA got associated with something like the replacement conspiracy.  (Do you agree?) 

> Or are EAs only permitted to have soft-Left political views?

Of course not. I did not suggest this. But it is clearly more important for EA to stay clear of associations with far-right conspiracy theories than for you to express every controversial thing you believe. 

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by Nathan Young
1 min read17 answers 19

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CommunityBuilding effective altruism
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Which EAs should be bigger on Twitter? Upvote those who are top priorities.
Answers
37
IanDavidMoss
Peter Wildeford is an A+ follow on Twitter IMHO. I think it's realisti...
27
Nathan Young
Luisa Rodriguez
22
Nathan Young
Habiba Islam Habiba is a very talented advisor, a model community membe...
18
IanDavidMoss
Amanda Askell consistently has thoughtful and underrated takes on Twit...
14
Nathan Young
Holly Elmore Holly is an expert in her field, is honest and kind. I wou...
13
IanDavidMoss
I'm a little surprised that Rob Wiblin doesn't have more followers, bu...
13
Nathan Young
Dustin Moskovitz I am uncertain if it's good that Dustin is rapidly bec...
12
Nathan Young
Will MacAskill
11
Nathan Young
Holden Karnofsky Holden (as far as I know) doesn't use twitter. Seems t...
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Nathan Young
Chana Messinger
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Nathan Young
Nuño Sempere - https://twitter.com/NunoSempere
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Tyner
@Kat_Woods
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Nathan Young
Carrick Flynn I don't know if Carrick plans to do more political runs i...
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IanDavidMoss
I assume you're being modest in not suggesting "Nathan Young," so I'll...
5
Nathan Young
Cari Tuna I am both uncomfortable including Cari (because I sense she d...
4
Geoffrey Miller
Julian Hazell, aka @HuelHater, posts some pretty funny EA jokes and me...
4
Nathan Young
Toby Ord
19 comments

Who ought to have a larger twitter account and it wouldn't be much effort for us to make it happen?

I think were this numerical, we'd do: (value of them having bigger account) * (difficulty to get there)/(GiveWell charities)

 Use upvotes to signal  the priority of the answer, and the agree/disagree to support the specific reasoning given by the answer.

IE the upvote ordering should be the correct ordering.

Ideally we'd not have anyone named who doesn't want to be, so if you are a bit in doubt, then ask their permission to name them.

Starter questions:

  • Who would be easy for outsiders to engage with and understand?
  • Who produces great content you wish you saw more of?
  • Who deserves the ability to more easily influence discourse and meet with members of the cultural elite?
  • Who has cultural cache in a different space that would allow them to grow quickly

This question is to give a sense of who ought to be supported/invested in. I think that it should be followed by a strategic look and finally funding to those individuals named. I am not authorised to do any of that.

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IanDavidMoss

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Peter Wildeford is an A+ follow on Twitter IMHO. I think it's realistic to get him a bunch more followers if that's something he wanted.

Nathan Young4
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What strategy would you propose to get him more followers?

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IanDavidMoss
He seems like a natural fit for the American economist-public intellectual cluster (Yglesias/Cowen/WaitButWhy/etc.) that's already pretty sympathetic to EA. The twitter content is basically "EA in depth," but retaining the normie socially responsible brand they've come to expect and are comfortable with. Max Roser would be another obvious candidate to promote Peter. I'd start there and see where it goes.

Nathan Young

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Luisa Rodriguez

Luisa is a x-risk expert, who contributed heavily to Will’s book. She is a good conversationalist. Seems like she could easily be sent to do the podcast circuit and end up with 20k followers.

She seems a clear candidate for “public intellectual”

Peter Wildeford4
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I think her name is spelled Luisa. I agree it would be very great to have her write more publicly. Does she have a twitter account?

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Nathan Young
I carefully copied it from my address book.. where i’d spelt it wrong.

Nathan Young

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Habiba Islam

Habiba is a very talented advisor, a model community member and is very winsome. (Full disclosure, we're friends.) I don't really know how to make her expertise legible enough that she could justify a 200k account, but I think that in a better world she would have a much larger presence.

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Nathan Young
I really hope you referencing this: 

IanDavidMoss

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Amanda Askell consistently has thoughtful and underrated takes on Twitter.

Nathan Young2
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Having read your link, she’s an AI expert, great suggestion.

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Nathan Young2
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what’s her field again?

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IanDavidMoss
https://askell.io/

Nathan Young

14
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Holly Elmore

Holly is an expert in her field, is honest and kind. I would like to see her with 30k followers. I don't see any super easy way to bootstrap that though.

IanDavidMoss

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I'm a little surprised that Rob Wiblin doesn't have more followers, but he's already high-profile enough that it wouldn't take that big of a push to get him into another tier. He's also the most logical person to leverage 80K's broader content on social media given his existing profile and activity. (ETA: although Habiba could do this too, per your suggestion.)

Nathan Young

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Dustin Moskovitz

I am uncertain if it's good that Dustin is rapidly becoming more legible on twitter, but since SBF is becoming waaay more legible, I think it's good that Dustin is too. Dustin tweets a lot and is pretty funny. I imagine he'll hate the idea of actual publicity, be if he didn't, I'd want him to have like 100k - 1m followers.

Nathan Young

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Will MacAskill

Twitter is the platform of elites.  Will’s content shares well and  i’d like more people to see it.  Will probably doesn’t want to the  anxiety from being on twitter all day, but I think he could be firewalled from much of that.


Will has like 50k followers. I think by employing a social media manager for $100k  he could have 200k followers in a year (60%).

IanDavidMoss2
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Do we know that he doesn't already have a social media manager? He's had a lot of help to promote the book.

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Nathan Young
Given how superb the team were at promoting wills book, I struggle to believe they are seriously attempting twitter promotion right now.

Nathan Young

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Holden Karnofsky

Holden (as far as I know) doesn't use twitter. Seems trivial for him to make an account, tweet new posts and nothing else. He'd probably get like 10k followers that way. 

While we see Holden's cold takes, I'm not sure he has the desire to post his hot ones. 

I think it would cost about $50k to get his account to 10k followers in a year (80%)

$100k for 50k followers, (60%) with more podcast  appearances.

Nathan Young

10
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Chana Messinger

Chana is clever, funny and responsible. I don’t know how to frame her as a larger twitter account, but I think she should be one.

Nathan Young

10
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Nuño Sempere - https://twitter.com/NunoSempere

I think there is a risk to empowering the hot takes, forcasting crowd (of which I'm partially one), but I think if Nuño can be branded as not necessarily the mainstream view in EA, I’d like to see his thoughts getting much more attention.

NunoSempere2
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I'll leave a link to my profile here: <https://twitter.com/NunoSempere>; not that far-off from 1k followers.

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Nathan Young

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Carrick Flynn

I don't know if Carrick plans to do more political runs in future, but if he does probably more followers would be valuable to him.

IanDavidMoss

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I assume you're being modest in not suggesting "Nathan Young," so I'll do it for you.

Nathan Young2
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I don’t think I should be high on this list. I’m a good networker but I don’t think EA as a whole benefits from me being a much bigger account.

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NunoSempere
Disagree. Maybe given some function of "innate talent", it makes sense to put more eggs on one basket.
2
Nathan Young
What do you think is the case for effort being spent on me more than those high on the list? like what’s the benefit of me having 50k followers? Maybe I could more easily network with important non-EAs?

Nathan Young

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Cari Tuna

I am both uncomfortable including Cari (because I sense she deliberately doesn't engage heavily with EA publicly) and uncomfortable excluding her (I think her impact is already underrated by EA discourse). I assume there is some reason she's not more active on twitter, but the interview she gave in 2015?? was really good and I sense she'd be a great public figure if she wanted to be. 

I think with a few interviews that would be  easy to get and maybe $50k in staff you could get her account to 20k in a  year (60%)

Geoffrey Miller

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Julian Hazell, aka @HuelHater, posts some pretty funny EA jokes and memes on Twitter.  His substack is here: https://hazell.substack.com/

Nathan Young

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Toby Ord

Yes, Toby is a big deal, but could he be on documentaries. Would we want that? Certainly seems feasible to imagine him having more twitter followers. Unlike some of the big names here, I don't see a quick way to do that.

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Geoffrey Miller19
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Nathan -- If you compile a list of EAs worth promoting on Twitter, and DM me the list of their Twitter handles, I'm happy to mention them to my 124k followers. 

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Nathan Young3
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Sure, thank you, will do. What about yourself, what would happen if you had 1M followers?

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Geoffrey Miller3
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LOL, I'd get 10x times more grief and flack and it would make me sad.

Although I could pivot from writing hot and ornery political takes (my main activity now) to doing more serious EA promotion. But then I'd lose most of the new followers....

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[anonymous]0
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I could pivot from writing hot and ornery political takes (my main activity now) to doing more serious EA promotion.

That seems very risky, given your political views.

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Geoffrey Miller1
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Why? Say more please.

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[anonymous]1
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(I have a somewhat high credence that you are trolling, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.) For example, I recall that you believe something like the replacement conspiracy. 

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Geoffrey Miller3
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I'm not trolling. I'm actually curious why you think it's 'very risky' for me to promote EA more actively given my centrist heterodox libertarian political views, as opposed to whatever political views other EAs might have?  Or are EAs only permitted to have soft-Left political views?

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[anonymous]2
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I think it would be straightforwardly bad if EA got associated with something like the replacement conspiracy.  (Do you agree?) 

> Or are EAs only permitted to have soft-Left political views?

Of course not. I did not suggest this. But it is clearly more important for EA to stay clear of associations with far-right conspiracy theories than for you to express every controversial thing you believe. 

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Geoffrey Miller3
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This seems a case where there are deep partisan disagreements about what counts as a 'conspiracy theory'. 

When people on the Left say that 'America has shifting racial demographics such that the previous majority group is losing power and influence relative to other groups', mainstream media considers that a good thing and celebrates it as progress. When people on the Right say exactly the same thing, based on exactly the same data, mainstream media calls that 'the Replacement Conspiracy'. The double standard is striking. 

As it happens, I've written and tweeted very little about demographic shifts in the US, relative to other issues, so I'm surprised that you think this is something people would associate with me.

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[anonymous]-1
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When people on the Left say that 'America has shifting racial demographics such that the previous majority group is losing power and influence relative to other groups', mainstream media considers that a good thing and celebrates it as progress. When people on the Right say exactly the same thing, based on exactly the same data, mainstream media calls that 'the Replacement Conspiracy'. The double standard is striking. 
 

Sure, might be the case, idk. I'm not saying something about the object-level. It's still bad if half of the US associates EA with the far-right.  Seems like you are shoulding at the world.

> As it happens, I've written and tweeted very little about demographic shifts in the US, relative to other issues, so I'm surprised that you think this is something people would associate with me.

Not saying that; it was just a thing I remembered you tweeting. (I stopped following you one-two years ago, I think.)

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Nathan Young11
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Twitter downsides:

  • causes anxiety
  • takes up mental real estate in these people’s heads
  • being dogpiled is horrible

But I think Twitter is just very high leverage in terms of networking and changing minds. And we want to change minds, right?

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IanDavidMoss4
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It seems worth noting that you can get famous on Twitter for tweeting, or you can happen to be famous on Twitter as a result of becoming famous some other way. The two pathways imply very different promotional strategies and theories of impact. But my sense is that it's pretty hard to grow an audience on Twitter through tweeting alone, no matter how good your content is.

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IanDavidMoss3
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Also worth noting that you can be influential on Twitter without necessarily having a large audience (e.g., by interacting strategically with elites and frequently enough that they get to know you).

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IanDavidMoss6
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In light of the two-factor voting, I'm unclear what you mean by "upvote." I would suggest using the "agree/disagree" box as the scoring, with "upvote/downvote" meant to refer to your wisdom in suggesting the person and/or the analysis you provided. But I think you should clarify which one you intend to actually pay attention to.

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Nathan Young4
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You’re right, but I think the opposite way round makes more sense.

“ Use upvotes to signal the priority of the answer, and the agree/disagree to support the specific reasoning given by the answer.

IE the upvote ordering should be the correct ordering.”

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MichaelDickens5
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In my experience, most people (~75%) become their worst selves on Twitter. Many times I have followed someone because I enjoyed their writing off Twitter, only to find that a significant portion of their Twitter content was angry culture-warring. So I think someone being interesting and thoughtful is not enough to make them a good Twitter poster, and using Twitter seems to be net negative for a lot of people.

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Stefan_Schubert4
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Fwiw my view is that this isn't true of most effective altruists I see on Twitter. 

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Pato2
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We shouldn't limit to Twitter, but what Youtube channels, Instagrams and more we should follow to increase their reach and learn from them

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Nathan Young2
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I’d read the answers to that question

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