How CEA’s communications team is thinking about EA communications at the moment

By Shakeel Hashim @ 2023-06-23T12:17 (+86)

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.
• Polling suggests that there wasn't a hit to public sentiment about EA 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 likely that it will continue, in some form, to be a key source of value going forward.

On the use of communications to achieve various object-level goals:

• Attention on AI safety has increased very rapidly, and regulatory conversations are moving very quickly. We are possibly in a very narrow window for being able to influence policy — the next 6 months seem really important.
  • While lots of good AI safety communications work is being done, there seems to be a clear need for more.
  • It is unclear the extent to which the EA brand is good for AI safety work; my best guess is that it is neutral-to-harmful and we should try to build a non-EA branded AI safety coalition.
• There are some upcoming events that provide good opportunities to publicise other work (e.g. the release of Oppenheimer is ripe for nuclear security coverage).

How the team is responding to this

In recent weeks, I have been very focused on AI work. I expect this to continue; I think there is an urgent need for more communications capacity here and I’m well-positioned to help. This work will not be EA-branded.

We are also helping some organisations on publicising other, non-AI and non-EA branded work.

On EA: We think now is a good time to resume work on the EA brand. This should probably look less like “let’s go and talk to lots of newspapers about EA”, and more like “let’s assert on our own channels what EA is and stands for”.

The rationale for avoiding mass attention (e.g. a press campaign à la summer 2022) is the potential for significant downside (e.g. articles might focus a lot on FTX, and raise the salience of EA just before another wave of negative media). Courting this kind of mass attention while there is still significant uncertainty as to what EA is and what we want it to be also feels a bit premature.

But that doesn’t mean we think we should avoid all communications. It seems good that if and when people do hear about EA and come on e.g. the Twitter account, they see good things and get a good impression of us. And for various decision-makers and opinion influencers, softly reminding them that EA is still around and still doing cool, impactful work seems good. In particular, this lays the groundwork for if and when we do decide to court attention again, as there will already be some positive sentiment towards us.

Of course, to do this we need some vision of EA to present to the world. As mentioned above, for now CEA is sticking pretty closely to my original plans for the EA brand. This is a vision we’re loosely calling “EA as a university”. EA, in this conception, is a place for intellectual exploration, incredible research, and real-world impact and innovation. In practice, that means we’ll be promoting things like:

• Explanations of Rethink Priorities’ moral weights sequence.
• Our World In Data’s new data-driven article on child mortality.
• This forum post on the cost-benefit analysis of preventing catastrophes.
• Profiles of innovative charities, such as the Lead Exposure Elimination Project, and promising new interventions, such as far UVC.
• Explanations of lesser-known or more complicated cause areas, such as wild animal welfare and digital sentience.

CEA's broader strategy and a new ED will significantly affect our team's strategy. We're operating with these ideas for now, but we remain open to future changes as the environment continues to evolve.

We’re currently figuring out exactly what approach we’re going to take to promote this conception of EA: I expect it will likely involve things like sprucing up our social media accounts and potentially launching new channels (such as an EA blog). We are also considering producing materials to help group organisers communicate about EA.

We view this, and everything we do, as somewhat of an experiment: as we execute on this we’ll be paying close attention to what is and isn’t working, and we’ll adjust our approach accordingly. We also appreciate feedback and suggestions — and if you think you have skills that could contribute to this work, please let me know!

Thanks to Ben West, Emma Richter and Mike Levine for comments on this post, and to them and many, many others for thoughts on our communications strategy. The preview image was taken at EAG London.