Hi everyone! I'm Tom Chivers, and I'll be doing an AMA here. I plan to start answering questions on Wednesday 17 March at 9am UK: I reckon I can comfortably spend three hours doing it, and if I can't get through all the questions, I'll try to find extra time.
Who I am: a science writer, and the science editor at UnHerd.com. I wrote a book, The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy – originally titled The AI Does Not Hate You – in 2019, which is about the rationalist movement (and, therefore, the EA movement), and about AI risk and X-risk.
My next book, How to Read Numbers, written with my cousin David, who's an economist, is about how stats get misrepresented in the news and what you can do to spot it when they are. It's out on March 18.
Before going freelance in January 2018, I worked at the UK Daily Telegraph and BuzzFeed UK. I've won two "statistical excellence in journalism" awards from the Royal Statistical Society, and in 2013 Terry Pratchett told me I was "far too nice to be a journalist".
Ask me anything you like, but I'm probably going to be best at answering questions about journalism.
Thanks for your answers! (Both here and elsewhere in this AMA.)
Not sure if you'll come back to answer followups, but on the off chance you might:
Regarding your answer to 1, what do you think the implications of that should be for rationalist/EA beliefs or behaviours? E.g., is it that you think we should ourselves spend more time reading journalists' writing? That more of us should go into journalism ourselves? That we should donate more to support high-quality journalism? That we should just probably be doing something more in relation to journalism, so we should do some research or thinking to figure out what that is? Something else?
And regarding your answer to 3, it sounds like you're actually saying that journalists quite often are out to destroy people, and that the mistake is just to assume that this is for the fun of it rather than because the journalist sincerely thinks it's right to destroy those people?