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."
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"
Lots of EAs, myself included, did nontrivial actions during covid. I expect many of us will act again in once-in-a-decade news cycles that correlates strongly with expected real changes on the real world.
"Powerful people have a spat on Twitter", while occasionally important, are usually part of the same phenomenon that other fake news cycles come from, and it's probably more important for us to focus on the things that matter in normal reality, with some distance away from social reality.
EDIT: tbc, "fake" is meant to modify "news cycles" and not "news", so I'm referring to fake news cycles, and not fake news cycles.
I agree. For me this was a news cycle to act on rather than pass but I I could be wrong.
I imagine we agree that most news cycles should be ignored.
An advantage of 80k not seeing itself as a traditional news org is that it doesn't chase news cycles and make a fool of itself. I think that's a good thing.
Agreed. The proper approach is probably to develop a playbook for rapidly evaluating whether or not a news cycle is worth thinking about at all, and then executing on a specific pre-determined plan when it is.