“How and Why to Make EA Cool” by JustinPortela

EA has always had a coolness crisis. The name itself is clunky and overly precise. The logo is fine-but-not-great, and the visual branding has never excited anybody. EA orgs have spent over a decade struggling to tell exciting stories or get serious numbers of social media followers. In short: It's never been sexy; it's never been cool. Maybe you don’t think being cool matters. That's a fine opinion if you’re ok with EA being a group of 10,000 people, ~70% male and ~75% white, circularly spending Dustin Moskovitz's money. But imagine a movement of a million people. A million people donating a percentage of their income to create a community fund as large as Open Phil's. A million people working at high-impact organizations. Getting to a million people means being cool in public campaigns. It means cool branding and cool social media posts and cool copy in emails. The unfortunate truth is that the attention economy consumes us, and the world is a popularity contest. EAs often have this dastardly intuition that they can convince people just by being right. I once watched an EA tell a man to rip up his backyard grass and [...] ---Outline:(03:24) 1. Heroes need villains(05:10) 2. Please, for God's sake, hire non-EA creative talent(05:58) 3. Invest in creatives.(06:59) 4. Learn to drop the caveats --- First published: November 9th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aBoA8Hri8nfZMzkEB/how-and-why-to-make-ea-cool --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.