More generally I think EA should have an all or nothing approach to news cycles

I don't think we should care most of the time, but occasionally there comes a news cycle which is close enough to our work to warrant quick blog publications, op-eds, media appearances.

To me, this feels like one of those. 

I am confused that I'm not seeing EA articles on this topic. If we don't push for the "how to best spend $6Bn to combat global povery" which news cycles do we act on?

Some theories:
- Perhaps noone wants to rush and make mistakes. That's certainly why I'm not talking about it. But EAs are literally the experts on this. 
- Perhaps it's mainly on twitter. But lots of articles are being written. (https://www.google.com/search?q=elon+musk+6bn&oq=elon+musk+6bn&aqs=chrome..69i57.4031j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) now is the time to publish meta takes "how we would spend 6Bn" 

EDIT: I wrote a pitch and sent it to the Guardian's op-ed page. Given how quickly news cycles change, I think time is of the essence, but I'm also wary of reputational risks to EA, so I'd be happy to work with comms professionals about the best way to approach this, should they decide to run the piece. 

I'm a freelance journalist and previously worked in fundraising at GiveDirectly. I may be able to write a draft tomorrow, or at least an op-ed pitch. If people have concerns/ideas, feel free to comment or DM me. 

I've written for lefty outlets before and was thinking that the Guardian may be a good place to try to run this. It's still likely to be rejected because these things are competitive. Worst case, I could write something on Medium that could go up quickly.  

The general idea would be to agree that the $6B to solve world hunger claim is problematic, and pivot to filling the funding gaps of the GiveWell charities. GiveDirectly has the most room for funding, and could scale up a lot if needed (we went from ~$50M per year to $320M in 2020). Musk also donated $~15k in doge coin to GD while I was there. Trying to move into other cause areas is likely to be confusing and overreaching IMO. I had a short discussion of a similar idea in a past piece I wrote.

Relevant quote: 

"We can learn a bit more about Koch by examining some of his claims in the interview. In response to the above question, Koch says: 

I don’t like the term capitalism, that assumes that what we’re after is a system where certain people have a lot of capital. That’s not what we’re about. What we’re after is a system where everybody has the opportunity to realize their potential, including those who start with nothing. And businesses should only profit to the extent that they’re helping other people improve their lives… And polluting and making people sick, killing people shouldn’t profit. They should bear a cost for that…our biggest failures in our mind are safety problems. When there’s an accident and people die, I mean, that’s monstrous. Job one is keeping people safe and job two is protecting the environment. In the last 5 years, the EPA has ranked us either number one or two of US companies in pollution reduction initiatives.

There’s a lot to unpack here. If Charles isn’t “about” a system where certain people have a lot of capital, then why does he have over $47 billion? If he wanted to prove how not about capitalism he was, he could give away his capital. There is certainly no shortage of social problems that could be addressed by $47 billion. With the interest on his fortune, Charles could fully prevent and treat neglected tropical diseases that affect more than a billion people annually. With his principal, he could end extreme poverty (living on less than $1.90 per day) for a year in all of Nigeria, Brazil, India, China, and Angola. Now this level of giving is not sustainable even for Mr. Koch, but that’s okay, because he’s not “about” anyone having that much money."

Is the aim here to generate a bunch of PR for EA, or to actually convince Elon Musk to do more EA-aligned giving?
 

If the latter, I doubt trying to publicly pressure him into donating to an EA global poverty charity as part of a twitter debate is the best way to do it. (In fact, he already knows several EAs and has donated to EA orgs before.)

The 'get PR' angle (along the lines of what Fin is saying below) seems more promising – in that ideally we'd have more 'public intellectuals' focused on getting EA into the media & news cycle. This is mainly because the main candidates are doing things that seem even higher value, but I would like to fix this.

FWIW this seems like a reasonable idea to me and I would be pretty sad if no one at e.g. Givewell had even considered it.

Was literally coming here to write a shortform post on this.  I suggest an EA org writes how much good they think could be done with $6Bn.  Mostly I think this will get shared a lot. However there is a small chance musk might see it and reach out in some way.

Thanks for writing this. Here's one way this could look:

• No, probably $6 billion isn't quite enough to end world hunger. Here are the facts about food scarcity/security over time, and here are ways to address the problem that you might not have considered (e.g. fortifying food with micronutrients, malnutrition isn't just about inadequate calories)
• Turns out there is a community of people thinking about what you could achieve with that kind of money, and they're thinking about causes beyond food scarcity/security. Often the best ways to spend it aren't what you might initially think.
• And here's the elevator pitch for what a range of EA orgs could do with $6 billion, starting with a couple which are closest to 'solving world hunger'.
• Here's a ladder to more longtermist/growth-focused/risk-focused interventions, and what $6 billion could achieve on that front, and why you might also care about them if you cared about the world hunger stuff.
• Here's a call to action for EA in general.

Definitely possible to mess up, and should be pitched as an interesting/relevant bit of popular writing about EA rather than anything actually aimed at getting Elon/other billionaires to pay attention.

Thoughts on whether this is worth pitching to a couple media outlets? Thoughts on which person/org might be well-placed to write it? My guess is someone from OWID could be especially good.

Addendum: I think it's plausible that Elon ends up making a big Givewell-style donation at the end of this, even if it's not six billion dollars big. (Maybe a six billion dollar pledge spread out over a long time, like the Bezos climate pledge? Or maybe founding a new EA organization like how he helped found OpenAI -- Elon likes to be in charge of his various efforts.) It would probably look pretty stingy and mean to start a big fight over this and end up giving away nothing, just sticking to your "charity is ineffective, I deserve to keep all of my money" guns.

Thanks for the post. First, I think it’s important to clarify that UN didn’t say anything: it was David Beasley, director of the World Food Programme - WFP (a branch of UN), who tweeted this “challenge” and later on was interviewed about it; second, his original tweet was about U$ 6.6 bn to prevent 42 million people from starving – only when interviewed he was more emphatic and said “they are literally going to die”. After the CNN interview spread, they changed their original piece, and now the website states that “An earlier version of this story's headline incorrectly stated that the director of the UN's food scarcity organization believes 2% of Elon Musk's wealth could solve world hunger. He believes it could help solve world hunger.” To me, this implies Beasley backed from what he said / implied in the interview - but not from his original tweet.

My conjecture: maybe what we are seeing is a politician (Beasley is a member of the Republican party and was Governor of South Carolina) getting lost with numbers, mistaking something like the amount necessary to lift people beyond the poverty line (U$1,90) for what would be necessary to prevent (first) starvation and (second) death. Or maybe someone just did a regression using what WFP spends per person – and I’m actually surprised they could feed an additional person with only U$0,43 a day (= 6.6 bn / (365 * 42 mi)), and scale it up to 42mi. Either way, it’d not justify the bold (counterfactual) claim that people are "literally going to die" – though it’d justify the straightforward claims such as “we could feed up to additional 42 million people, or lift them from extreme poverty”. Even then, I’m quite surprised with that, and would like to see someone analyze their data.

However, I tend to disagree that this would be a peculiar opportunity for (most) EA orgs – unless one could do this without becoming one more of Moloch’s tools. I’m afraid this type of news driven by Twitter debate and suspicious analysis (like the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness published) is precisely what EA is usually trying to avoid.

Agreed! Honestly, it seems strange to me that there aren't more EA resources dedicated to getting ultra-wealthy people to contribute to EA causes. Perhaps it's that it isn't very tractable, or that it requires a highly specific skillset, or maybe even that it's bad PR with too much potential for backfiring to be so blunt about it--but this seems like a HUGE opportunity that's currently neglected. EA has been pretty successful from getting buy-in from a decent number of high earners--where "high-earner" is defined relative to the average American income (think tech folks earning to give). And there are a few ultra wealthy folks on board (e.g. the open phil funders). But getting even one or two more ultra-high net worth folks on board could have a monetary impact equivalent to thousands of people earning to give. Are people familiar with EA initiatives working on this? Or am I missing other downsides?

Folks employed at universities might consider theconversation.com. Pieces published there are sometimes picked up by other outlets. They especially like it if your proposal links into something currently in the news. They prefer being pitched first but I have succeeded in the past with a full piece ready-to-go. They will expect you or a coauthor to be an 'expert' in the topic you are writing on, but this is broadly construed; I would just fill out my profile in a way that shows you have some academic background relevant to the topic.

A thing I have been thinking about but am not at all an expert on is open-source research into high-yield seed production.

Currently high-yield seeds alone can significantly increase outputs  by something like 25-55% 

One of the big challenges with improved seeds and agritech is that the current model doesn’t seem to be working for the ~25% of the worlds population who are subsistence farmers. Maybe there is no profit in it. For example subsistence farmers don’t want to be dependent on having to buy seeds every year but want to be able to save seed from their own crops, but seed developers prefer seeds that need to be purchased annually. 

If I was suggesting a $6bn megaproject to end world hunger that would appeal to some ambitious tech entrepreneur it would be something like open-source agritech designed for (and by?) the worlds poorest, not like "hey donate to an EA food charity like Fortify Health or Food Fortification Initiative" (although that would be nice too).

Just mentioning the idea on the off chance it is helpful to the debate, to anyone's op-eds, anyone chatting to Musk or whatever.

Also I can't overstate that news cycles are quick. If you agree and have better connections at an org capable of writing this (GiveWell, one of the philanthropic advisory places, etc) then I suggest sharing this with them. If you wait for them to find it, the opportunity might be gone.

I wouldn't normally push something like this but here it feels genuinely time pressured. 1 of my non EA friends posted Elon's comments in our chat and memes groups. For me that's a signal that for a moment EA concepts are in the mainstream news cycle.  

I have spoken to the editor of CapX who said they'd likely publish an article if the text could get to them in the next day. Judge that opportunity as you will.

Thanks for writing this Jackson.

I really think EA should get involved in trying to answer how to best deploy billions of dollars, and not just focus on the marginal impact of millions USD.