Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...
Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
If you're an expert in your field and have good credentials (ex. a PhD), you might consider signing up for one of the many 'expert networks' that reporters use to find sources for stories like helpareporter.com or expertisefinder.com.
These directories seem to be a common way for reporters to connect with domain experts to learn more about a topic area or, maybe more likely, find the right pull quotes to provide evidence for their existing thesis.
While it's unlikely to have a major impact, I expect it would be good to have more EA leaning experts interfacing with reporters could:
And the costs are very low, basically just the risk it becomes a major drain on your attention.
I’d be interested in hearing from reporters at high quality orgs if these are useful or if there are better ways of getting connected with sources.