EA - Revisiting EA's media policy by Arepo

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Revisiting EA's media policy, published by Arepo on December 3, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Epistemic status: This post is meant to be a conversation starter rather than a conclusive argument. I don’t assert that any of the concerns in it are overwhelming, only that we have too quickly adopted a set of media communication practices without discussing their trade-offs.Also, while this was in draft form, Shakeel Hashim, CEA’s new head of communications, made some positive comments on the main thesis suggesting that he agreed with a lot of my criticisms and planned to have a much more active involvement with the media. If so, this post may be largely redundant - nonetheless, it seems worth having the conversation in public.CEA adheres to what they call the fidelity model of spreading ideas, which they formally introduced in 2017, though my sense is it was an unofficial policy well before that. In a low-fidelity nutshell, this is the claim that EA ideas are somewhat nuanced and media reporting often isn’t, and so it’s generally not worth pursuing - and often worth actively discouraging - media communication unless you’re a) extremely confident the outlet in question will report the ideas exactly as you describe them and b) you’re qualified to deal with the media.In practice, because CEA pull many strings, this being CEA policy makes it de facto EA policy. ‘Qualified to deal with the media’ seems to mean ‘CEA-sanctioned’, and I have heard of at least one organisation being denied CEA-directed money in part because it was considered too accommodating of the media. Given that ubiquity, I think it’s worth discussing the policy more depth. We have five years of results to look back on and, to my knowledge, no further public discussion of the subject. I have four key concerns with the current approach:It’s not grounded in researchIt leads to a high proportion of negative coverage for EAIt assumes a Platonic ideal of EAIt contributes to the hero-worship/concentration of power in EAElaborating each.Not empirically groundedThe article assumes that low-fidelity spreading of EA ideas is necessarily bad, but doesn’t give any data beyond some very general anecdotes to support this. There’s an obvious trade-off to be had between a small number of people doing something a lot like what we want and a larger number doing something a bit like what we want, and it’s very unclear which has higher expectation.To see the case for the alternative, we might compare the rise of the animal rights movement in the wake of Peter Singer’s original argument for animal welfare. The former is a philosophically mutated version of the latter, so on fidelity model reasoning would have been something that’s ‘similar but different’ - apparently treated on the fidelity model as undesirable. Similarly, the emergence of reducetarianism/flexitarianism looks very like what the fidelity model would consider to be a ‘diluted’ version of the practice of veganism Singer advocated. My sense is that both of these have nonetheless been strong net positives for animal welfare.High proportion of negative coverageIf you have influence over a group of supporters and you tell them not to communicate with the media, one result you might anticipate is that a much higher proportion of your media coverage comes from the detractors, who you don’t have influence over. Shutting out the media can also be counterproductive - they’re (mostly) human, and so tend to deal more kindly with people who deal more kindly with them. I have three supporting anecdotes, one admittedly eclipsing the others:FTXgateAt the time of writing, if you Google ‘effective altruism news’, you still get something like this.Similarly, if you look at Will’s Tweetstorm decrying SBF’s actions, the majority of responses are angrily negativ...