Posting in a personal capacity.

I'm excited about EA doing more to shout about its wins and defend itself against bad-faith detractors and would love to see more discussion of what it could concretely look like for EA to take more control of its own narrative in this way.

I think the core point here is right: whether we like it or not, there is a narrative about EA that gets constructed, and if we choose not to do our own narrative shaping, then EA’s critics control more of the narrative. Choosing not to engage doesn’t make the narrative ‘authentic’ and the status quo isn’t ‘neutral’. EA has had a lot of cool wins, almost nobody outside the community knows about them, so I want to see more people pointing out the wins and pointing out how EA principles informed these wins.

I think @Andy Masley has been a great example of what this can look like in practice. Andy has written a lot about a topic not usually associated with EA, data center water usage, but has written and engaged publicly in a way that’s clearly informed by EA ideas, and he's unashamed about his connection to EA. I’d personally love to see more of this. There's an EA thought leadership gap right now, with not many people who write and speak publicly from an EA perspective. I'd love to see a new generation of people who write, speak, and engage publicly on a variety of topics from a perspective informed by EA principles.

I also don’t think that doing more of this is the same thing as trying to make EA cool or trying to expand it. It’s just trying to make sure that people have a clearer understanding of what EA principles are and what they have led to in the world so far, the good and the bad. I’d love an end state where people who are into EA ideas are clearer about how they see EA and their relationship to it, and for people not to feel embarrassed to say they're into EA ideas or part of the EA community. 

I'm keen to hear more concrete ideas for what doing more good proactive narrative shaping could look like. 

I disagree pretty strongly with this.

The biggest danger to EA is being cool. I mean this completely seriously. When EA becomes cool, people who don't care about EA show up to secure money and status. When EA becomes cool, that reputation needs defending, which is often corrosive to truth. EA being unpopular enough to deter status-seekers while not being so universally loathed that even mission-aligned nerds hesitate to associate with it for fear of social repercussions is exactly where we ought to be.

I think the argument of "EA could achieve more if it had a better reputation" is compelling, intuitive, and wrong. It seems like you're imagining a cool version of EA that tons of smart people want to join, but also maintains the same level of mission alignment and commitment to truth. I think this is actually impossible. 

EA's impact is a product of magnitude * direction. A better reputation increases our magnitude, but it's very easy for that direction to get much closer to zero. (And, since we take the money of committed altruists, a direction that is insufficiently positive is actually net-negative, thanks to opportunity cost) 

I hear you. If you think about the School for Moral Ambition for example, it is a bit that--in a way, its EA but unweird and less about philosophy, though the core principles of effectiveness remain. There is simply more of a systemic change vibe, with the tax fairness fellowship. 

I think that we are already seeing status-seeking people get into the movement, or that is my experience as I go from conference to conference. So I am not sure how much of a risk that is. Plenty of folks laid off by USAID cuts or in general lack of hiring in big GH orgs are seeing EA as a job market. Which is good, because they are usually very talented. 

I definitely think that we should invest more in creating our own narrative because so far it has been a lot of answering to criticism rather than having our own voice. Without compromising on principles, we can still control better our image since so far people know it mostly because of scandals. It hurts me that people know more about SBF than LEEP, for example