I think almost everyone I know who has taken up requests to be interviewed about some community-adjacent thing in the last 10 years has regretted their choice

Would be interested in hearing more, like what those interviews were about and whether the interviewed people were mostly from the Bay area and/or part of the rationality community. Could imagine that I wouldn't want to strongly extrapolate from those experiences to potential media interviews for learning about EA in Germany, for instance.

I appeared on a radio program on behalf of EA London in 2018 and don't regret it. I thought the coverage was fair to positive.

In terms of understanding the causal effect of talking to journalists, it seems hard to say much in the absence of an RCT.

Someone ought to flip a coin for every interview request, in order to measure (a) the causal effect of accepting an interview on probability of article publication, and (b) the direction of any effects on article accuracy, fairness, and useful critique.

(That was meant as a bit of a joke, but I would honestly be delighted to see a bunch of articles about EA which include sentences like "Person X did not offer any comment because we weren't assigned to the interview acceptance group in their RCT". Seems like it sends the right signal to the sort of people we want to attract.)

In any case, until that RCT gets run, maybe it would be worthwhile to compare articles informed by interviews and articles uninformed by interviews side-by-side, and do what we can with the data we have. It's easy to say "I talked to the journalist and the article was inaccurate". But claiming that the article ended up worse than it would've been in the absence of an interview is harder. (There are also complicating factors: an article with quotes from relevant people may seem more legitimate to readers; no interview might mean no article.)

I think almost everyone I know who has taken up requests to be interviewed about some community-adjacent thing in the last 10 years has regretted their choice, not because they were punished by the community or something, but because the journalists ended up twisting their words and perspective in a way both felt deeply misrepresentative and gave the interviewee no way to object or correct anything.

Do you have thoughts about the idea of creating a thread on a site like the EA Forum or Less Wrong where someone takes questions from the media and responds in writing publicly? 3 birds with one stone: written responses can be more considered, public source material discourages misrepresentation, and less need to respond to the same question multiple times.

(This was Wei Dai's idea for handling journalist questions about Bitcoin.)

I agree that public communication is risky, but I think that plenty more people are qualified to do it than just CEA and the movement's "big three" public intellectuals (MacAskill, Ord, and Singer). My comment here was partly a response to this one.

You might be right but just to add a datapoint: I was featured in an article in 2016. I don’t regret it but I was careful about (1) the journalist and (2) what I said on the record.

I think almost everyone I know who has taken up requests to be interviewed about some community-adjacent thing in the last 10 years has regretted their choice, not because they were punished by the community or something, but because the journalists ended up twisting their words and perspective in a way both felt deeply misrepresentative and gave the interviewee no way to object or correct anything. 

I upvoted this comment because it matches my intuitions, however I think this section is exaggerrated.

When this was brought up on Twitter, someone brought up a survey for how much people who were involved in events felt journalists accurately characterized them. iirc it was something like 20% substantively/entirely accurate, 60% minor errors but broad gist is true, 20% majorly false. 

I couldn't find the study again and I don't know how good it was. But at least your comment seems maybe an overestimate.

I've tended to be pretty annoyed by EA messaging around this. My impression is that the following things are true about EAs talking to the media:

-Journalists will often represent what you say in a way you would not endorse, and will rarely revise based on your feedback on this, or even give you the opportunity to give feedback

-It is often imprudent to talk to the media, at least if you are not granted anonymity first, because it shines a spotlight on you that is often distorted, and always invites some possible controversy directed at you

However, the advice is often framed as though a third thing is also true:

-It is usually bad for Effective Altruism if Effective Altruists talk to the media without extreme care

My personal impression has been that the articles about EA that are most reflective of the EA I know tend to involve interviews with EAs, and that the parts of those articles that are often best reflective of EA are the parts where the interviewed EAs are quoted. The worst generally contain no interviews at all. Interviews like this might grant unearned credibility, but at minimum, they also humanize us, depict some part of the real people that we are. I guess this might not be everyone's experience, but it's worth remembering that even if the parts where the EAs are interviewed are often misrepresentative, so are the parts, often to a greater degree, where they aren't. This is especially true of articles that are written in relative good faith but by outsiders briefly glancing in for their impressions, and it is my impression that this describes the overwhelming majority of pieces written on EA, especially where interviewed EAs get quoted.

Still, I don't think this advice is the main reason EA has failed so badly with PR recently. FTX was the obvious one, but in terms of actual media strategy I stand by this comment as my main diagnosis of our mistake. With some honorable exceptions, EA's media strategy this past few months seems to me something like: shine highbeams on ourselves, especially this rather narrow part of ourselves, mostly don't respond to critics directly in any very prominent non-EA-specific place, except maybe Will MacAskill will occasionally tweet about it, and don't respond to very harsh critics even this much. I think pretty much every step in this strategy crashed and burned.

It sounds like there are two main issues:

1. When is talking to journalists in the self-interest of an individual or very small org? 
2. When is talking to journalists going to contribute positively to the world?

My gut instinct is that the latter will hold more often than the former, since it develops a wider public discussion, implying that sometimes altruists might want to talk to the media even if they feel it will cast them in a poor light. Over time, as a community we can share our experiences and  and collectively decide which publications and individuals we trust to have a conversation with, possibly on which topics or in which broader contexts. One of CEA's roles could then be to seek to build new such relationships to share with the community, widening our set of options rather than restricting it.

If EAs don't talk to journalists they will miss out on one really important learning:

.... how to talk to journalists!

Fwiw many of the details of this I didn't know, and many of the rest I'd forgotten. But overall it seems  consistent with what I said, with a couple of caveats:

I was wary because of my and my friends' experiences with journalists and "a few thoughts from CEA" [where did "policy" come from?]

I've edited the OP to say that this was mostly based on your own experience. Re 'policy' - it was somewhere in the aftermath/discussion of this experience that I learned of CEA's stance. Fwiw the guide you linked to looks very much like a policy to me, albeit a slightly differently emphasised one from the OP.

AFAICT I never saw any sign that the journalist was "excited about the project" or cared about us at all.

My memory is that on the phone, he came across as excited and very positive about the project. I didn't have any further interaction with him after that. 

The OP plans to invite the journalist to stay at the hotel "for a few days" where I am already approaching breaking point trying to run three retreats. I don't think he actually ever did.

I think he already had the idea of visiting, and asked me about the possibility, and IIRC encouraged it at the time - I didn't realise how overloaded you were, and if you told me since I've evidently forgotten, so rather belatedly, sorry for dropping that on you :(

it's a warped summary of events written to paint CEA in a bad light.

I don't think this is justified. I'm criticising the policy of isolating from the media that CEA have advocated  for several years, and which the hotel de facto implemented on grounds that were, at least in part, informed by CEA writings. I'm not saying anyone involved did anything wrong at the time (including the journalist), just that this is some light evidence that CEA's policy can be counterproductive - depending on your reading of the final article.

The tweaks above notwithstanding, even after reading your full description I would think it reasonable to write much the same synopsis and argue for much the same conclusion from it.

The media is an extremely different discursive environment than the EA forum and should have different guidelines.

I don't want to assume that the public sphere cannot become earnestly truthseeking, but right now it isn't at all and bad things happen if you treat it like it is.

Fwiw, I'm strongly in agreement that people do not have an obligation to follow CEA's media policy (I work for CEA, am not speaking in that capacity exactly, but obviously it's relevant!) I'm confused about what the ideal media policy is from an instrumental perspective, I found some of the ideas in this post and comments somewhat persuasive re: maybe instrumentally more EAs should be talking to the media, but on a community level, while I think there's some context it would be good to have before talking to media (how it tends to work, whether a given journalist has an axe to grind, other things, though I don't know exactly what happens when people contact CEA for media advice), I don't think it's people's obligation to talk to CEA first (though I could end up thinking empirically it's a bad and poorly judged decision to talk to media without guidance!).

if anyone is contacted by the media to discuss EA, they have no obligation whatsoever to follow CEA's media policy. This isn't a political party.

This specific statement is an extreme mischaracterization. Political parties have strict media policies because it is instrumentally convergent to avoid letting random strangers control your fate, and they have sufficient experience with the media for most members to know several reasons why this is the case.

It's effectively the same class of fallacy as saying "EA is not an autocracy, therefore there should be no leadership at all". EA requires a less strict media policy than political parties, not a total absence of a media policy at all.

Whenever I've seen media/outsiders criticize EA, EAs react defensively - which is a very normal human reaction.

I want to clarify that this is true and helpful to introduce to the conversation.

Perhaps more EA orgs - like GiveWell, ACE, and FHI - should have their own publicity arms that operate independently of CEA

I think GiveWell (at least, and maybe ACE too) is already very independent of CEA. The fact that they also haven't done mass media outreach is probably a result of an independent assessment that it isn't particularly in their interests to do so. They do have significant marketing and media outreach, e.g. I've seen YouTube sponsorships, and I know they're on podcasts sometimes, so I feel safe guessing that media exposure they haven't had is because they haven't pursued it rather than because they don't have the expertise to do so.

Great points.

There's an unfortunate dynamic which has occurred around discussions of longtermism outside EA. Within EA, we have a debate about whether it's better to donate to nearterm vs longterm charities. A lot of critical outsider discussion on longtermism ends up taking the nearterm side of our internal debate: "Those terrible longtermists want you to fund speculative Silicon Valley projects instead of giving to the world's poorest!"

But for people outside EA, nearterm charity vs longterm charity is generally the wrong counterfactual. Most people outside EA don't give 10% of their earnings to any effective charity. Most AI work outside EA is focused on making money or producing "cool" results, not mitigating disaster or planning for the long-term benefit of humanity.

Practically all EAs agree people should give 10% of their earnings to effective developing-world charities instead of 1% to ineffective developed-world ones. And practically all EAs agree that AI development should be done with significantly more thought and care. (I think even Émile Torres may agree on that! Could someone ask?)

It's unfortunate that the internal nearterm vs longterm debate gets so much coverage, given that what we agree on is way more action-relevant to outsiders.

In any case, I mention this because it could play into your "ideologically diverse group of public figures" point somehow. Your idea seems interesting, but I also don't like the idea of amplifying internal debates further. I would love to see public statements like "Even though I have cause prioritization disagreements with Person X, y'all should really do as they suggest!" And acquiring a norm of using the media to gain leverage in internal debates seems pretty bad.

Perhaps more EA orgs - like GiveWell, ACE, and FHI - should have their own publicity arms that operate independently of CEA and promote their views to the public, instead of expecting CEA or a handful of public figures like MacAskill to do the heavy lifting.

More spending and effort placed into publicity arms makes sense. Less cohesion and coordination is a hard sell though, that's more points of failure at best, and at worst risks exploitation/playing both sides by clever outsiders, or inter-org conflict/retaliation that is triggered by accident instead of deliberately. 

There needs to at least be an apparatus for negotiation.

Hey Ben,

Let me clarify a couple of my views first:

1. CEA has a policy of minimising the total amount of media engagement.

At the risk of sounding pedantic, I'm obviously not claiming they've sought to minimise it, but to control it.

2. EA should have sought even more media coverage than it did in recent years.

I don't think they necessarily should have, and definitely not in a cavalier 'all publicity is good publicity' way. I think they should have experimented more, and been generally less willing to promote  a doctrine laid out in a few hundred words based on nothing but anecdote for nearly as long as they did.

4. There should be a wider range EA public figures, but CEA has prevented this.

I would say more that they've strongly singled out Toby and especially Will for promotions than that they've prevented individuals from becoming public figures (with the caveat on their influence I discuss further down in this comment). For example, the majority of opening and closing talks at most EAGs until at least 2020 seem to have been by Will or Toby, as well as maybe half the fireside chats - with hardly anyone else seeming to have given more than one. Meanwhile, the promotion they've given What We Owe the Future, Doing Good Better and The Precipice is extreme. Many other books have been written on similar subjects without getting anywhere near the level of support (eg Reese's On the Future, MacFarquahar's Strangers Drowning, Russell's Human Compatible - even Singer's The Most Good You Can Do).

5. A significantly wider range of people in the community should speak to the media even if they don’t have approval or training from others in EA.

At the risk of sounding pedantic-er, I would restrict myself to the weaker claim that lack of training or official approval should not be a strong deterrent to people who are thinking of speaking to the media about EA-related subjects in a positive way and that, to the extent that CEA have publicly discouraged this (which, if I understood Shakeel's comment on my original doc he agrees they have), they should stop doing so (which, again, it sounds like is what he intends).

Re your arguments:

my understanding is that from 2020 onwards they became significantly more pro media coverage

That might be true. I don't know what their policy is internally, only what guidance they display publicly. That said,

This uptick can be seen on 80k's media page: https://80000hours.org/about/media-coverage/ and then there were also the campaigns for the Precipice, WWOTF etc.

Excluding those campaigns, which are a large part of the phenomenon I'm criticising, I don't see an uptick. Just going by those links, and ignoring 2022 which was mostly WWOTF, there seems to have been a cycle of increased  coverage every ~3 years, in 2013, 2015, 2018, and 2021.

That said,  with regards to FTX they seem to have reverted to a policy of less engagement. What to do here just seems like a really hard call to me. You point out there's a high proportion of negative coverage, but I don't see a straightforward route to drowning that out with new positive coverage in the current environment.

I basically agree here. Now is probably a particularly bad time to talk to the media casually - I'm claiming (weakly, and more that these are claims we should be testing) that a) we would be in a better situation now had we had more exposure earlier, and b) once this stuff dies down, a more liberal policy will reduce the risk of such a negative-PR-singularity in future.

One point is that it seems likely that EA is getting way more negative coverage now because it was fresh in journalists’ minds from Will’s summer media campaign. If there had been less coverage of EA over the summer, I expect there would be fewer negative articles about EA now. So overall I'm tempted to draw the lesson from this that less media is better.

Fwiw I interpret this as supporting my case. The level of EA-media engagement in Will's summer media campaign was, as you imply highly unusual. Had there been a steady stream of articles, some good, some bad, on a wide range of EA topics for years and then 2022's articles happened to include (but not exclusively be) a large number about Will's book, I think the 'man-bites-dogness' of EA = Will = FTX would have been much reduced.

Another point is that most surveys I’ve seen show that only ~5% of people come into EA via the media, but the media is how most people have heard of EA. This means it creates only a small fraction of community members, but perhaps the majority of haters.  I think that suggests there’s still a lot to be said for a strategy that involves a small media footprint (i.e. maybe you get 95% of the recruitment but with only 20% of the haters)

I don't update in either direction based on this. This sounds like standard marketing logic - you irritate the majority of people who see your ad and engage the minority who matter. I don't see how that makes a case that less marketing means fewer people will buy your product.

I also think this kind of data is very hard to interpret, in much the same way - few people will consciously go through an internal monologue resembling 'ah, I heard about EA in the New York Times, so I'll donate some money to Givewell', just as few people will say 'Ah, having seen that ad for Coca Cola I'll go out and buy a bottle'. It's all about priming, which is incredibly hard to self-report, even if people are perfectly scrupulous about it (which they're probably incentivised not to be). If marketing departments - both of for-profits and nonprofits - have for  decades thought this was a good trade-off, I think we need some pretty robust evidence to confidently claim it won't be in our case.

Non-rhetorically-intended question: other than producing bad media, do you know of any instances of 'haters' actually impeding EA activities? Otherwise, this claim seems to be 'more media attention on EA will produce more of both good and bad media', which seems uncontroversial - the question I want us to investigate is in what proportion it does.

Although turning the journalist away at the door also worked out badly in hindsight, I think the bigger mistake was accepting the journalist’s invite in the first place, so if anything I think this example updates me towards a stronger non-engagement policy.

I think this is fair (both in that I made a mistake and that that's a reasonable interpretation). I presented it because it's not my interpretation, and it seems a relevant discussion point.

(Also the fact that the journalist came even after you'd turned down the interview is pretty aggressive of him, suggesting the story could have been a lot worse.)

Without knowing what pressures he was under, having possibly told his boss he had been offered an interview, needing to get some article out by a deadline, I don't think this is fair to him.

I think you’re overstating CEA’s influence. The large orgs (GiveWell, OP, FP, TLYCS, ACE, 80k, Singer etc) all have their own outreach people and decide their own strategy. CEA provides advice to some of these orgs, but I wouldn’t say it’s the main driver of what’s happened in recent years. Far more funding comes from OP than CEA. CEA does not ‘appoint’ the representatives of EA.

This is true, but somewhat misleading in that of these orgs, only CEA has meaningfully funded individuals . More subtly but IMO with similar effects, EA Funds have been the group most explicitly funding EA startup projects - the others you mention mostly review existing charities that would counterfactually exist, albeit with a reduced budget absent their support. So CEA has wielded existential power over orgs who are the most likely to be explicitly EA aligned. There also seems to have been some amount of deference from the other funders, who sometimes seem to contribute to some project if and only if CEA  do it first.

Having said that, as I understand it EA Funds are now separate from CEA, so this is a primarily historical concern. But CEA still run the forum, the EAGs, and have a large hand in EAGxes. So they probably still have an outsized influence on the community comprising the most engaged non-billionaires. Also, they seem to have been much more proactive than the other orgs both in engaging and deterring engagement with the media.  Lastly, there's a huge amount of cross-pollination between these groups, with many of the staff at them having come via one of the other orgs, or being employed by one while being a trustee or advisor for another, etc. 

Even if someone can match e.g. Toby in terms of communication skills and charm, very few people can tell the kind of story he can, and match the level of coverage he’s able to get.

I don't buy this. I'm a big fan of Toby, but I don't think he's especially adept at public speaking, and I don't think it's a common view that he is.  Sure, his story is 'I started the movement' (at least, I think so. Jonas is disagreeing below), which is worth a lot, but if you look through the thousands of actively engaged EAs I'm sure there are plenty of others with at least as good a human interest angle.

But my impression is that Will, CEA and 80k have all been trying to find and encourage such people. (If you’re reading this and interested in trying, please apply to 80k advising asap.)

The reason it hasn’t happened isn’t because CEA doesn’t want it, but rather because it’s a shitty and difficult job.

This is perhaps a quibble, but I think considering it as necessarily a 'job' is part of my concern. Often the story is just going to be 'person X did something the media are interested in' and the question is whether they do or should feel pressure not to speak to the media even if they feel like it's a  good idea.

On 5), I disagree for similar reasons that others have said in the thread. It’s pretty hard to make media go well and generate positive coverage. I think if lots more people tried without making it a major focus of theirs, the results are as likely to be bad as good.

I don't think there's a strong case to be made either way yet - again, I want to see more exploration, not sudden adoption of a policy with the opposite emphasis. Fwiw by my count more of the comments on this thread are positive than negative wrt the idea of at least somewhat liberalising the historical policy.

I'm not surprised people with those sorts of views exist, but to some degree I'd expect them to diminish with familiarity. It's easier to sneer at things when you don't have multiple friends openly doing or supporting them.

There's also a question of how much harm comes from such people hearing more about EA, even assuming they don't change or just reinforce their views. It seems unlikely they'd have been won over by a slower, more guarded approach, so the question would probably be something like 'are those people likely to become more proactively anti EA such that they turn people away from making effective donations on net, despite the greater discussion around the idea of doing so?' That certainly seems possible, but nonetheless I would bet at pretty good odds against it.

Writing this, it occurs to me that one effect of a more open media policy might be to blur the lines further between EA as 'a social movement' and EA as 'a certain way of donating money, that loads of people do without getting engaged'. That again is plausibly bad, but I would bet on being net good.

Disagree. Many people have made important contributions over the years, but that doesn't make them founders of the effective altruism movement.

Givewell were doing great research at the same time and probably have the next best claim, but they were explicitly neither trying to create a community nor encourage altruism per se (IIRC their early tagline was something like 'don't give more, give well'). 

Bostrom wrote a couple of essays that eventually became seminal but otherwise hasn't really engaged with the community - or, I would argue, published anything particularly significant to it since 2003 (perhaps excepting Superintelligence, which is mainly a trade book summarising what various people had written well before that point). Similarly seminal ideas came from Brian Tomasik, who wrote countless essays that inspired many people to make substantial changes to their behaviour, and Peters Singer and Unger for writing impassioned calls for people to act like EAs perhaps a little before it was culturally feasible - the first two of whom have been far more involved as the movement developed.

Eliezer started a forum, wrote a lot of fanfic and told people paperclipping AI was the main threat to humanity; there's room for wide disagreement on the  value of that, but I wouldn't call it starting a movement - and if it was, it wasn't the effective altruism movement (which still doesn't seem particularly mainstream on Less Wrong, and whose non-AI concerns were notoriously dismissed as a 'rounding error' by rationalists at early EA meetups). Seth Baum collected a bunch of people on the original Felicifia who were smaller in number but far more committed to the ethos of optimising general do-gooding, rather than focusing on one narrow cause area.

Also Zell Kravinsky continues to be massively underappreciated for taking all of these ideas more seriously than even their authors did, and earning to give decades before it was cool - not to mention being the first undirected organ donor (and he was ridiculed and  in many cases even vilified by the media for it).

You could make a case for any of these people having the most counterfactual value, but Giving What We Can was the project that explicitly sought to build a movement, and that was almost all done by Will and Toby. 

What has been your experience with the results of this policy?

It seems like setting ourselves up for selection bias if we take listen only to people with experience with "how bad journalism gets". We also  want to get advice from people with good experiences with journalism, because they might be doing things that make them more likely to get good experiences, and presumably know about how to continue to go about having good experiences, having gotten them.

There may be some parts of EA where the media don't start out nicely inclined to the area at hand, but I think on many topics we might care to engage with the media on, they likely would start out neutral or positive on anything.

We might take the points here with more weight if they are from someone with extensive experience, but a lack of experience doesn't invalidate the reasoning here.

Alas that I don't have the credentials to match an autodidact whose hobby is telling academic specialists that he understands their subject better than they do.