AMA: Tom Chivers, science writer, science editor at UnHerd

Honestly I'm not sure. I think those guys do a good job. I might try to approach more rationalist/EA bloggers for external freelance pieces: I'd love to commission, say, Kevin Simler or Sarah Constantin or John Nerst to write things, rather than just do it all in-house. (But maybe they already do that and I haven't noticed?)

Hi Rob! Loved your post about politics being too meta.

OK so you're all obviously aware of Kelsey Piper,  Dylan Matthews etc. And probably Zeynep Tufekci. 

In the UK, I think it's worth paying attention to Ian Leslie, who is very interested in these topics (he's a big fan of Julia Galef's podcast, for instance). The (London) Times's science correspondent, Tom Whipple, thinks in quite an EA-ish sort of way, I think.

People who are less obviously EA-ish but make me think might include Helen Lewis and Alex Hern – Alex for instance is quite a long way to the left of me but always thoughtful; I love his The World is Yours* newsletter because it either explains tech stuff that I wouldn't understand, or it approaches things from some quite left-wing angles in ways that make me think about stuff.

That's entirely off the top of my head. If I think of any more while I'm writing other replies I'll come back and add them.

1. this is a totally fair question! But … hmm. I am (these days) rarely "assigned" work, but obviously I do have to get my editors to agree to let me write things, and I can't just write "buy antimalarial bednets" every week forever. That said, if I did, no one would read me, so I need to write interesting things that get an audience. So there's a theoretical tradeoff between "say what's important" and "say what will get read", and the greatest impact means finding the right balance.

That said, in reality, it's not often as though I have two brilliant ideas for a column in the same week and I have to choose between them; it always feels like a miracle that I usually manage to have at least one. And since I don't always have a really clear idea about what will have the most impact, I rarely feel like I'm writing something I don't think matters. 

(I guess when I do something fun, like this about Warhammer, it doesn't "matter" in some sense that it probably won't save lives. But I enjoyed writing it, and people enjoyed reading it, and maybe it gave a few people an idea for how to have a hobby. I doubt it was the most impactful thing I could have done, but I still feel it was net positive in the world just by cheering a few people up.)

2. It's a conversation with the editors. I come up with ideas, or they suggest something (maybe pegged to some news piece, or a new book out, or whatever. Quite often I'll say "I'd like to write about X" and the editors will be unconvinced by my pitch, and since that is literally the purpose of editors, I can't really complain.

But the key thing is I have to find it interesting. I don't mind whether I'm writing about sperm counts or deworming or stupid economists, it needs to be something I enjoy learning about and then can enjoy telling other people about, even if I'm telling people that this is stupid and you don't need to worry about it. I think that would be my main recommendation to bloggers/independent writers too: if you aren't interested, don't write about it, because it will be obvious, and no one will read it. (And you'll be bored.)

3. Hmm. You know, this is really hard to answer! I have been lucky in that I've almost always been able to write about what I'm interested in, and what I'm interested in shifts over time: I went through a phase a few years ago of being fascinated with linguistics, for instance. Now I'm super obsessed with the replication crisis and statistics. So I have no idea what I'll be fascinated by in three years time, and the things I'm fascinated by now, I can usually write about without too 

much difficulty. This is unusual in journalism and I am super lucky.

Sorry, this is a really rambly answer; I hope it makes some sense.

Ah man! I have THOUGHTS about this.

So. First up, I have indeed made a few concrete forecasts, and it is worth noting that they absolutely stink. I don't know what my Brier score is but it will definitely suck. That does not exactly make me want to do them more, because it's a bit embarrassing, although there is a nice virtuous feeling when you hold your hand up and say "I got another one wrong". And the EA/rationalist community is really good at socially rewarding that behaviour, and being on the fringes of the community I do get some good social feedback for doing it, so it's not too cringey.

But it's related to another problem, which is that when I make forecasts, it's not the day job. I write some article, say, talking about the incentive problems in vaccine manufacturing. Do I stick a forecast on the end of that? Well, I could – "I think it is 60% likely that, I dunno, Covax will use advanced market commitment structures to purchase vaccines by the end of 2021". But it's kind of artificial. I'm just whacking it on the end of the piece.

And it also means they will, usually, suck. I know a few superforecasters, and I gather that one of the best predictors of the accuracy of a forecast is how long you spend making it. If I've just spent a day writing a piece, interviewing scientists or whatever, and my deadline is 5pm, then I won't be able to spend much time doing a good forecast. It's not what I'm being paid for and it's not what the readers want from me.

I do think it's valuable, and it means that I have to think carefully about what I actually mean when I say "it's likely that schools will reopen in May" or whatever. So I try to do it. And sometimes pieces are more about forecasting, and they lend themselves more naturally to concrete predictions (although the problem of me doing it quickly, having spent most of my time chasing interviewees and writing the piece, is still there). I'll definitely try to keep doing it. But I think the value isn't always as huge as EAs/forecasters think, or in fact as huge as I used to think before I tried doing them more, so I understand journalists not being super interested. I hope more start doing it, but I doubt it will ever be a standard procedure in every opinion piece.

(That said, maybe I just suck and that's what a person who sucks would say.)

No big story! We changed editors between the hardback and the paperback, and the new editor decided that the book wasn't really centrally about AI. She felt that it was more about the rationalist community, so she wanted to change the title to reflect that. I know sod-all about the publishing industry and I trust her judgment better than mine, so I said "fine". 

If I'm starkly honest with myself I think it's probably because the sales weren't great and she thought this would help, but I don't know.

The positive impacts I guess will be if it sells more copies, but one negative impact is that a few people thought I'd written a new book. I hope no one accidentally buys a second copy but I imagine it might happen.

(It's not that unusual, I don't think. At least two of my journalist friends have books with different paperback titles to the original hardback titles.)

*loads* of people saw the title and thought "oh, this is a book about how AI is Good, Actually". For anyone who doesn't know, the full quote is Eliezer's: "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.". I much preferred the old title but I guess I shouldn't be surprised people didn't get it!

Honestly, I think this is all about finding journalists who you trust. The Vox lot, for instance, you know they're not going to write a "ha ha look at the weirdos who want you to donate money to stop humans going extinct" piece, even if they don't agree with the specific position you're supporting.

"How to frame it" comes down to the same thing. In the end, assuming that you give interviews to journalists, the journalists will be the ones framing it, so choose journalists you trust and feel you can speak freely to. I know that's kind of unhelpful advice - "be good at choosing people you trust" - but it's really important.

That said. There are some general tips if you're, say, writing research papers (and press releases for those research papers). One of them is including a nice clear list at the top of things that your paper doesn't say: if your paper finds a correlation between doing crosswords and brain health, for instance, it's worth saying "this does not mean that crosswords prevent alzheimer's" at the top. That's been shown (Chris Chambers at Cardiff did some great research) to avoid misunderstandings without reducing press coverage. So I guess that could be relevant. With longtermist ideas, say, you could say prominently "this doesn't mean we need to dedicate all of our charity resources to preventing X-risk" or whatever. (Assuming you do think that.)

My only advice for talking to different demographics/political biases is to signal that you are on the side of the reader. If you're trying to convince a right-wing person of a stereotypically left-wing point, or vice versa, it's worth starting out with some "I come in peace" stuff about how yes, the things right-wing people worry about are OK to worry about, etc. (Scott Alexander is really good at this.) That's obviously more relevant if you're writing the piece yourself, but i guess if you're talking to journalists, you can aim to do something similar.

Is any of that helpful?

I think there are a lot of journalists who think EA is very wise and sensible, and there are a lot of journalists who think it's all neckbeard rationalist techbros, or whatever dismissive term they might use. I think the first journalists are right and the second journalists are wrong.

(TBF I think the largest group of journalists is probably the ones who've never heard of EA, and don't write about things that are anything to do with EA.)

Key errors: ah man. I don't really want to advise after I got it so badly wrong with the Scott Alexander/NYT stuff, and also I don't feel I know the EA community well enough to say what they do now. But I do think they could do with finding a few more media-savvy, personable spokespeople who can help you get your stuff into the media when you want it there. I'm always surprised that, say, 80,000 Hours doesn't act more like a think tank, trying to get journalists reading their latest work. But maybe if EAs start playing the game like think tanks do, they'll end up drifting away from their purpose and start chasing headlines and so on, and that would be a shame.

I'll answer the last question first, because it's easiest: BuzzFeed UK had a load of cuts in late 2017, they offered voluntary redundancy to anyone who wanted it, and I took it because I had a book to write (and because I may well have ended up losing the job anyway). After that it turned out to be pretty straightforward to get people to give me money to write things and I'm really glad I did it, but it was a half-jump half-push situation.

Biggest bottleneck: sheesh. Honestly it's probably coming up with interesting, worthwhile ideas fast enough. But then it's also having the time to write about them all, so there's a tension there. I feel like I'm always desperately trying to think of the next piece, while also somehow not having time to do the longer-term projects. So, and this sounds like I'm being flippant, but I think honestly the biggest bottleneck is my own tendency to procrastinate.

HANG ON. I'm going to leave that paragraph up because I think it's interesting, but I've just realised it doesn't quite answer your question. The biggest bottleneck on IMPACT is probably readership. I can get a few tens of thousands to read a piece; a few hundreds of thousands if it goes really, really well. Assuming that piece is something I think is really important and I want to change some minds with it, what percentage of people actually will change minds? Is it double-digits? Is it even greater than one? I don't know. So I suppose that's the most important thing. How do I write something that is 1) about something super important 2) persuasive enough to change minds and 3) exciting enough to be widely read? there are trade-offs there.

The best changes: Hmmmmmmmmm. I am sorry, I really don't know. I think the lack of numeracy among journalists is a real problem, and that's why I've just written a book about how numbers go wrong in the news. I don't know if it's the most important thing, but I think it would make a real difference to public understanding if journalists started thinking about putting numbers in context, absolute vs relative risk, linking to original sources, etc etc. Just being more comfortable with and transparent about the numbers they use in reporting.

The UK's outcomes have certainly been bad! Absolutely no argument there.

Before I go into why I think it was, I will say that I suspect there's quite a lot of randomness in these outcomes, and it's not straightforward to say it's because of political responses or whatever.

But that said I think I am pretty comfortable saying that the political response has, in fact, been bad. I think failure to lock down early not once but twice (maybe three times?), the eat out to help out nonsense, the CONTINUED insistence on "washing hands" and so little emphasis on meeting outside, ventilating areas, etc, is really bad and stupid. I think a lot of it stems from bad political leadership (the cabinet mainly chosen for loyalty over brexit rather than talent, a PM who never wants to deliver bad news and always wants to say "I've saved Christmas"). And it also probably stems from years of chipping away at state capacity, having a really centralised state with a paradoxically weak centre, etc.

I am, however, quite low-confidence in all this stuff. I think that this set of politicians has been bad, and a randomly selected cabinet from the last 50 years would on average do better, but I don't know.

Thank you for your contributions! It was very kind of you to take time out of your schedule to chat with us, especially during a book-release period :-)

And: Are there common proposals for reforming or improving journalism that you don't think are good ideas?

yes! Mainly Scott, of course, but also various other rationalist and rationalist-adjacent blogs; Everything Studies, Put A Number On It, the 80,000 Hours podcast, Julia Galef's podcast. I find LessWrong itself a bit hard to navigate but if an interesting piece comes around I'll read it. I even try to read Gwern sometimes but usually I'm out of my depth.

this is a complex question. But I think I agree with whoever it was (Eliezer?) who said that there are weirdness points: you are allowed to be only so weird before people stop taking you seriously. You can decide to spend those weirdness points how you like, but once you spend them, they're gone. AI risk is obviously a lot more expensive in weirdness points than, say, deworming. So you'll be able to talk about it less before people start thinking of you as the weird AI-obsessed guy.

I do think, though, that you can still do it, if you can explain that you're using the same processes - expected value etc - to reach the conclusions in AI as you did with more prosaic things like bednets or deworming. That's sort of what I did here. And if you try to pretend that AI/X-risk isn't part of what you're worrying about, then it looks like you're doing a scientology and hiding the weird stuff behind a friendly facade.

All that being said, in your concrete example, I wouldn't include MIRI unless you're really sure that that is where you want to go. I speak as someone who really likes MIRI! But if it's a "this is your first taste of effective altruism" deal, then you're already asking people to take on board the idea that, actually, donating to Cancer Research UK is severely suboptimal and you should give it all to very specific infectious-disease charities in sub-Saharan Africa or whatever. That's weird and counterintuitive enough already, and I think taking people along that route one step at a time is probably wisest.

This is going to sound like I'm blowing smoke, but: you guys know better than me! I get really interested in various topics, but I'm not systematic about it. I try not to get blown around by whatever the current news fascination is, but I'm not immune to being swept along by whatever media Twitter cares about that day. The value of EA is that you run the numbers and continue to care about it, so that even though British media Twitter has today decided that X is the most important thing in the world, EAs will continue to say "no actually you can probably do the most good by donating money to the Malaria Foundation".

1. No, but I'd say I'm rationalist-adjacent. I find the topics interesting and I love the community, but I'm not really part of it. I imagine there being circles of rationalism, with the outermost circle being people who read I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup once and quite enjoyed it, and the innermost circle being literally a room with Eliezer, Luke Muehlhauser, Gwern and Scott Alexander playing Dungeons & Discourse. I'm in a medium-sized circle in between those two.
2. No, partly for similar reasons, and partly because I don't think I deserve it because I don't donate enough to charity. I have a small monthly direct debit going to GiveWell and it should be more but it isn't. In fact I will go and double it after I've said bye here because it really should be more.

So, this is a massive and hard-to-summarise question.

You're right, a lot of what goes wrong in the media isn't lies. It's not even deliberate misinformation. The Chinese Robber fallacy is spot on, but it's also: if you, say, hear that 180 women are murdered in the UK each year, that sounds dreadful (obviously it is dreadful). And if you're not used to asking questions like "is that a big number" or "what's the base rate" then you can easily be misled by large-sounding numbers.

A lot of it is just being unfamiliar with numbers (book plug alert! Out today! In the UK at least). Most journalists aren't very good with numbers, or with thinking about how they reach the news. Sure, there are plenty of grifters and boring contrarians, but there are also a lot of well-intentioned people who want to do good in the world but aren't brilliant at thinking "wait, that SOUNDS important, but how would I go about checking whether it is or not?"

(Also there are quite a lot of people who are quite unreflective and just think that fighting the culture war is the most important thing you can do, although they wouldn't necessarily say it that way.)

Does that sort of answer your question?

Oh I never replied to this one. BUY MY BOOK (either one, but especially the new one: https://www.howtoreadnumbers.com/ ). Or, I dunno, read my stuff and be available to chat if I need to speak to someone about some topic.

I think this is a really interesting question, but I don't know enough about the business of journalism to have good answers. Somewhere else in the Qs I've talked a bit about the impact of journalism and why it's important, which is probably relevant.

Short answer: no.

Long answer: I think that what is underappreciated about journalism is the time pressure. If you're writing for a daily paper, or some equivalent, you often have to become passably expert in some topic in a few hours. It is a miracle that, say, the Times puts together enough material for a medium-sized novel every 24 hours. Some of it is longer lead times, the mags and features sometimes you have a week or so, and the real glossy mags like the Atlantic and the Economist and so on you might have weeks or more to research. But it is absolutely incredible to witness a paper go from "literally nothing exists" at 11am to "here is a full paper, with relatively few typos and hopefully no libels and tens of thousands of words of news, analysis, criticism, a topical cartoon, sports reports, the weather" by 9pm. There just isn't time to do a full fact-check. The sheer just-in-time nature of it is incredible. Same with TV and radio; everything is spinning like a gyroscope, seconds away from going wrong.

(The Atlantic and the Economist and the New Yorker, etc, it's totally different, everyone sits around in oak-panelled rooms thinking deep thoughts and writing one piece a month which is then picked to the bone by fact-checkers like vultures on a dead buffalo. I exaggerate somewhat.)

And then you get the incentive issues that while journalists definitely think of themselves as performing a public service, and we are, we're also contributing to a business and that business needs to sell papers or get clicks or whatever so "1,000 people died of malaria today" can't be the splash headline every day. It just can't. Journalism is in the public interest, but it ALSO needs to provide what the public is interested in, and if it doesn't do the latter then it can't be the former. And there's a coordination problem that if I say "I will do only high-minded journalism that is in the public interest", the next guy can say "great, I'll do scurrilous celebrity hackery and sell 40 times what you do and put you out of business".

AND THEN you have to remember it's staffed by humans with biases and political opinions and families to feed and social status to uphold.

So with those limitations in mind, I think journalism does a pretty good job of giving readers/viewers/listeners a rough picture of reality. But they're really big limitations and it's unrealistic to expect anything approaching a clear, unbiased window on the world. 

Hmm. I don't know, I'm afraid. I took a chapter on Occam's Razor out which I rather liked. But I'm quite proud of the book and I think it works fairly well as an intro to rationalist thinking. I'm sure there are some things I could think of and if I do I'll come back and add them.

I wish I had a better answer to the first one than "become good at writing". My own pathway was reading loads and loads, and writing loads and loads, and then essentially mimicking the writing that I liked (mainly Pratchett tbh) until eventually I noticed that I'd stopped doing that and had a recognisable style of my own. I sometimes go through my old emails from before I was a journalist and see I've just written needlessly long show-offy emails to friends, which I cringe about a bit now, but they were clearly practice for when I had to do it for real.

Actually, also, I did philosophy at uni and MA, and I found that the way I learnt to structure an argument in those essays has been really helpful.

Oh and this might sound silly but become good at typing. If you can type as fast as you think then when the ideas are flowing quickly then they just sort of appear on the page. I used to work as a medical secretary for a long time and I swear that helped me an awful lot, not least in transcribing interviews but also just in being able to get ideas down quickly.

As for getting it published: pitch! Ideally start by developing a relationship with some editor somewhere. It might be a good idea to blog as well, so that you can point people to stuff you've written.

1. I've said elsewhere in this AMA, but I suspect that journalism, for all its many flaws, actually is really important, and that democratic societies would be much harder to organise without a free press. I suspect that journalism isn't hugely popular among rationalists (and since I tend to think of EAs as being the same people, I assume it's not hugely popular with them either), but I think it's really important.
2. I think there's a huge miscalibration about what's "actually" important in the media – there's a huge focus on problems of the Western world, and especially US problems (which then get exported to the UK and other places;  eg I think problems with race in the UK are very different to the ones in the US, but we see everything through a US lens).  A murder in the UK (or a school shooting in the US) is objectively less important than 1,000 people dying every day of malaria, but it gets many times the coverage. But it's hard to say "actually this doesn't matter" when it's some named person dead in a horrible way, and compare it to thousands of real but faceless individuals dying off-camera.
   
   Funnily enough I think Covid has shifted this a bit because it's a genuinely global and important story about infectious diseases and vaccinations. But I'd love to see more focus in the mainstream media on diseases of poverty in the developing world, things like that. That said - as I've said elsewhere, you can't run a media industry on the things that you OUGHT to write about, you have to give readers what they want as well.
3. Since this is about journalism, I'll stick to that example: I think EAs/rationalists tend to assume journalists are out to destroy people. It's not that that's wrong exactly, but it's incomplete. For instance, when I've written about quack charities – autism charities telling people not to get vaccinated, say, or to  have awful heavy-metal chelation therapy or whatever – it is 100% my intention to damage those charities' ability to function, or get their CEOs to resign, because I believe that they are damaging children, and that revealing their bad practices is good for society. I think most people here would agree with me. But other journalists are doing the same thing - they've just sometimes made different judgments about what "good for society" is, and I very often disagree with those judgments. But they're not out to destroy for the fun of it; they're usually trying to do good. (That said, there is a tendency to measure journalistic impact in how many people you've forced to resign, which is understandable but kind of icky.)

no I don't, and I was unaware of the idea. I am very unsystematic in my choices of what I write about and I don't have any good way of measuring how many minds I change (just the hopelessly survivorship-bias-tainted one of people telling me that they've changed their minds). So it's all very finger-in-the-wind.

thanks Nathan!

FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK! https://www.howtoreadnumbers.com/

(thank you for this obvious setup)

It's not a news site; it's comment and analysis (I never know how much the distinction between reporting and commentary is clear to non-journalists). Essentially, UnHerd rarely breaks scoops, although I have done once or twice; it's analysis of things that are already public knowledge, essays, opinion. Like a blog site in a way.

But it's – I guess it thinks of itself as heterodox? In the Haidt sense. Saying the, ah, "unheard" things (also "not part of the herd", it was a bit of a laboured pun). So it's generally politically unaligned but has a fondness for the stuff that it is hard to say in The Current Moment, which often but not always cashes out as criticism of the social justice movement. I think that's a fair description.

there's this great book, The Rationalist's Guide to – never mind.

I genuinely think that the Sequences are still great for that! And Scott's Nobody is Perfect, Everything is Commensurable. I love 80,000 Hours' podcast and Rationally Thinking. But if someone's in the market, I'd start with Rationality: From AI to Zombies.

1. For me, at least, Twitter is the way to get hold of me - my DMs are open, and most journalists' are. But emails are good too and most journalists will make them publicly available.
2. Send us an email or a DM! But first make sure that the journalist in question is interested in the sort of thing you're pitching. I keep marking PR emails as spam, because they're obviously just auto-sending to some list, and I don't give a toss if some tech company is having a roundtable meeting about some acquisition or whatever. If, however, I get a personalised email from someone who obviously knows my work and has thought that whatever they're emailing might actually be of interest, I'll always at least reply, even if I don't use the info in a piece.
3. Yes, but don't spam them out - see 2. Get the journalist's attention and ask if he or she would be interested. (Although: it's just occurred to me that this is like the breeding habits of elephants vs the breeding habits of frogs. Either spend years raising the baby and getting high rates of survival but low rates of actual birth, or fire out tens of thousands of eggs and fertilise them all at once and hope that one or two survive. Maybe the latter works and I am giving you a survivorship bias-tainted account because I, obviously, ignore the large majority of them, as they expect.)
4. Indeed it is: see 1.

I think it would be very hard to have a functioning democratic state without journalism of some kind. I may be overstating my industry's importance, but if you don't know what the government is doing, or how the machinery of the state is operating, or what the lives of the citizens are like, then how can you participate in your democracy? And you can't rely on the government to tell you. So even though most journalism is not vital to democracy, if there was no journalism, there would be very little to stop the government from behaving how it liked.

I also think that in my field of journalism, science writing, there's a lot of value in translating abstruse-but-important research and thinking into readable or even enjoyable material for laypeople. Also, you can convince people of things that are true, and help people make good decisions (I hope).

Plus, things like criticism are helpful for readers in allowing them to find the books/films/theatre they might enjoy (and I think they have a value even given the existence of crowdsourced review sites like Rotten Tomatoes). And, of course, people enjoy reading/watching, and that is a good in itself. 

For someone like me who has no other skills than interviewing clever people and writing down what they say, I suspect that journalism is one of the places I could do the most good, because I can do it well. Of course, all the good outcomes I just mentioned are reliant on the journalist in question being good at their job, but that's probably true of all careers, isn't it?

On measuring it: re democracy at least, I guess you could try to do some sort of study looking at countries with strong independent journalism vs those without, but they would be so horribly confounded I doubt you could get good numbers on it.