What brand should EA buy? If we had to buy one.

I like the idea but then a potential counter-point would be we should just simple expand Oxford's GPI/FHI. Both of these are within Oxford, which adds a lot of prestige/credibility etc. 

Are there any top universities that one could actually buy, even theoretically? Most (or at least most large) universities are either government-run or non-profits and one can't buy these kinds of entities.

There seems to be very little precedent of someone founding new successful universities, partially because the perceived success of a university is so dependent on pedigree. There is even less precedent of successful "themed" universities, and the only ones I know that have attained mainstream success (not counting women's universities or black universities, which are identity-based rather than movement-based) are old religious institutions like Saint John's or BYU. I think a more realistic alternative would be to buy something like EdX or a competing online academic content aggregator ("MOOC") and give it an EA slant. The success of programs like EdX is much more recent, and much more "buyable", since it is just a matter of either licensing the right content or hiring famous academics to give independent courses.

EA satire sounds interesting. How about Mad Magazine? That would be cheaper than Last Week Tonight, the brand isn’t attached to one person like John Oliver and it could be a good job for people that have written rationalist fiction?

I'm not so sure. First if your goal is to influence the general public, I don't they they'd be very influenced by that. 

Second, even if you do use a journal's brand name (say Nature), it only works in the short run. The people who read it frequently  know about the change in management and would be (at least) a little sceptical about the new management. So its not entirely clear that you would be able to use the previous legitimacy.

And finally, whatever legitimacy existed could be destroyed with a few articles that were out of consensus with the previous journal. Perhaps someone more well versed in the sociology of academia would know better but I think that it wouldn't take very long for its reputation to change to the "weirdo journal" or anything else. 

My biggest concern though is that even if it worked and the previous two points were wrong, I don't think convincing academics is the best brand to buy. It would be more on the lines of getting famous people across various sections of society (actors, singers, sports players, politicians) to endorse EA or specific EA causes. So better would be Rihanna's or Ronaldo's brand just so that your reach is maximised. 

Whether it would work aside, I don't think this is a very ethical thing to do. It is fundamentally an attempt at deceit, which is to me is the antithesis of what EA is all about.

edit: I think I misunderstood the idea. I read it as an attempt at hijacking a journal to use it as a platform to publish ea research. If it's just buying a journal,and placing a higher emphasis on impactful research I take back my original comment. That said I think there's a very fine line between the former and the latter.

I like this idea, but there are a lot of different things it could mean:

• Try to create a "Journal of Effective Altruism", like an academic version of this here EA Forum, for researchers to exchange ideas and build up the field.  This idea could be interesting but it's vulnerable to the trade-offs expressed by So-Low Growth, and it's not clear why we'd have to start by buying a prestigious journal -- surely we could just start our own journal from scratch.
• Buy a mainstream journal and just exert a slight EA bias insofar as we try to highlight higher-impact papers and subjects than the previous journal owners, thereby subtly changing the incentives of a large research community.  This is a cool idea and it inspired my "fund a university department" answer.
• Buy a journal as an exercise in metascience, in order to implement better scientific standards such as requiring preregistration of hypotheses, etc.  This idea could of course be combined with having a slight EA tilt; your answer seems like it is saying we should do a combination of these last two bullet points.

Another big question is, what kind of journal (or university department) should we be aiming to buy?  Maybe "Nature" is the most prestigious journal overall, but surely we'd want to target our efforts at a specific field -- one that seems like it could be particularly high-impact, but perhaps also one that's currently misaligned from EA values and seems to have poor scientific standards (that way we'd have lots of room to improve things).  Some things that come to mind:

• Buy a computer science journal and mostly keep running it like normal, except try to ensure that worries about AI safety are treated as pressing and important rather than niche and weird.
• Buy a journal about bioethics and try to steer it away from obsessing about blame, privilege, whether anyone can truly give "informed consent" for anything, etc, in favor of utilitarian-style public health examination of which policies would minimize deaths and suffering during a pandemic, or how a faster approval pace for drugs might save more lives even if it means we let some duds sneak through the process.
• Buy a journal about aging, Alzheimer's, or gerontology and try to steer it towards higher-impact research about the root causes of aging rather than just classifying finer and finer details about the various downstream effects of the decaying health that comes with age.
• Buy some kind of journal related to biology or animal behavior and subtly try to get everyone studying the kinds of animal-welfare topics relevant to organizations like Rethink Priorities.
• Try to turn an existing journal of economics into a journal about Progress Studies.
• Buy a journal in a problematic field, like gain-of-function research or hypersonic missile design or AI design (if such obviously net-negative journals exist) and try to sabotage it by jacking up prices or shutting down the journal entirely.

And so on and so forth.  Are some of these better targets than others?  (For instance, maybe in biology all the incentives flow from the journals down, but in computer science changing the journals would not do as much to change the overall field.)  How much does it cost to actually buy a journal, and is that something it's possible to actually do?

I think the counter-point here is that currently EAs publish in more mainstream journals, allowing them to gain exposure to a wide audience. Having a niche EA journal (even if buying a popular one and changing it) may reduce the audience/respectability (i.e. considered fringe etc.). 

Why do an EA-themed nature documentary when we haven't even gotten around to making any documentaries about EA??  If Carl Sagan was still alive, I'd say we should pay him to make an EA-themed sequel to "Cosmos" -- each episode could tackle a different philosophical idea or global problem, roughly following the 80,000 Hours Podcast series "Effective Altruism: An Introduction" and "Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems".  Interviews with experts would alternate with experimental demonstrations, historical anecdotes,  and CGI visualizations meant to make the abstract ideas of effective altruism vivid and memorable, just like Cosmos did so well.

I'm confident that Carl Sagan (given his curiosity and strong anti-nuclear-weapons activism) would've been very amenable to this idea, but unfortunately he is no longer with us, and I don't think Neil Degrasse Tyson would be an acceptable replacement.  Maybe somebody like Bill Gates or Al Gore (of "An Inconvenient Truth") would be interested?  James Burke, of the beloved British documentary series "Connections", is still around.

Actually, rather than focusing on star power, it would probably be a better idea to just hire a really good documentary team with a track record of producing good television.  Ken Burns and more recently Peter Jackson are big names in the documentary world, although they've mostly worked with archival footage, which is very different than producing a "Cosmos"-inspired science show.  Maybe some team of folks at National Geographic or the BBC would be a good fit?

Taking this idea more seriously:  If I was an EA grantmaker, I'd want to start small by maybe hiring an educational-youtube-video personality (like John Green's "Crash Course") to make an Effective Altruism series.  If that seemed to show good results, then I would escalate to funding a decent Netflix-style documentary movie, which I imagine could be had for something like $2-5 million -- "An Inconvenient Truth" had a budget of around $1.5 million.  Then, if everything was still going peachy, we could set our sights higher and consider a big Cosmos-style TV series with a big marketing push to really try and get the word out.

This is a really good idea. Even better might be to commission him to make a documentary with a very EA-focused take on animal welfare. It's hard to say how much his explicitly climate change focused documentaries have done, but anecdotally it feels like they've been influential.

I wouldn't say money is no object. Instead I'd say that we have to look at the cost benefit. But your points still stand.

Similarly, I've wondered how much impact could be had by changing Facebook's charity donation prompts to EA-recommended charities.

:P yeah a bit. But I still think some of what you say stands. It is well known that FTX supports effective charities and that's really good on reputation alone.