Got it– thank you! Am I right in thinking that your team intends to influence policymakers and national security officials, though? If so, I’d be curious to learn more about how you plan to get your materials in front of them or ensure that your materials address their core points of concern/doubt.
Put a bit differently– I feel like it would be important for your team to address these questions insofar as your team has the following goals:
The main audience we want to reach is policymakers – the people in a position to enact the sweeping regulation and policy we want – and their staff.
We are hopeful about reaching a subset of policy advisors who have the skill of thinking clearly and carefully about risk, particularly those with experience in national security.
In this reply I am speaking just about the comms team and not about other parts of MIRI or other organizations.
We want to produce materials that are suitable and persuasive for the audiences I named. (And by persuasive, I don’t mean anything manipulative or dirty; I just mean using valid arguments that address the points that are most interesting / concerning to our audience in a compelling fashion.)
So there are two parts here: creating high quality materials, and delivering them to that audience.
First, creating high quality materials. Some of this is down to just doing a good job in general: making the right arguments in the right order using good writing and pedagogical technique; none of this is very audience specific. There is also an audience-specific component, and to do well on that, we do need to understand our audience better. We are working to recruit beta readers from appropriate audience pools.
Second, delivering them to those audiences. There are several approaches here, most of which will not be executed by the comms team directly, we hand off to others. Within comms, we do want to see good reach and engagement with intelligent general audiences.
Thank you! I still find myself most curious about the “how will MIRI make sure it understands its audience” and “how will MIRI make sure its materials are read by policymakers + natsec people” parts of the puzzle. Feel free to ignore this if we’re getting too in the weeds, but I wonder if you can share more details about either of these parts.
There is also an audience-specific component, and to do well on that, we do need to understand our audience better. We are working to recruit beta readers from appropriate audience pools.
There are several approaches here, most of which will not be executed by the comms team directly, we hand off to others
Got it– thank you! Am I right in thinking that your team intends to influence policymakers and national security officials, though? If so, I’d be curious to learn more about how you plan to get your materials in front of them or ensure that your materials address their core points of concern/doubt.
Put a bit differently– I feel like it would be important for your team to address these questions insofar as your team has the following goals:
In this reply I am speaking just about the comms team and not about other parts of MIRI or other organizations.
We want to produce materials that are suitable and persuasive for the audiences I named. (And by persuasive, I don’t mean anything manipulative or dirty; I just mean using valid arguments that address the points that are most interesting / concerning to our audience in a compelling fashion.)
So there are two parts here: creating high quality materials, and delivering them to that audience.
First, creating high quality materials. Some of this is down to just doing a good job in general: making the right arguments in the right order using good writing and pedagogical technique; none of this is very audience specific. There is also an audience-specific component, and to do well on that, we do need to understand our audience better. We are working to recruit beta readers from appropriate audience pools.
Second, delivering them to those audiences. There are several approaches here, most of which will not be executed by the comms team directly, we hand off to others. Within comms, we do want to see good reach and engagement with intelligent general audiences.
Thank you! I still find myself most curious about the “how will MIRI make sure it understands its audience” and “how will MIRI make sure its materials are read by policymakers + natsec people” parts of the puzzle. Feel free to ignore this if we’re getting too in the weeds, but I wonder if you can share more details about either of these parts.
Your curiosity and questions are valid but I’d prefer not to give you more than I already have, sorry.
Valid!