EA - How CEA’s communications team is thinking about EA communications at the moment by Shakeel Hashim

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How CEA’s communications team is thinking about EA communications at the moment, published by Shakeel Hashim on June 23, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TL;DR: For now, we're going to be promoting EA as a place for intellectual exploration, incredible research, and real-world impact and innovation.These are my thoughts, but Emma Richter has been closely involved with developing them.This post is intended as a very overdue introduction to CEA’s communications team, our goals, and what we’re currently working on/planning to work on.I started at CEA as head of communications in September 2022. My position was a new one: as I understand it, various EA stakeholders were concerned that EA communications had fallen into a diffusion of responsibility. Though everyone in this ecosystem wanted it to go well, no one explicitly managed it. I was therefore hired with the remit of trying to fix this. Emma Richter joined the team as a contractor in December and became a permanent member of the team in March. We’ve also worked with a variety of external advisors, most notably Mike Levine at TSD Communications.Our team has two main goals. The first is to help look after the EA brand. That means, broadly, that we want the outside world to have an accurate, and positive impression of effective altruism and the value created by this ecosystem. The second, more nebulous goal, is to help the EA ecosystem better use communications to achieve various object-level goals. This means things like “helping to publicise a report on effective giving”, or “advocating for AI safety in the press”. As communications capacity grows across the EA ecosystem, I expect this goal to become less of a priority for us — but for now I think we have expertise that can be used to make a big difference in this way.With that in mind, here’s how we’re thinking about things at the moment.I’ll start with what’s going on in the world. There are a few particularly salient things I’m tracking:On the EA brand:Negative attention on EA has significantly died down.We expect it to flare back up somewhat this autumn, around SBF’s trial and various book releases, though probably not to the level that it was in late 2022.On net, there doesn’t appear to be a hit to the EA brand from FTX (see here for various data). Among those who have heard of both, though, there may have been a hit — and I suspect that group of people would include important subgroups like journalists and politicians.There is uncertainty about what people want EA (the brand, the ecosystem and/or the community) to be.Within CEA, our new executive director might make fairly radical changes (though they may also keep things quite similar).From the job announcement: “One thing to highlight is that we are both open to and enthusiastic about candidates who want to pursue significant changes to CEA. This might include: Spinning off or shutting down programs, or starting new programs; Focusing on specific cause areas, or on promoting general EA principles; Trying to build something more like a mass movement or trying to be more selective and focused; Significant staffing changes; Changing CEA’s name.There is increased interest in cause-specific field building (e.g. see here).In general, there are lots of conversations and uncertainties about what direction to take EA in (“should we frame EA as a community or a philosophical movement?" or "should we devote most of our resources to AI safety right now?")I expect this uncertainty to clear up a little as conversations continue in the next few months (e.g. in things like EA Strategy Fortnight), and CEA getting a new ED might help too. But I don’t expect it to resolve altogether.That said, EA community building (groups, conferences, online discussion spaces) has a strong track record and it seems likel...