Thanks for this. I agree that we’ve been neglecting social media; the main reason for this as far as I can tell is that no one at CEA was primarily focused on comms/marketing until I was hired in September; then other events proved to be attention-stealing.

Social media is going to be a major part of the communications strategy I outlined here; I expect you'll see us being more active in the coming months. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mFGZtPKTjqrfeHHsH/how-cea-s-communications-team-is-thinking-about-ea

This is interesting and I broadly agree with you (though I think Habryka’s comment is important and right). On point 2, I’d want us to think very hard before adopting these as principles. It’s not obvious to me that non-violence is always the correct option — e.g. in World War 2 I think violence against the Nazis was a moral course of action.

As EA becomes increasingly involved in campaigning for states to act one way or another, a blanket non-violence policy could meaningfully and harmfully constrain us. (You could amend the clause to be “no non-state-sanctioned violence” but even then you’re in difficult territory — were the French resistance wrong to take up arms?)

I think there are similar issues with the honesty clause, too — it just isn’t the case that being honest is always the moral course of action (e.g. the lying to the Nazis about Jews in your basement example).

These are of course edge cases, and I do believe that in ~99% of cases one should be honest and non-violent. But formalising that into a core value of EA is hard, and I’m not sure it’d actually do much because basically everyone agrees that e.g. honesty is important; when they’re dishonest they just think (often incorrectly!) that they’re operating in one of those edge cases.

Thanks for this post, it's a really important issue. On tractability, do you think we'll be best off with technical fixes (e.g. maybe we should just try not to make sentient AIs?), or will it have to be policy? (Maybe it's way too early to even begin to guess).

Makes total sense — thank you, and looking forward to the handbook!

This is really exciting, nice work on putting it together. Do you have any plans to put the teaching materials (even if that’s just a reading list) online at any point? I think I’m not the right sort of person to do the course but I’d love to slowly work my way through a reading list in my own time.

I think this is interesting but don't think this is as clear cut as you're making out. There seem to me to be some instances where making the "first strike" is good — e.g. I think it'd be reasonable (though maybe not advisable) to criticise a billionaire for not donating any of their wealth; to criticise an AI company that's recklessly advancing capabilities; to criticise a virology lab that has unacceptably lax safety standards; or to criticise a Western government that is spending no money on foreign aid. Maybe your "personal attack" clause means this kind of stuff wouldn't get covered, though?

Great question, to which I don't have a simple answer. I think I agree with a lot of what Sjir said here. I think claims 2 and 4 are particularly important — I'd like the effective giving community to grow as its own thing, without all the baggage of EA, and I'm excited to see GWWC working to make that happen. That doesn't mean that in our promotion of EA we won't discuss giving at all, though, because giving is definitely a part of EA. I'm not entirely sure yet how we'll talk about it, but one thing I imagine is that giving will be included as a call-to-action in much of our content.

Really great post, thanks for writing this! EA's animal successes are indeed really impressive. I want to push back a bit on "no one cares about" this though. The "good things" forum post and Twitter thread I did back in December both did well; much of EAG programming is about wins; Animal Liberation Now, which has got a ton of attention, contains a whole chapter on progress in animal welfare; and indeed your own post got a ton of upvotes.

 I do agree that we could always do more to celebrate and reflect on wins like this — I'm just pushing back because I think saying "no one cares about" can actually perpetuate the negative environment it's trying to fight.

Definitely agreed that we need to showcase the action — hence my mention of "real-world impact and innovation" (and my examples of LEEP and far-UVC work as the kinds of things we're very excited to promote).