How “effective” is our forum?
I apologise for the critical tone of this post. I know a lot of people are working very hard to do their best. I am very excited to see EA be the best it can be.
I imagine EA being a great gathering of ideas; the opportunity to learn and be part of important conversations; people coming together in an organised way.
EA should have an excellent website and a well structured forum. This is a very important foundation to generate sharing ideas and discussion. It also reflects on our image as an organisation. If we are to convince skeptics that we are “effective” at altruism, then we must be effective at running this movement.
The forum:
I have found myself reading posts in a number of places but I’m yet to find a well organised, central forum. I have found: a sub-reddit, this forum, .impact, the facebook group, the australian facebook group
If this is the central forum, there should be:
an easy to find link from the website (whichever one),
and multiple categories (including one where new members can post freely).
This is a conversation about having better conversations.
Do you mean how much good does it do? I suppose the key questions there are how many people new to EA read it, how many of those “get into” EA partly as a result of this, and to what extent it strengthens the commitment of people who read it and are already somewhat into EA.
EA should have an excellent website and a well structured forum. This is a very important foundation to generate sharing ideas and discussion. It also reflects on our image as an organisation. If we are to convince skeptics that we are “effective” at altruism, then we must be effective at running this movement.
As a broad social movement constituted by thousands of people around the world, effective altruism isn’t the sort of thing which would (or should!) have a “main website”. Both of the websites you mentioned belong to a particular organisation, the Centre for Effective Altruism, which shouldn’t be seen as constituting or “owning” effective altruism.
What’s more, I don’t know quite what it would mean for something to be the main EA website. There are many different EA introductions, articles, websites and discussion venues, serving many different functions. Insofar as it makes sense for them to direct people to the EA Forum, they can do so on a case-by-case basis, and insofar as it makes sense for the EA Forum to direct people elsewhere, it can also do so. For example, I help run the Effective Altruism Hub community website, and that points people looking to discuss EA to this Forum, the main Facebook group, and the full list of discussion venues on the EA Wiki.
The forum: I have found myself reading posts in a number of places but I’m yet to find a well organised, central forum. I have found: a sub-reddit, this forum, .impact, the facebook group, the australian facebook group.
De facto, I’d say that the two most prominent places for EA discussion are this Forum and the main Facebook group, though both are run independently so they’re not official central forums. As I mentioned there’s a full list of discussion venues on the EA Wiki.
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the reply. What you say makes sense, but I still have the same concerns.
What’s more, I don’t know quite what it would mean for something to be the main EA website.
Something like this: https://www.unrealengine.com/
This is the Unreal Engine website. Similar to EA, it’s a global community of creative people coming together to work on projects and share ideas. It has a useful FAQ, a learning section, a link to the wiki, a community section with a well structured forum and links to associated websites and groups. You can find everything you need to learn more and get involved. It’s not fancy, it just works.
EA falls short of this standard. We have websites but they don’t effectively get the job done. The info is generally available, but not well consolidated/organised. And there’s no decent forum that I can find. Even on your list (thanks for posting it).
I have recently been fairly critical of EA’s internal workings. I apologise if this is causing upset. I have no intention to cause ill-will. I believe that, at this early stage, there should be a lot of work (and review) of how the whole movement is set up and working. I would really like to see EA working really well and my scrutiny is with the best of intentions.
Unreal Engine is a professional industry tool that’s obviously able to have a more polished website than that of a fledgling social movement. It’s fine to have aspirations to match them, and to want to pursue these with a sense of urgency, but people are only going to be able to recieve criticism in a positive spirit if you give them something concrete and constructive to work with - (more specific than ‘well consolidated/organised’). What do you want?
If this is the central forum, there should be: an easy to find link from the website (whichever one), and multiple categories (including one where new members can post freely)”
This website has links to others at the very top on the right. It’s also linked from the Facebook group, and when the landing page (effectivealtruism.org) is redesigned, it’ll be linked more prominently from there also.
It was discussed that (at least) the landing page and the forum should have matching layout and links right across a top banner—it just didn’t pan out, but probably it should be made that way later.
As for multiple categories, well that was one of the top few criticisms of LessWrong, the site that this forum was built from. At the time of starting the forum, there was a resounding call for all the content to be lumped together into one feed. Nonetheless, people can comment straight away and only need five karma to post a new thread.
Bottom line is: there are people who are thinking hard about how to connect these sites. The forum has good usage, and steadily growing readership. If we have new ideas for how to improve this further and speed things up, let’s assess them and implement them.
I apologise if my posts sound like demands. It’s not intended. At the least, I guess I have had trouble learning what I need to know, and finding the best way to get involved. I hope this can be seen as feedback worthy of discussion. Cheers
As for multiple categories, well that was one of the top few criticisms of LessWrong, the site that this forum was built from. At the time of starting the forum, there was a resounding call for all the content to be lumped together into one feed. Nonetheless, people can comment straight away and only need five karma to post a new thread.
I think having a feed where it can all be seen is valuable, but I’m getting increasingly worried about the lack of ability to find old posts in the forum because there aren’t categories. (This wasn’t a problem in the first few months while there was little enough material.) I expect this will lead to me using the forum less than I might have done in the future.
Search is pretty helpful. I have two issues with it (neither huge):
1) For some reason it seems to work inconsistently for me. Sometimes it doesn’t load the search results. (I haven’t been able to identify enough of a pattern that reporting a bug seems useful)
2) It’s not always clear what to search for, or what material is out there. A small set of tags, consistently used, would help with this.
As for multiple categories, well that was one of the top few criticisms of LessWrong, the site that this forum was built from. At the time of starting the forum, there was a resounding call for all the content to be lumped together into one feed.
My understanding was that the LessWrong split between Main and Discussion led to some undesirable effects, no? I recall hearing someone (maybe Peter Hurford and Tom Ash?) suggest that the Forum is to the FB group as LW Main is to LW Discussion.
Hey Russ, as David Barry has mentioned regarding the division of labor between different discussion spots:
“The rough sort of organisation that’s emerged is:
Main EA Facebook group for free-wheeling discussion and links. I go through phases where I’ll keep up with everything that happens there, but it’s a busy busy place.
Local EA Facebook groups serve a similar purpose (and are the natural home for locally-relevant news) but the number of people and posts is less intimidating than in the worldwide group.
The name of this social movement, “effective altruism” actually came out of the name Centre for Effective Altruism, which was meant to be the name of one non-profit, not the title which carried much weight for an entire social movement. At least, as far as I know, that was the original intent. As a shorthand for people outside of Oxford all around the world interetsed in the idea of applying effectiveness to doing good and philanthrophy, the shorthand for this nascent global community of however many few dozen or hundred people constituting effective altruism when it started (five years ago?) was called “effective altruism”. However, the name ‘effective altruism’ was sticky, and now it’s stuck. A couple years ago, in retrospect, there was a couple conversation not just within the Centre for Effective Altruism, but publicly across the whole movement, about whether effective altruism was good name. Everyone agreed the movement and its ideas needed a name, and “effective altruism” is as good as any and in some ways didn’t cause problems other names, e.g., “optimal altruism”, wouldn’t. That’s some long context for where the words “effective altruism” came from, and why we slap them on different websites.
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), and its website, just represent the organization out of Oxford itself. “www.effectivealtruism.org” is a website meant as a global landing page for anyone who heard about effective altruism. It was built on behalf of the CEA by their outreach team “EA Outreach”, which also organized the EA Global conferences this last summer. It’s meant to be a first stop for someone who encounters effective altruism online for the first time, and they can sign up for an email newsletterfrom the Centre for Effective Altruism, but not much else. It’s meant to be an intro and PR page, and redirects people to all manner of effective altruism websites which better serve the specific purpose or need of anyone with more specific questions of effective altruism.
The forum: I have found myself reading posts in a number of places but I’m yet to find a well organised, central forum. I have found: a sub-reddit, this forum, .impact, the facebook group, the australian facebook group
Dovetailing what Ryan and Tom already said, The Facebook group and this Forum are the main discussion sites for effective altruism. In this, they’re central for “discussion”. Effective altruism may not need only one online nexus. While I haven’t talked about this much with others, I’m guessing the people who build these sites think effective altruism is better served by having multiple websites in that regard.
Effective altruism is becoming a community with so many people working on so many different types of projects, topics, and organizations, it’s impossible for maybe even the majority of effective altruists anymore to keep up to date on all the developments coming out of any and all arms of the movement. I’m assuming that’s some value you would see in a single central forum for effective altruism. However, that coordination would be difficult enough as is. There are folks from, e.g., the CEA whose full time job is more or less to keep abreast of everything going on, and if there is a new development from one organization or cause so critical everyone should know about it, those folks will go through the most well-read channels to inform everyone as thoroughly as possible.
The various channels for discussion for .impact don’t reflect all of effective altruism. .impact is effective altruism’s decentralized volunteer task force working on EA projects, mostly software ones right now. Don’t worry about anyone mistaking .impact as being the main forum for effective altruism, supplanting another, as that has never been a purpose of .impact.
If this is the central forum, there should be: an easy to find link from the website (whichever one)
I agree there should be more links from central EA websites to one another, or at least links on easier to find pages, such as the splash page of any given website.
multiple categories (including one where new members can post freely).
This would be ideal, but this would be the equivalent of running multiple subreddits, making this Forum an “EA Reddit”. This would be the natural site for such a thing. However, I expect running such a site would be hard. There are only a couple of volunteers who run this website, if I recall correctly. Also, there isn’t a consensus on what those multiple categories would or should be. In the meantime, I believe this forum serves quite well.
How “effective” is our forum? I apologise for the critical tone of this post. I know a lot of people are working very hard to do their best. I am very excited to see EA be the best it can be.
I imagine EA being a great gathering of ideas; the opportunity to learn and be part of important conversations; people coming together in an organised way.
EA should have an excellent website and a well structured forum. This is a very important foundation to generate sharing ideas and discussion. It also reflects on our image as an organisation. If we are to convince skeptics that we are “effective” at altruism, then we must be effective at running this movement.
The main website: Even upon inspection, I’m still unclear which is the primary EA website: centreforeffectivealtruism.org or
www.effectivealtruism.org/
The forum: I have found myself reading posts in a number of places but I’m yet to find a well organised, central forum. I have found: a sub-reddit, this forum, .impact, the facebook group, the australian facebook group
If this is the central forum, there should be: an easy to find link from the website (whichever one), and multiple categories (including one where new members can post freely).
This is a conversation about having better conversations.
How “effective” is our forum?
Do you mean how much good does it do? I suppose the key questions there are how many people new to EA read it, how many of those “get into” EA partly as a result of this, and to what extent it strengthens the commitment of people who read it and are already somewhat into EA.
As a broad social movement constituted by thousands of people around the world, effective altruism isn’t the sort of thing which would (or should!) have a “main website”. Both of the websites you mentioned belong to a particular organisation, the Centre for Effective Altruism, which shouldn’t be seen as constituting or “owning” effective altruism.
What’s more, I don’t know quite what it would mean for something to be the main EA website. There are many different EA introductions, articles, websites and discussion venues, serving many different functions. Insofar as it makes sense for them to direct people to the EA Forum, they can do so on a case-by-case basis, and insofar as it makes sense for the EA Forum to direct people elsewhere, it can also do so. For example, I help run the Effective Altruism Hub community website, and that points people looking to discuss EA to this Forum, the main Facebook group, and the full list of discussion venues on the EA Wiki.
De facto, I’d say that the two most prominent places for EA discussion are this Forum and the main Facebook group, though both are run independently so they’re not official central forums. As I mentioned there’s a full list of discussion venues on the EA Wiki.
Hi Tom, Thanks for the reply. What you say makes sense, but I still have the same concerns.
Something like this: https://www.unrealengine.com/ This is the Unreal Engine website. Similar to EA, it’s a global community of creative people coming together to work on projects and share ideas. It has a useful FAQ, a learning section, a link to the wiki, a community section with a well structured forum and links to associated websites and groups. You can find everything you need to learn more and get involved. It’s not fancy, it just works.
EA falls short of this standard. We have websites but they don’t effectively get the job done. The info is generally available, but not well consolidated/organised. And there’s no decent forum that I can find. Even on your list (thanks for posting it).
I have recently been fairly critical of EA’s internal workings. I apologise if this is causing upset. I have no intention to cause ill-will. I believe that, at this early stage, there should be a lot of work (and review) of how the whole movement is set up and working. I would really like to see EA working really well and my scrutiny is with the best of intentions.
Thanks again
Unreal Engine is a professional industry tool that’s obviously able to have a more polished website than that of a fledgling social movement. It’s fine to have aspirations to match them, and to want to pursue these with a sense of urgency, but people are only going to be able to recieve criticism in a positive spirit if you give them something concrete and constructive to work with - (more specific than ‘well consolidated/organised’). What do you want?
This website has links to others at the very top on the right. It’s also linked from the Facebook group, and when the landing page (effectivealtruism.org) is redesigned, it’ll be linked more prominently from there also.
It was discussed that (at least) the landing page and the forum should have matching layout and links right across a top banner—it just didn’t pan out, but probably it should be made that way later.
As for multiple categories, well that was one of the top few criticisms of LessWrong, the site that this forum was built from. At the time of starting the forum, there was a resounding call for all the content to be lumped together into one feed. Nonetheless, people can comment straight away and only need five karma to post a new thread.
Bottom line is: there are people who are thinking hard about how to connect these sites. The forum has good usage, and steadily growing readership. If we have new ideas for how to improve this further and speed things up, let’s assess them and implement them.
I apologise if my posts sound like demands. It’s not intended. At the least, I guess I have had trouble learning what I need to know, and finding the best way to get involved. I hope this can be seen as feedback worthy of discussion. Cheers
I think having a feed where it can all be seen is valuable, but I’m getting increasingly worried about the lack of ability to find old posts in the forum because there aren’t categories. (This wasn’t a problem in the first few months while there was little enough material.) I expect this will lead to me using the forum less than I might have done in the future.
[This is also my main problem with LessWrong.]
One can add tags to one’s posts.
We’re planning to make them more visible, when it works its way up the priority queue: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dotimpact/permalink/489215301246125/
Thanks, that’s good news.
What about having someone curate old posts to keep tags consistent? (many posts aren’t tagged)
Sounds like something we could maybe get a volunteer to do, though I don’t think it would be high priority. What do you think?
Nice idea, I think that’s exactly right. Low priority but clearly-defined and net beneficial task.
Yeah, this could work well if used more thoroughly.
You can search posts (upper right corner of screen) and can view posts from a given user by clicking their name then ‘submitted’
Search is pretty helpful. I have two issues with it (neither huge):
1) For some reason it seems to work inconsistently for me. Sometimes it doesn’t load the search results. (I haven’t been able to identify enough of a pattern that reporting a bug seems useful)
2) It’s not always clear what to search for, or what material is out there. A small set of tags, consistently used, would help with this.
I think popular wisdom is that it’s pretty-much impossible to enforce tags on a group blog.
Let me know if you find a consistent pattern!
My understanding was that the LessWrong split between Main and Discussion led to some undesirable effects, no? I recall hearing someone (maybe Peter Hurford and Tom Ash?) suggest that the Forum is to the FB group as LW Main is to LW Discussion.
Oh, seems it was David Barry, I should read the whole thread before commenting!
Hey Russ, as David Barry has mentioned regarding the division of labor between different discussion spots: “The rough sort of organisation that’s emerged is:
Main EA Facebook group for free-wheeling discussion and links. I go through phases where I’ll keep up with everything that happens there, but it’s a busy busy place.
Local EA Facebook groups serve a similar purpose (and are the natural home for locally-relevant news) but the number of people and posts is less intimidating than in the worldwide group.
effective-altruism.com forum has more detailed posts.
r/SmartGiving doesn’t really have much discussion but can be a decent curation of links.”
The name of this social movement, “effective altruism” actually came out of the name Centre for Effective Altruism, which was meant to be the name of one non-profit, not the title which carried much weight for an entire social movement. At least, as far as I know, that was the original intent. As a shorthand for people outside of Oxford all around the world interetsed in the idea of applying effectiveness to doing good and philanthrophy, the shorthand for this nascent global community of however many few dozen or hundred people constituting effective altruism when it started (five years ago?) was called “effective altruism”. However, the name ‘effective altruism’ was sticky, and now it’s stuck. A couple years ago, in retrospect, there was a couple conversation not just within the Centre for Effective Altruism, but publicly across the whole movement, about whether effective altruism was good name. Everyone agreed the movement and its ideas needed a name, and “effective altruism” is as good as any and in some ways didn’t cause problems other names, e.g., “optimal altruism”, wouldn’t. That’s some long context for where the words “effective altruism” came from, and why we slap them on different websites.
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), and its website, just represent the organization out of Oxford itself. “www.effectivealtruism.org” is a website meant as a global landing page for anyone who heard about effective altruism. It was built on behalf of the CEA by their outreach team “EA Outreach”, which also organized the EA Global conferences this last summer. It’s meant to be a first stop for someone who encounters effective altruism online for the first time, and they can sign up for an email newsletterfrom the Centre for Effective Altruism, but not much else. It’s meant to be an intro and PR page, and redirects people to all manner of effective altruism websites which better serve the specific purpose or need of anyone with more specific questions of effective altruism.
Dovetailing what Ryan and Tom already said, The Facebook group and this Forum are the main discussion sites for effective altruism. In this, they’re central for “discussion”. Effective altruism may not need only one online nexus. While I haven’t talked about this much with others, I’m guessing the people who build these sites think effective altruism is better served by having multiple websites in that regard.
Effective altruism is becoming a community with so many people working on so many different types of projects, topics, and organizations, it’s impossible for maybe even the majority of effective altruists anymore to keep up to date on all the developments coming out of any and all arms of the movement. I’m assuming that’s some value you would see in a single central forum for effective altruism. However, that coordination would be difficult enough as is. There are folks from, e.g., the CEA whose full time job is more or less to keep abreast of everything going on, and if there is a new development from one organization or cause so critical everyone should know about it, those folks will go through the most well-read channels to inform everyone as thoroughly as possible.
The various channels for discussion for .impact don’t reflect all of effective altruism. .impact is effective altruism’s decentralized volunteer task force working on EA projects, mostly software ones right now. Don’t worry about anyone mistaking .impact as being the main forum for effective altruism, supplanting another, as that has never been a purpose of .impact.
I agree there should be more links from central EA websites to one another, or at least links on easier to find pages, such as the splash page of any given website.
This would be ideal, but this would be the equivalent of running multiple subreddits, making this Forum an “EA Reddit”. This would be the natural site for such a thing. However, I expect running such a site would be hard. There are only a couple of volunteers who run this website, if I recall correctly. Also, there isn’t a consensus on what those multiple categories would or should be. In the meantime, I believe this forum serves quite well.