Cat🔸's Quick Takes

Cat Shi🔸

Cat🔸's Quick Takes

Cat Shi🔸

1 min readOct 24

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Cat Shi🔸

5d*

I think so much of the PR problem EA has just comes down to people hating EA for the same reason people hate philosophers:

people want clarity in a chaotic world, but philosophers often poses more questions than answers (like how EA itself is an open question)
populism is really popular right now, but philosophers are technocrats in ivory towers (like the memetic associations EA has with ivy league educations, silicon valley, etc.)
there's a lot more noise about what EA thinks rather than what EA does, aligning with the stereotype that philosophers don't do anything to apply their ideas in the real world.
(edit) philosophers are seen as making basic ideas more profound than it actually is, which is my impression of what people also think when they hear the basic idea of EA (e.g. yea duh we should help people more efficiently? obviously we should use reason?)

I think the solution here is to just keep hammering in what EA has done, rather than engaging on what EA thinks. Most people's only knowledge of what EA has done is SBF, because that's all that gets talked about. Anecdotally, my friends' impressions of EA were most improved by learning that:

EA did a lot of pandemic risk preparation before COVID, and is part of the reason why the COVID vaccine came out as quickly as it did (Also really good if people start asking about why EA is investing in AI safety)
EA has gotten people to donate >2 billion to save >300k lives through GiveWell alone
(for leftist friends) EA supports a lot of direct money transfers to people in the global south, allowing for local entrepreneurship
(depends on the audience) EA is one of the reasons why so many countries are now emphasizing cage-free eggs, so chickens don't die in their own feces

Ben_West🔸

17h

It seems to me that negative PR of EA over time has correlated quite well with how influential we were at that time.^[1] "People hate philosophers" doesn't explain why the hate focuses on EA in particular:

I'm in favor of reiterating the points you make about our track record, but also we should be realistic that "I support [policy] but hate those extremists who advocate for [policy]" is what success looks like. E.g. MLK was extremely unpopular^[2] whilst civil rights legislation was being passed:

A bar chart showing that Americans viewed Martin Luther King Jr. much more positively after his 1968 death than during his life.

^{^}
And also how generally newsworthy we were. One of the clearest learnings I have about EA comms is that a story will get >10x the traction if the journalist can somehow include "Elon Musk" in the title.
^{^}
As comparison: LBJ, a president so unpopular he didn't even attempt to run for re-election, bottomed out at a net approval 13 points higher than MLK

Cat Shi🔸

10h

Yea I do agree that the "people hate philosophers" framing doesn't explain all of the unique dislike EA gets, I think the correlation between influence and EA hate mostly comes from the encroachment on personal freedoms. For example, there seems to be a sentimental current right now of "I never consented to big tech changing my life in this way", because it's kinda impossible to opt out of big tech if you want to live a normal life. But back when Big Tech adoption was seem as more voluntary (you didn't need a phone or internet or social media presence to survive in the world), I feel like their reputation also looked better.

In my personal model of the world, a lot of the current dislike for EA is also because of the blowback of Big Tech, making everyone more cynical of "people changing the world". But my impression is that even without this blowback, people would still dislike EA the same way people dislike philosophers (my friends who didn't know about EA's associations with SV still felt icky when hearing about the basic idea).

Gemma 🔸

"there's a lot more noise about what EA thinks rather than what EA does, aligning with the stereotype that philosophers don't do anything to apply their ideas in the real world."

Agree with this ^^ This is weird because IMO EA is far more interesting as a practical project than a set of ideas

Vivek S

3d*

I think #1 is not right (ETA: I explain in my below comment). I think there's a somewhat related problem where people are refusing to decouple. Taking philosophy seriously can lead you to beliefs that, on first sight, appear incredibly strange (eg: strong longtermism).

#2 and #3 seem quite likely to me.

But these critiques presumably can't be exclusively because of philosophers, since unfortunately academic philosophers seem to dislike EA (on aggregate)^[1]

^{^}
I think a lot of these critiques from philosophers seem to rely on weak arguments, but nonetheless they exist

Cat Shi🔸

I'm not really sure why you think the refusal to decouple can't co-exist with people wanting clarity?

And I'm also not sure why you think philosophers hating EA means people don't hate EA the same way they hate philosophers? I think a lot of philosophers hate each other as well, and those same people get hated on by outsiders for philosophy-vibes reasons. Unfortunately hatred is not a zero-sum game.

Vivek S

3d*

My comment was not clear and I wrote it poorly, sorry! I will edit parts of it.

I'm not really sure why you think the refusal to decouple can't co-exist with people wanting clarity?

My objection to "EA posing more questions than answers" is that a lot of what people are objecting to are the answers that many people take in the movement (eg: future people matter a ton, AI x-risk is a serious issue, etc.). People also seem to be upset about its overconfidence rather than its underconfidence.

The thing I was trying to gesture at with "decoupling" was that people find many thought experiments very weird and counterintuitive (eg: torture vs dust specks, strong longtermist thought experiments). Then, people often not separating them out from questions like "is AI a potential existential threat" or "is factory farming bad" which aren't too different. I'm now unsure if this is related to your initial point.

And I'm also not sure why you think philosophers hating EA means people don't hate EA the same way they hate philosophers? I think a lot of philosophers hate each other as well, and those same people get hated on by outsiders for philosophy-vibes reasons. Unfortunately hatred is not a zero-sum game.

This explanation is interesting, but imo its more of a minor factor than a major factor. It seems to me that the dislike for EA doesn't seem like a respectful disagreement but much more of a strong dislike. However, I'm not super confident about this since I'm not super familiar with how academic philosophers relate to one another.

Cat Shi🔸

10h

Hmm ok yea I see your point more now, I think maybe what reconciles our viewpoints is that "clarity" in my mind also means intuitive, at least when it comes to PR. Counterintuitive ideas take more time to understand, and people have a limited attention span for paying attention to ideas, so they're more likely to dismiss ideas that take longer to understand.

Denis

22h

This is really great observation.

We really struggle to get outside EA and see how we look from the outside.

I especially love the 3rd point and your idea to talk more about what we actually do, which is so, so good, and not weird at all - helping very poor people, helping animals, preparing for pandemics, taking the side of "what's good for humans" in climate, in AI, in nuclear weapons ...

The one thing I would add is "how EA's live". There is this stereotype based on SBF and so on - the vast majority of people working in EA orgs either volunteer or take salaries far below their market value and live quite frugal lives. (not sure if this is true in the SF Bay area, but in much of the world that is very much the norm.

Cat Shi🔸

It seems like EAs care a lot about defining EA, but it's not clear to me what the purpose of defining EA is. A lot of social movements are ill-defined, either because the people inside the movement disagree (i.e. socialism), or because the people outside the movement disagree (i.e. zionism, or feminism).

If the definition is meant for PR reasons, then it strikes me as weird why most definitions are either long or not immediately understandable. PR seems to heavily favor processing fluency (how easy it is to understand something; happy to cite my sources if needed), and most definitions of EA seem like they're more catered towards philosophical ponderings than spreadable messages that someone can understand in <10 seconds.

If the definition is meant for marketing reasons (marketing is attracting people into EA, PR is managing what people say about EA on the outside), then the current array of definitions seems to further encourage only philosophically-inclined people to get into the movement (which isn't a problem, tbh, if you don't weigh ideological diversity highly).

If the definition is meant for gaining clarity as a community on what the community is about, then it seems strange that people are presumably unsatisfied enough with previous definitions that new posts trying to define EA and its direction keeps on popping up. Some of it is justified by evolutions in the movement, for sure, but I think part of it is also just that people keep trying to explain EA to their non-EA friends, and most of the current defintions don't land very well (anecdotally, n > 30).

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^{^}

And also how generally newsworthy we were. One of the clearest learnings I have about EA comms is that a story will get >10x the traction if the journalist can somehow include "Elon Musk" in the title.

^{^}

As comparison: LBJ, a president so unpopular he didn't even attempt to run for re-election, bottomed out at a net approval 13 points higher than MLK

^{^}

I think a lot of these critiques from philosophers seem to rely on weak arguments, but nonetheless they exist