EA in the mainstream media: if you're not at the table, you're on the menu

There's also a previous update from an earlier stage of this work: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zgHWeMBPnCMvdoZvz/ea-will-likely-get-more-attention-soon

Thanks Max - really good to hear. Will CEA's Head of Comms be focussed more on CEA comms or EA Movement comms? I see some other comments about not over-centralising this but I also worry about capacity for one person/someone with more than one brief to monitor and be proactive about the whole space?

Definitely a really positive development though.

I'm working on an EA consultancy startup (still in planning phases) but with my experience running a large scale operation, I could fold this kind of talent into the consultancy portion and then farm that out. Part of my job is media training and perhaps that is something that EA lacks? I need to research this more but I tend to get the feeling that EAs disregard politics when it's not convenient or don't engage as much as they could. Messaging is politics as it's basest level, and I'll probably write a forums post on this later- it's about building rapport and speaking clearly what you are doing.  Comment on this with your thoughts as to what you would want with a PR team or media training so I can make some red teaming stuff about it.

I agree.

Thanks. I was inspired yesterday to do a point by point addressing of the piece. Feels a little "when you wrestle with a pig, you get muddy and the pig likes it", but spoiler alert I think there's nonzero worthy critique hiding in the bad writing.

Workers will rationalize high-paying jobs by giving most of their income away. Actually, when you work, you already give to society, but that is too complex for some to understand.

I think EAs live in the space between the extreme "capitalism is perfectly inefficient such that a wallstreet compensation package is irrelevant to the (negligible) social value that a wall street worker produces" and the equally extreme "capitalism is perfectly efficient such that a wallstreet compensation package is in direct proportion to the (evidentially high) social value that a wallstreet worker produces". Also, insofar as capitalism is designed and not emergent, is it really optimized for social value? It seems optimized for metrics which are proxies for social value, and very much subject to goodhart, but I'll stop before I start riots in every last history and economics department. Moreover, how about we want more number go up? If number go up is good, and working some arbitrary gig in fact makes number go up, donating some of the proceeds will make number go up more, so E2G people are correct to do both! 

Animal rights and veganism are big in the movement as well.

Sorry this reads to me like applause lights for the "I hate those smug virtue signaling vegans because I love bacon" crowd. OP's thesis about EA doesn't really relate to our unusually high vegan population, they might as well have pointed out our unusually high queer or jewish or computer programmer population. 

Yes, they direct money toward malaria nets and treatments for parasitic worms, but they also supply supplements for vitamin A deficiency, though genetically modified “golden” rice already provides vitamin A more effectively. Hmmm, seems like a move backward.

Sorry one sec I'm laughing a little at this "what have the romans ever done for us?" moment. "yeah, besides the malaria nets and deworming, which I admit are a plus, what have the EAs ever done for the poor?" it's like monty python! Anyway, my friend, if you think golden rice is a neglected approach to vitamin A deficiency, are you rolling up your sleeves and advancing the argument? Do you even bother to cite evidence that it's more effective? "Hmmm, seems like a move backward" is a completely unjustified and frivolous sentence. 

That’s a bit like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

EAs do not subscribe to the interpretation of the theory of random variables that you imply! We do not believe that random variables conserve a supply of events out in the universe of potentiality, such that an event of a particular class drains the supply of events of that class from the future. We instead believe that events of a class occurring does not imply that there's less of that class of event available to occur in the future. In fact, if anything we believe the opposite, if anything we believe that observing an event of a class should update us to think they're more likely than we did before we observed it! Moreover, EAs are widely on record advocating for pandemic preparedness well before covid. 

Partly as a result of his and his brother’s efforts, $30 billion for pandemic preparation was written into the Biden administration’s thankfully stalled Build Back Better porkfest.

From a writing style perspective, this is blatant applause lights for the tribe of those who think build back better is bad. 

Catch that? Someone else pays. Effective, but not exactly selfless. It’s the classic progressive playbook: Raise taxes to fund their pet projects but not yours or mine. I don’t care if altruists spend their own money trying to prevent future risks from robot invasions or green nanotech goo, but they should stop asking American taxpayers to waste money on their quirky concerns.

Not wrong. Policy efforts inevitably lead to this line (from this crowd at least), unless they're, like, tax-cutting. Policy EAs are advancing a public goods argument. It opens us up to every lowering-my-taxes-is-ITN guy that every single public goods argument in the world is opened up to. I don't need to point out that OP surely has pet projects that they think ought to be funded, by taxes even, and I can omit conjectures about what they are and about how I personally feel about them. But this is a legitimate bit of information about EA policy efforts. (Obviously subject to framing devices: tax increments are sufficiently complex that a hostile reader would call something "increase by 0.75%" while another reader would say "pushing numbers around the page such that the 0.75% came from somewhere else so it's not a real increment" and neither would be strictly lying). 

And “effective” is in the eye of the beholder. Effective altruism proponent Steven Pinker said last year, “I don’t particularly think that combating artificial intelligence risk is an effective form of altruism.”

I'll omit how what I actually think about Pinker, but in no worlds is this settled. Pinker is one guy who lots of people disagree with! 

There are other critics. Development economist Lant Pritchett finds it “puzzling that people’s [sic] whose private fortunes are generated by non-linearity”—Facebook, Google and FTX can write code that scales to billions of users—“waste their time debating the best (cost-effective) linear way to give away their private fortunes.” He notes that “national development” and “high economic productivity” drive human well-being.

Seems valid to me. Nonlinear returns on philanthropy would be awesome, wouldn't they? It's sort of like "if a non-engineer says 'wouldnt a heat-preserving engine be great?' we don't laud them as a visionary inventor" in this case, because I don't expect OP to roll up their sleeves and start iterating on what that nonlinearly returning mechanism would look like! But that doesn't mean we shouldn't take a look ourselves. 

There are only four things you can do with your money: spend it, pay taxes, give it away or invest it. Only the last drives productivity and helps society in the long term.

This should clearly be in our overton window about how to do the most good. It almost alludes to the excellent Hauke Hillebrandt essay doesn't it? 

Eric Hoffer wrote in 1967 of the U.S.: “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” That’s true even of allegedly altruistic ones.

This seems underjustified and not of a lot of substance. I think what OP has portrayed may qualify as a racket to people of a particular persuasion regarding government spending, or as a cult to the "I intuitively dislike virtue signaling and smugness so I look for logical holes in anyone who tries to do good" crowd, but OP could have been more precise and explicit about which of those they think is important to end on. But alas, when you're in a given memeplex that you know you share with your audience, you only have to handwave! lol 

As Scott Alexander recently addressed, EAs are like a borg: we assimilate critics of any quality bar whatsoever. As much as we respect Zvi "guys, I keep telling you I'm not an EA" Mowshowitz' wishes to not carry a card with a lightbulb heart stamped on it, it's pretty hard not to think of him as an honorary member. My point is we really should consider borg-ing up the "taxation is theft" sort of arguments about public goods and the "investment beats aid" sort of arguments about raising global welfare. 

Ironic the title of his column is "Inside View"

I'll oblige others who don't want the WSJ op-ed to get more attention by only responsible to the article in this comment thread. I don't expect specifically trait-feign or any other person to respond to this comment, though it'd be appreciated if anyone can provide relevant information. 

FTX bought the naming rights to the Miami Heat’s arena and lots of umpire and referee uniforms. Since May, he has been bailing out failing crypto firms

This is the first I've read of this. This doesn't sound  good or effective at face value. It's being used to make EA look bad. That doesn't mean the attempt has succeeded. Others have commented about how many bogus assumptions in this op-ed are easy to debunk. It's also written in a sensational way that makes this second claim not sound too serious. 

Surely SBF has some argument for why he has been, if the characterization is accurate, bailing out failing crypto firms. They could be poorly reasoned arguments for why it's a good idea. Bailing out these failing crypto firms may end up being what was a big, foreseeable mistake. Whether SBF's giving really is effective matters more than only one op-ed spins it as ineffective. Knowing the reasons and evidence is what matters.

Assuming for the sake of argument that so many of SBF's and FTX's giving or investments turn out to be very bad bets, it's not hard for the EA community to make clear that the EA community at large neither advised nor endorsed such choices. Nobody would say buying the naming rights to the Miami Heat's arena was one of EA's top recommendations for what FTX should do with that money. 

The EA community has already begun making distinctions like that clear. A few of the most upvoted articles of 2022 so far have been ones critical of FTX's giving approach/methodology, or the prospect of EA community getting particularly involved with SBF's political plays. Even given assumptions of such a bad scenario, which could easily be false anyway, a future scenario like this with EA having a PR team or whatever seems like it wouldn't be that hard to deal with. 

And Mr. Bankman-Fried’s various entities, along with Cari Tuna and others, have put up about $19 million for a future California ballot measure, the California Pandemic Early Detection and Prevention Act, which would add a 0.75% tax on incomes over $5 million to raise up to $15 billion over 10 years. Catch that? Someone else pays. Effective, but not exactly selfless.

It’s the classic progressive playbook: Raise taxes to fund their pet projects but not yours or mine. I don’t care if altruists spend their own money trying to prevent future risks from robot invasions or green nanotech goo, but they should stop asking American taxpayers to waste money on their quirky concerns.

The author isn't a grifter only for doing a job but he is kind of a hack in that it's evident he is pandering to a particular "own the libs" readership he has in mind.  

1. Politically progressive or liberal multi-millionaires or billionaires are far from the only ones who advocate raising taxes or even back campaigns that will raise taxes.
2. There are a lot of billionaires who've advocated their own taxes being raised. Warren Buffet has. Elon Musk has said stuff about how he doesn't want to pay higher taxes because he doesn't trust the government to spend the effectively but he'd support it more if the government were to spend the money more effectively, e.g., on high-impact existential risk reduction. Even some conservative billionaires are in favour of the government expanding in a least some ways even if they don't want to have to pay higher taxes for it. 
   
   The author puts almost no effort into an argument for why not even billionaires have a right to support a campaign to raise taxes on other billionaires. 
    
3. Who he is pandering too are readers who are themselves probably not super-wealthy either. He refers to "American taxpayers" as if it's taxpayers in general as opposed to the very small minority o them that earn more than $5 million per year. 
    
4. The author conflates how some x-risk scenarios superficially sound like silly science fiction with pandemic preparedness being silly. Before the pandemic, most people would think that's ridiculous. After the pandemic, it could be even most conservatives in the USA who'd think that's ridiculous.

 The last couple paragraphs are a couple random quotes out of context critical of some aspects of EA. (Other claims made in the article have been commented on by others and I've got nothing else to add.)
 

Here are some comments on the article that I sent to my family.

In 1972 philosopher Peter Singer suggested using metrics rather than emotion to direct charitable giving.

Not sure what he's talking about. I think the main point of Famine, Affluence, and Morality is that if you can help someone without a significant cost to yourself, you should.

Effective altruism also seems to be related to the “work to give” movement. Workers will rationalize high-paying jobs by giving most of their income away. Actually, when you work, you already give to society, but that is too complex for some to understand.

Earning to give is only a small part of EA, and I don't think it's typically a post hoc rationalization. And EAs understand very well that working directly on problems can give to society - see the first WSJ article I sent.

An organization known as GiveWell will tell you what charities are effective. I did a little digging, and I’m not so sure they’re effective at all. Yes, they direct money toward malaria nets and treatments for parasitic worms, but they also supply supplements for vitamin A deficiency, though genetically modified “golden” rice already provides vitamin A more effectively. Hmmm, seems like a move backward.

It's plausible that the best way to reduce vitamin A deficiency is to invest in multiple strategies at once. But if he gave a thorough argument that donating to "golden" rice infrastructure fights vitamin A deficiency more effectively per dollar than vitamin A supplementation, then I wouldn't be surprised to see GiveWell change its recommendations.

William MacAskill, a major effective-altruism booster, told the Washington Post that more should be spent on “preparing for low-probability, high-cost events such as pandemics.” That’s a bit like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

The author's comment seems quite silly to me.

And Mr. Bankman-Fried’s various entities, along with Cari Tuna and others, have put up about $19 million for a future California ballot measure, the California Pandemic Early Detection and Prevention Act, which would add a 0.75% tax on incomes over $5 million to raise up to $15 billion over 10 years. Catch that? Someone else pays. Effective, but not exactly selfless.

I don't see anything wrong with SBF promoting a tax on extremely wealthy people to prevent pandemics (unless the resulting pandemic prevention efforts are less valuable than what the wealthy people would do with their money otherwise). In general, I'm sure some taxes are totally worth promoting.

I don’t care if altruists spend their own money trying to prevent future risks from robot invasions or green nanotech goo, but they should stop asking American taxpayers to waste money on their quirky concerns.

Pandemic prevention is not a "quirky" concern!

And “effective” is in the eye of the beholder. Effective altruism proponent Steven Pinker said last year, “I don’t particularly think that combating artificial intelligence risk is an effective form of altruism.”

Yes, EAs don't agree on everything, nor do I think they should. There's an emphasis within EA on updating your beliefs in response to new evidence, such as reasonable arguments from other people.

Development economist Lant Pritchett finds it “puzzling that people’s [sic] whose private fortunes are generated by non-linearity”—Facebook, Google and FTX can write code that scales to billions of users—“waste their time debating the best (cost-effective) linear way to give away their private fortunes.”

So the argument is that when deciding where to donate your money, you should use the same tactics that earned you that money in the first place? It's unclear how "cost-effectiveness" is the same as "linearity." Maybe he's advocating for donating to interventions that are like unicorn startups - interventions that could be hugely beneficial if they succeed, but probably won't do much. If so, this is kind of exactly what Open Philanthropy is doing ("hits-based giving"). 

He notes that “national development” and “high economic productivity” drive human well-being. So true. History has proved that capitalism is the most effective and altruistic system.

It's fully possible to believe in EA principles and support capitalism. But high economic productivity can come with damaging externalities, such as increased risk of global catastrophes from new technologies.

There are only four things you can do with your money: spend it, pay taxes, give it away or invest it. Only the last drives productivity and helps society in the long term.

That seems totally incorrect. GiveWell estimates that donations to its recommended charities have averted over 100,000 deaths.

Eric Hoffer wrote in 1967 of the U.S.: “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” That’s true even of allegedly altruistic ones.

This is one of the few points in the article that I like. EA (which EA headquarters likes to describe as "a project") resembles a cult in some ways: people worry about future catastrophes, care about "doing good," think about weird ideas, and dream about growing the movement.

Hey - this is great, and very reassuring. It's great that all this exists!

I would just point out one distinction, which is between 'marketing' and 'PR'. I'm not well-versed in this, but this is how I understand it: marketing = trying to get people to do your thing (access your services, donate, come to your conference, join your movement); PR = managing the public's perception of you (getting positive press, combating bad press, crisis management). I think the two often overlap (e.g. in general awareness raising) but aren't the same.

If this is right, a lot of the above is marketing, where I completely agree that there have been great strides recently (e.g. more Comms directors at EA orgs, the EA Market Testing initiative, the new EA digital marketing agency etc. etc.); but there seems to me to be a lot less PR (e.g. managing mainstream press coverage). So while One for the World is an enthusiastic part of message testing to try to boost donations, we're not aware of any efforts to place more positive press coverage of effective donations in general.

All that said, these are all great initiatives and it's exciting to see them come to fruition.

I was with you until you said it's valuable. Conservative or not, the criticism seems so to be written by someone who either hasn't given EA more than 20 minutes of careful thought (despite writing an article about it) or isn't capable of thinking in a sane manner. I don't really know how to approach such people and I don't think it teaches me much about conservatives in general (I hope not all of them think like this).

Seriously, what do you make of statements like this: 

William MacAskill, a major effective-altruism booster, told the Washington Post that more should be spent on “preparing for low-probability, high-cost events such as pandemics.” That’s a bit like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

I'm not sure I follow why conservative criticism would lead to expanding the movement to a less represented audience

Most of the criticisms of EA may be more "leftist" than liberal. If you don't know, "leftist" is a catch-all term for 'left-of-liberal' ideologies, i.e., ones thoroughly to the left of the mainstream of the Democratic Party, or even social democrats. 

It's no fault of EA to not understand the distinction well because leftists themselves are often barely able to distinguish if by "leftism" they mean some kind of socialism or something else, or where the dividing line is between liberalism and far-left ideologies. 

Anyway, some of the more liberal movements, like 'The Neoliberal Project,' are among the few that are voluntary proponents of EA. 

Devin's comment was on a post I wrote last week. It was better than my post. I meant to post a comment sharing and recommending it to others to read until I noticed Devin had already shared the comment. I agree with almost every point Devin made. I recommend others participating in this current conversation read his comment too.

The EA movement usually tries to take good criticisms seriously. EA seeks to be an intellectual and scientific movement as well. One of the reasons why EA invests so much in self-criticism is because EA can't get enough good criticism from outside sources and criticism remains an important part of peer review. The worst problem isn't how some criticisms judge EA in general but criticisms that are based on misconceptions, or misunderstandings, and thus spread false information about EA.

I've seen left-wing criticisms of EA being a movement that wants to decrease taxes, especially on/in the crypto industry, based on how the critics perceived Sam's political plays. (I'm not aware of any such recent criticisms commenting on Dustin's and Cari's donations of any kind.) 

Yes, I agree. I was just trying to explore briefly why people might think this was a bad use of time/money, and thought 'don't give this stuff oxygen' might be one of those arguments. But it's not one I agree with.

This is consistent with the other advice I've been given. Apparently you need some people to really 'specialise' in your area, so that they can do high fidelity messaging, be the go-to place for comment etc.; so this seems like a good argument for trying to find a small group of EA-aligned (or 'teachable') professionals and then buy their time.

Yes, although this was a total guess, assuming $200k/person for two senior people and then $100k for a more junior person. I have no idea what good PR professionals earn.

There is also a practical issue of trying to have multiple people covering different markets/languages, but I guess you use consultants strategically to overcome that.

Thanks Ben. A few things:

• I read the posts I could find on this topic on the forum, none of which mention a PR agency or hiring a PR team for the movement
• I've talked about this with a lot of other EA professionals and no one has mentioned that this idea is coming, although all of them thought it was a good idea to some degree
• I posted it as an idea for FTX and it wasn't taken up, without feedback or any suggestion that it was already happening
• I visited the many examples of mainstream press criticism of EA cited in other posts and saw no response or comment 'from EA'

But, most importantly, the things you list here don't address the suggestion of this post. Individual orgs being advised by PR professionals, or Longview aiming for more press coverage, has at best partial overlap with the effect of a dedicated PR team for EA.

This is also self-evidently not having the effect of countering op-eds like this one (although that might be low priority work).

So, when OFTW, at least one GiveWell charity and presumably others are forwarded this op-ed by potential or actual major donors, and there is crickets 'from EA' in response, I think it's pretty reasonable to say 'this seems like a good idea - can we make it happen?'

I think it's valuable to point out a problem. The fact is that the majority of media articles about EA are negative (and often inaccurate), and this has been the case for years. Inasmuch as this is a problem, all existing efforts to solve it have failed! Listing upcoming efforts seems like more of a nice addition than a mandatory component.

I interpreted this post as also complaining about there not being any sort of consesus among EAs as a community for how to deal with negative press. Most of what you listed would not qualify as a community-wide strategy. Sure, Open Phil, CEA, 80k, etc. having some PR guidance seems awesome, but what about everyone else? I'm guessing there are many orgs, individual people who have a lot of twitter followers or whatever, etc. that don't know how to respond to negative press. 

• There's a communications strategy being drafted.

seems to be the only thing you listed that actually addresses this. Which is great! But it seems pretty unrealistic to expect OP to know that this was happening. I'm also guessing this wouldn't have been answered in an EA forum question; questions don't seem to gain that much traction on EA forum, and the vast majority of users probably had no clue a communications strategy was being drafted.