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EAs are trying to win the "attention arms race" by not playing. I think this could be a mistake.
The founding ideas and culture of EA was created and “grew up” in the early 2010s, when online content consumption looked very different.
We’ve overall underreacted to shifts in the landscape of where people get ideas and how they engage with them.
As a result, we’ve fallen behind, and should consider making a push to bring our messaging and content delivery mechanisms in line with 2020s consumption.
Also, EA culture is dispositionally calm, rational, and dry.
This is a poor fit for getting any traction in the current attention landscape.
If we don’t adapt, we risk increasing irrelevance.
a) a lot of EA's core worldview philosophy is about doing boring stuff (that works), and so we attract people with an aesthetic repulsion to overmarketing that stick here and contribute highly. It's not clear that standard marketing strategies work for something like EA without making such people more likely to leave, so I would be hesitant to propose changes to the current setup.
b) the School of Moral Ambition is already doing essentially a more marketed version of EA. I highly recommend anyone interested in this hop over to their platforms to check it out.
c) Cause area marketing is going fairly well I think? You may wish to consider voting for One for the World in our donation election.
d) We're about to have a 3000-person conference this weekend, our largest ever. "Increasing irrelevance" EA is decidedly not. Clearly our current approach is doing something right.
I'll add onto c) that AI safety cause area marketing is going really well (to the point I'm personally uneasy about it), and animal advocacy cause area marketing also seems to be doing ok. It's not just GHD cause area marketing that's working.
My reservations about anti-marketing effects apply mostly to principles-first EA outreach.
I'm quite excited about EAs making videos about EA principles and their applications, and I think this is an impactful thing for people to explore. It seems quite possible to do in a way that doesn't compromise on idea fidelity; I think sincerity counts for quite a lot. In many cases I think videos and other content can be lighthearted / fun / unserious and still transmit the ideas well.
The bad news is that saying just go and make high-quality video essays is like saying just go and make high-quality movies. Literally, some of these videos require a similar amount of work as making a microbudget indie movie. The main creator might work on them full-time for over a year. They often involve an editor and, in some cases, people to help with other aspects of production like music, visual effects, or voiceover. (ContraPoints lamented the fact that she spent longer writing the script for her video about Twilight than Stephanie Meyer spent writing Twilight.) The people who make these videos have honed their craft over years of experience.
Jenny Nicholson’s older videos, which are shorter and have less razzle dazzle, are much lighter on production, but still took a lot of time and effort. Hank Green does 2-3 vlogs per week on his channel and the vlogbrothers channel that I like a lot, which are relatively quick to make (they have to be, to come out so frequently). But Hank Green has this amazing radio host, podcaster, YouTube vlogger, TV personality-type charisma that is rare and also not a thing where you can say just go do that. If you think you can go do that, then definitely do it! But it’s not something just anyone can do, and no one can do it easily.
Another positive example from YouTube: Kirk Honda, a clinical psychology professor whose channel is called Psychology in Seattle. He does unbelievably good educational videos on mental health, psychology, personality disorders, therapy, abusive relationships, and so on, and the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down is he’s often reacting to reality TV. But this is not a gimmick. He says that for ethical reasons, clinical psychology professors don’t have recordings of real people interacting that they can show to their students. Without real (or realistic) examples, it’s hard to convey what you’re talking about. Reality TV is a great teaching tool because these Hollywood studios have decided to do the arguably unethical thing and exploit people’s anguish for money, so he can just comment on it and use it to explain psychology concepts. These videos seem relatively quick to produce, but again you have the Hank Green problem: Kirk Honda has charisma, wisdom, eloquence, and charm, and not just anyone can do it, and no one can do it easily.
Podcasts are another medium that is incredibly popular, but also hard to do. Effective altruism already has the 80,000 Hours Podcast which is by and large a great success. The winning formula for shows like that is just to book fascinating people with fascinating things to say and let them talk for a long time. And having good audio and video production, and having an interviewer who can lightly steer the fascinating person into saying more fascinating things. This is the easiest formula to replicate, but 80,000 Hours is already doing it. Not that I discourage people from starting new podcasts, or that I think the 80,000 Hours Podcast can’t be improved — my suggestion to them was to shake things up with guests who say things other than what people in EA are used to hearing, e.g., Richard Sutton, Yann LeCun, Jeff Hawkins, Edan Meyer. Toby Ord’s episode of the 80,000 Hours podcast was an amazing example of this. Toby Ord is as central to EA as it gets, but the cold water he’s dumped on AI scaling very much goes against most people in EA are saying about AI.
I’ve worked on 3 podcasts as hobby projects, and let me tell you, unless you’re already an expert, audio production is surprisingly hard to work out. If you’ve got a budget of ~$200 per episode (take this with a grain of salt and double-check my recollection/estimate), you can take the vast majority of this complexity away by renting a podcast recording studio for 1-2 hours. I think there are probably multiple spaces you can rent in any large city in developed countries. (This requires the people on the podcast are all physically in the studio. I don’t have a solution for making it easier to record podcasts remotely.) Editing the audio isn’t nearly as complicated and just takes time and work, but if you’ve got more money to spend, you can also hire an editor to take that complexity off your hands as well.
The right way to think about this is you’re trying to make good art. Easier said than done. However, I think it’s worth thinking about, and it’s worth trying for people who are willing to put in what it takes to give it a good shot. I just want to discourage people from thinking about making “content” or “social media content” as opposed to art.
I think investing in [shortform] mediums would just be good money chasing after bad.
Interesting!! Curious for any more detail on why you think this, if it's not too annoying to write out :)
if you have in mind content like the highest-quality video essays on YouTube
Yep, that's one of the things I'd be super excited about!!
To that end, earlier this year I helped get started AI in Context, which has been heavily inspired by the awesome creators you mentioned above :)
It sure is time and resource-heavy to get the videos out (we've only managed two so far (working on the third!) even though we hired the first programme staff in early Feb), but my hope is that it's worth it — the reception has been broadly very positive :)
My much belated reply! On why I think short-form social media like Twitter and TikTok are good money chasing after bad, i.e., the medium is so broken and ill-designed in these cases, I think the best option is to just quit these platforms and focus on long-form stuff like YouTube, podcasts, blogs/newsletters (e.g. Medium, Substack), or what-have-you.
The most eloquent critic of Twitter is Ezra Klein. An from a transcript of his podcast, an episode recorded in December 2022:
OK, Elon Musk and Twitter. Elon Musk — let me start with the part of this that I know and get to the part I don’t know. We’re talking in the aftermath of Musk tweeting that my pronouns are prosecute and Fauci. I wrote a piece when Musk announced that he was going to acquire Twitter that was all about the idea that it was going to be a more profound change and upheaval for that service to have it run by someone who liked what was worst about it than people realized. And I think that has proven true.
The thing — and this gets to the question that I have really been — I mean, I stopped tweeting back in April. I think I’ve tweeted a couple of times since then and then once a month or something occasionally. I think my last actual tweet was in maybe October, something like that. So I don’t really use Twitter anymore. And that’s been good for me.
But I go back and forth on this question as people have been looking for an alternative, and there isn’t really one. Mastodon, which people talk about, that’s not a Twitter alternative. It’s something very different. Should we want that? Should we want a thing that does what Twitter does, but is not Twitter or is not run by Elon Musk or something of that nature? And I’m not sure that we should.
I think it is worth people really reflecting on this idea that in a matter of roughly two decades, social media has gone from being barely a thing at all to something used by billions and billions of people around the world. I mean, it has become a civilizational fact faster than almost anything in human history. And something operating that macro of a scale should show some civilizational effect.
If it is good, we should be able to say, well, this is what has gotten better. GDP is growing faster because we’re sharing so many more ideas, and so innovation is sped up. Or we’re more humane and gentle and compassionate towards one another because we’re able to see each other across boundary and faction and country and generation. We’re kinder because we’re sharing so much more. We’re happier because we’re so much more connected.
Something, something should have gotten better. And I would say — and I think the evidence is very clear — nothing has. You cannot point to one macro indicator that has gotten substantially better, faster, anything, in the time since social media came on the scene. And I’m not saying that is 100 percent the fault of social media, but I am saying that it implies, at least, there is not some gigantic value here, that before it was offered to us, we were really struggling.
So that’s one thing. I think it’s really worth asking, why hasn’t something been better? And my answer to this, which I’ve kind of played with for a long time and finally wrote up, is that the flip side of all of this information and connection has been distraction and irritation.
That we have more that we can know and more that we can see and more content to consume, but what we don’t have is a space for reflection. What we don’t have are the habits of mind that tend to help us absorb a difficult question in the best way and come to a good view on it. What we don’t have are the sort of temperaments and virtues, something that is helping us have the virtues of how we live small D democratically or civically with one another.
Twitter is one of many things that are not good for that. It’s not the only one, and I don’t think this should only be a conversation about Twitter, though I do think Twitter is unusually central to politics and media and technology. And honestly, if you just want to look at everything I am saying in miniature, look at Elon Musk. You can go back in time and watch his interviews and look at the things he’s done.
And I have not, over time, been a Musk hater. There’s many things he’s said that have annoyed me over the years, things he’s done that have annoyed me, ways in which I don’t think he’s a great person. But he also did very important things, built very important things, rockets and cars and solar panels and so on. Does he seem to anybody like he’s more focused on the important questions in life and more able to hear things from people he disagrees with and able to absorb in a space of generosity and focus that his attention span is doing really well right now?
I mean, you can watch the effect it has had solely on him. And I think just generalize that out, I think a real tragedy of Twitter is that Musk is a man with many failings and many strengths. And it has amplified his failings and obsessed him with things that it is not good for him to be obsessed with, like the amount of social feedback he gets.
And that is going to completely overwhelm many of his strengths and many of the good effects he could have had on the world, or was even having on the world. This is not going to be good and has not been good for Tesla. And I think Tesla is and was an important company making electric vehicles cooler, more widely acceptable, and hastening a transition to them. But he’s making Tesla poisoned among many of the people who should be most excited to buy a Tesla.
So, all that said, I wonder a lot if it is good to have a Twitter. I think a lot of us are now so used to it that you think, well, what we need is something else like it, but a bit better. Maybe we don’t need something like it. Maybe a platform that condenses everybody’s thoughts down to bumper sticker bluntness is actually just not a good thing. Its structural build is a bad build, that the idea that we should come to expect thoughts to be that short, that we should train our minds for that kind of novelty.
I mean, back in the day, I was always amazed at how easy it was for me to waste time on the internet or on my phone. I would read articles on newspapers and so on. And then as each successive social media network got better, I enjoyed wasting time reading articles. And now I look at single images, and I don’t really do TikTok, but in theory, TikToks or tweets or whatever, and that habituation of the brain to novelty and to simplicity, I don’t think is a good thing for me, and I don’t think a good thing, broadly.
So I would like to imagine things that are valuable in part and are widely used in part, not because they are so good at grabbing our attention from us, but in some way, they feed our attention back to us. They help center us a little bit, that the habits of mind they encourage or habits of mind that we want. And maybe nothing staring at your phone is really like that. I’m not sure that’s true, but it’s at least a question I want to play with.
Maybe if you’re going to insist on distracting yourself while you’re standing in line at the grocery by staring at your phone, there’s no habit of mind that I think is a great one that is going to be encouraged by that. And the fact that I constantly do it is the problem and asking somebody to fix it for me without me changing my fundamental behavior is also the problem. But I think what has happened in social media at this point is a little bit tragic.
And it’s most tragic because so few people seem willing to say that even though I don’t like how this looks, my being here is what sustains it in its current form. And I think until people get over the collective action problem, that you have to leave before everybody else has left in order for it to be OK for everybody else to leave. We’re a little bit stuck, but I don’t think we’re going to be stuck forever. I’m a little surprised by how long we have been stuck for, though.
My life immediately improved after I quit Twitter in early 2021. In retrospect, I see Twitter as a harmful addiction. On the extremely rare few occasions where I’ve dipped into looking at Twitter since then, it’s always made me feel really yucky and frazzled afterward. But I still feel why it’s addictive.
The same overall critique can be applied to TikTok without many modifications. Serious discourse on TikTok suffers in the same ways as on Twitter, for the same reasons.
And any Twitter copycat, such as Bluesky, or TikTok copycat, such as Instagram Reels, has the same problems, since they’ve deliberately copied those platforms as closely as possible, including what makes them bad.
I see the extent of badness of social media platforms (for mental health or society at large) as orthogonal to the question of whether they can be used to cost-effectively attract talent to EA.
Short-form vertical video (TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts)
Short-form text a.k.a. microblogging (Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads)
Then I think it’s not true. I think investing in those mediums would just be good money chasing after bad.
I think this largely depends on your goal of creating this kind of content. If you are just blasting them to the ether, that's likely not useful, but such videos can serve as a "hook" for people to then go on and engage with long-form content or even to take an intro course about EA.
Is there any high-quality evidence or even good anecdotes about how successful creators are at getting people off the platform? I only know anecdotally things like, e.g., Hank Green complaining about the algorithm aggressively downranking his posts about his charity store.
I also feel like I’ve heard comedians say that Twitter is fine with their jokes, but when they want to promote a show — for many of them, the main purpose of being on Twitter — their followers barely see those tweets. Also, when I used TikTok, I noticed a few sketch comedy creators who had large followings on TikTok but had barely any conversions to YouTube.
I think probably the algorithm is behind a lot of this, but also I think probably most users don’t want the friction of clicking through to another platform.
My cynical take on this is that people scroll Twitter and TikTok to numb out and engage their limbic system, not their prefrontal cortex, so it’s a losing game for all involved.
@Bella that’s part of the answer I owe you. I will give the other part soon.
I think probably most users don’t want the friction of clicking through to another platform.
There are ad formats where people don't have to leave the platform, just quickly share their contact information in an in-built form and then continue the mindless scrolling :-) Once they are in a better place mentally, they can read our follow-up email!
There is also a whole "science" behind landing page optimisation, where if people click on your ad, you take them elsewhere but make it as low-friction as possible to sign up to your thing afterwards.
Amplify has a number of impact stories on people who ended up taking significant action, who originally "just saw an ad" on social media. I occasionally run into people who saw an 80K ad (as opposed to searching for it proactively) and are now doing impressive things.
The problem is that EA marketing is still in its infancy. We have some research (e.g. by Rethink) on what framings of EA work better, but that's really far from being able to answer the question of "How do we maximise attracting talent to EA per dollar spent?". Only now Amplify is doing some small tests on comparing the cost-effectiveness of LinkedIn vs Meta ads and measuring long-term outcomes, but there is so much more to do.
Short-form content doesn't have to sacrifice fidelity! It's going to contain less information, but the way to use it is to attract people to go onto engaging with long-form content.
I do not understand why so many disagree with your take. I think it can both be true that EA conferences, the forum, long-form YouTube and books etc are great and keep the community active and interesting but that we also miss out on reaching new young people over the long term.
I think that there are actually two reasons to be active in more channels:
1. Reach new people and keep the community alive over the long term. I mean people need to find out about the ideas and cause areas somewhere right? If they are not easily discoverable where people get their information and interests then that will be harder. Before people decide to read a whole book about something or attend a conference they need to be interested or curious about it in the first place.
2. Get EA ideas and cause areas out there in the general conversation to hopefully have some effect on policy and societal norms etc.
I think there are lots of EA ideas or cause areas that are “memable” and interesting. It is just a matter of how one frames it. Sure it will most likely not be the most popular stuff but it could influence relevant discussions on economics or politics or whatever. I think graphs like this one can be pretty mind-blowing[1] and making more people aware of these effects could have a good effect on the margin. I think the idea portrayed by the graph is very powerful: that one’s effort or giving could help 100 times more people if applied to the right target. I'm sure this concept could be shown in many other ways too.
To take another random example of nerdy “non-EA” meme I have seen a few times is this graph. It sometimes appears in discussions regarding fusion power. I have no idea how accurate[2] it is but the main point is that is a pretty complex “meme” but in the right contexts it is relevant and could influence discussions. Some other examples I can think about are the web comics xkcd or SMBC where particular strips get widely shared many years after they were published. There are tonnes of info graphics, comic strips and graphs like this that travel around the internet and influence peoples’ opinions. I don’t see why EA ideas, cause areas and insights could not be spread in the same way.
———
Another point: I think it is also possible to combine long-form and short-form content. With YouTube I’ve seen that some channels like Kurzgesagt make both regular videos and post shorts on YouTube and TikTok. I have no idea how well this makes people more aware of their long-form content and books though. I would guess that it is worth it since they can pretty easily create it based on highlights from their existing content. I am not content creator or influencer though so I wouldn't put too much weight on my opinion here.
I have not dug into the claims of the graph, so I cannot comment on the accuracy. I just thought it was good illustration of how more complex memes or graphs can spread to convey a message or "meme". The message here is very clear: humanity has under-invested in fusion and in another better world we might have solved our energy and climate issues if we just invested more in fusion research. If that is an accurate story then this graph illustrates that pretty well.
EAs are trying to win the "attention arms race" by not playing. I think this could be a mistake.
I see this take a lot.
My immediate response is fourfold:
a) a lot of EA's core worldview philosophy is about doing boring stuff (that works), and so we attract people with an aesthetic repulsion to overmarketing that stick here and contribute highly. It's not clear that standard marketing strategies work for something like EA without making such people more likely to leave, so I would be hesitant to propose changes to the current setup.
b) the School of Moral Ambition is already doing essentially a more marketed version of EA. I highly recommend anyone interested in this hop over to their platforms to check it out.
c) Cause area marketing is going fairly well I think? You may wish to consider voting for One for the World in our donation election.
d) We're about to have a 3000-person conference this weekend, our largest ever. "Increasing irrelevance" EA is decidedly not. Clearly our current approach is doing something right.
I'll add onto c) that AI safety cause area marketing is going really well (to the point I'm personally uneasy about it), and animal advocacy cause area marketing also seems to be doing ok. It's not just GHD cause area marketing that's working.
My reservations about anti-marketing effects apply mostly to principles-first EA outreach.
I'm quite excited about EAs making videos about EA principles and their applications, and I think this is an impactful thing for people to explore. It seems quite possible to do in a way that doesn't compromise on idea fidelity; I think sincerity counts for quite a lot. In many cases I think videos and other content can be lighthearted / fun / unserious and still transmit the ideas well.
Whether this is true or not depends on what specifically you mean by it. If by attention-grabbing content you mean:
Then I think it’s not true. I think investing in those mediums would just be good money chasing after bad.
On the other hand, if you have in mind content like the highest-quality video essays on YouTube, such as:
The bad news is that saying just go and make high-quality video essays is like saying just go and make high-quality movies. Literally, some of these videos require a similar amount of work as making a microbudget indie movie. The main creator might work on them full-time for over a year. They often involve an editor and, in some cases, people to help with other aspects of production like music, visual effects, or voiceover. (ContraPoints lamented the fact that she spent longer writing the script for her video about Twilight than Stephanie Meyer spent writing Twilight.) The people who make these videos have honed their craft over years of experience.
Jenny Nicholson’s older videos, which are shorter and have less razzle dazzle, are much lighter on production, but still took a lot of time and effort. Hank Green does 2-3 vlogs per week on his channel and the vlogbrothers channel that I like a lot, which are relatively quick to make (they have to be, to come out so frequently). But Hank Green has this amazing radio host, podcaster, YouTube vlogger, TV personality-type charisma that is rare and also not a thing where you can say just go do that. If you think you can go do that, then definitely do it! But it’s not something just anyone can do, and no one can do it easily.
Another positive example from YouTube: Kirk Honda, a clinical psychology professor whose channel is called Psychology in Seattle. He does unbelievably good educational videos on mental health, psychology, personality disorders, therapy, abusive relationships, and so on, and the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down is he’s often reacting to reality TV. But this is not a gimmick. He says that for ethical reasons, clinical psychology professors don’t have recordings of real people interacting that they can show to their students. Without real (or realistic) examples, it’s hard to convey what you’re talking about. Reality TV is a great teaching tool because these Hollywood studios have decided to do the arguably unethical thing and exploit people’s anguish for money, so he can just comment on it and use it to explain psychology concepts. These videos seem relatively quick to produce, but again you have the Hank Green problem: Kirk Honda has charisma, wisdom, eloquence, and charm, and not just anyone can do it, and no one can do it easily.
Podcasts are another medium that is incredibly popular, but also hard to do. Effective altruism already has the 80,000 Hours Podcast which is by and large a great success. The winning formula for shows like that is just to book fascinating people with fascinating things to say and let them talk for a long time. And having good audio and video production, and having an interviewer who can lightly steer the fascinating person into saying more fascinating things. This is the easiest formula to replicate, but 80,000 Hours is already doing it. Not that I discourage people from starting new podcasts, or that I think the 80,000 Hours Podcast can’t be improved — my suggestion to them was to shake things up with guests who say things other than what people in EA are used to hearing, e.g., Richard Sutton, Yann LeCun, Jeff Hawkins, Edan Meyer. Toby Ord’s episode of the 80,000 Hours podcast was an amazing example of this. Toby Ord is as central to EA as it gets, but the cold water he’s dumped on AI scaling very much goes against most people in EA are saying about AI.
I’ve worked on 3 podcasts as hobby projects, and let me tell you, unless you’re already an expert, audio production is surprisingly hard to work out. If you’ve got a budget of ~$200 per episode (take this with a grain of salt and double-check my recollection/estimate), you can take the vast majority of this complexity away by renting a podcast recording studio for 1-2 hours. I think there are probably multiple spaces you can rent in any large city in developed countries. (This requires the people on the podcast are all physically in the studio. I don’t have a solution for making it easier to record podcasts remotely.) Editing the audio isn’t nearly as complicated and just takes time and work, but if you’ve got more money to spend, you can also hire an editor to take that complexity off your hands as well.
The right way to think about this is you’re trying to make good art. Easier said than done. However, I think it’s worth thinking about, and it’s worth trying for people who are willing to put in what it takes to give it a good shot. I just want to discourage people from thinking about making “content” or “social media content” as opposed to art.
Interesting!! Curious for any more detail on why you think this, if it's not too annoying to write out :)
Yep, that's one of the things I'd be super excited about!!
To that end, earlier this year I helped get started AI in Context, which has been heavily inspired by the awesome creators you mentioned above :)
It sure is time and resource-heavy to get the videos out (we've only managed two so far (working on the third!) even though we hired the first programme staff in early Feb), but my hope is that it's worth it — the reception has been broadly very positive :)
My much belated reply! On why I think short-form social media like Twitter and TikTok are good money chasing after bad, i.e., the medium is so broken and ill-designed in these cases, I think the best option is to just quit these platforms and focus on long-form stuff like YouTube, podcasts, blogs/newsletters (e.g. Medium, Substack), or what-have-you.
The most eloquent critic of Twitter is Ezra Klein. An from a transcript of his podcast, an episode recorded in December 2022:
My life immediately improved after I quit Twitter in early 2021. In retrospect, I see Twitter as a harmful addiction. On the extremely rare few occasions where I’ve dipped into looking at Twitter since then, it’s always made me feel really yucky and frazzled afterward. But I still feel why it’s addictive.
The same overall critique can be applied to TikTok without many modifications. Serious discourse on TikTok suffers in the same ways as on Twitter, for the same reasons.
And any Twitter copycat, such as Bluesky, or TikTok copycat, such as Instagram Reels, has the same problems, since they’ve deliberately copied those platforms as closely as possible, including what makes them bad.
I see the extent of badness of social media platforms (for mental health or society at large) as orthogonal to the question of whether they can be used to cost-effectively attract talent to EA.
I think this largely depends on your goal of creating this kind of content. If you are just blasting them to the ether, that's likely not useful, but such videos can serve as a "hook" for people to then go on and engage with long-form content or even to take an intro course about EA.
Is there any high-quality evidence or even good anecdotes about how successful creators are at getting people off the platform? I only know anecdotally things like, e.g., Hank Green complaining about the algorithm aggressively downranking his posts about his charity store.
I also feel like I’ve heard comedians say that Twitter is fine with their jokes, but when they want to promote a show — for many of them, the main purpose of being on Twitter — their followers barely see those tweets. Also, when I used TikTok, I noticed a few sketch comedy creators who had large followings on TikTok but had barely any conversions to YouTube.
I think probably the algorithm is behind a lot of this, but also I think probably most users don’t want the friction of clicking through to another platform.
My cynical take on this is that people scroll Twitter and TikTok to numb out and engage their limbic system, not their prefrontal cortex, so it’s a losing game for all involved.
@Bella that’s part of the answer I owe you. I will give the other part soon.
There are ad formats where people don't have to leave the platform, just quickly share their contact information in an in-built form and then continue the mindless scrolling :-) Once they are in a better place mentally, they can read our follow-up email!
There is also a whole "science" behind landing page optimisation, where if people click on your ad, you take them elsewhere but make it as low-friction as possible to sign up to your thing afterwards.
Amplify has a number of impact stories on people who ended up taking significant action, who originally "just saw an ad" on social media. I occasionally run into people who saw an 80K ad (as opposed to searching for it proactively) and are now doing impressive things.
The problem is that EA marketing is still in its infancy. We have some research (e.g. by Rethink) on what framings of EA work better, but that's really far from being able to answer the question of "How do we maximise attracting talent to EA per dollar spent?". Only now Amplify is doing some small tests on comparing the cost-effectiveness of LinkedIn vs Meta ads and measuring long-term outcomes, but there is so much more to do.
An additional reason EAs may not be playing the attention arms race is that they may be persuaded by the fidelity model of spreading ideas.
Short-form content doesn't have to sacrifice fidelity! It's going to contain less information, but the way to use it is to attract people to go onto engaging with long-form content.
I do not understand why so many disagree with your take. I think it can both be true that EA conferences, the forum, long-form YouTube and books etc are great and keep the community active and interesting but that we also miss out on reaching new young people over the long term.
I think that there are actually two reasons to be active in more channels:
1. Reach new people and keep the community alive over the long term.
I mean people need to find out about the ideas and cause areas somewhere right? If they are not easily discoverable where people get their information and interests then that will be harder. Before people decide to read a whole book about something or attend a conference they need to be interested or curious about it in the first place.
2. Get EA ideas and cause areas out there in the general conversation to hopefully have some effect on policy and societal norms etc.
I think there are lots of EA ideas or cause areas that are “memable” and interesting. It is just a matter of how one frames it. Sure it will most likely not be the most popular stuff but it could influence relevant discussions on economics or politics or whatever.
I think graphs like this one can be pretty mind-blowing[1] and making more people aware of these effects could have a good effect on the margin. I think the idea portrayed by the graph is very powerful: that one’s effort or giving could help 100 times more people if applied to the right target. I'm sure this concept could be shown in many other ways too.
To take another random example of nerdy “non-EA” meme I have seen a few times is this graph. It sometimes appears in discussions regarding fusion power. I have no idea how accurate[2] it is but the main point is that is a pretty complex “meme” but in the right contexts it is relevant and could influence discussions.
Some other examples I can think about are the web comics xkcd or SMBC where particular strips get widely shared many years after they were published. There are tonnes of info graphics, comic strips and graphs like this that travel around the internet and influence peoples’ opinions. I don’t see why EA ideas, cause areas and insights could not be spread in the same way.
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Another point: I think it is also possible to combine long-form and short-form content. With YouTube I’ve seen that some channels like Kurzgesagt make both regular videos and post shorts on YouTube and TikTok. I have no idea how well this makes people more aware of their long-form content and books though. I would guess that it is worth it since they can pretty easily create it based on highlights from their existing content. I am not content creator or influencer though so I wouldn't put too much weight on my opinion here.
from the giving what we can front page https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/
I have not dug into the claims of the graph, so I cannot comment on the accuracy. I just thought it was good illustration of how more complex memes or graphs can spread to convey a message or "meme". The message here is very clear: humanity has under-invested in fusion and in another better world we might have solved our energy and climate issues if we just invested more in fusion research. If that is an accurate story then this graph illustrates that pretty well.