There’s some good suggestions here already, so I don’t want to duplicate those. Instead, I want to offer a perspective that the (perceived) quality of discussion on the Forum is downstream of broader events in the EA movement. For example:
The perception of there being an increase in poor quality epistemics[1], that’s a topic that has generated a lot of ongoing discussion on the Forum. But the major events that kicked that off seem to have been the response to ‘Open EA Global’ and the FTX crash.
The debate about ‘normie EA’[2] vs longtermism, again, seems to have been boosted by the fallout from FTX, and whether and to what extent the philosophy of longtermism is at fault for these crises.
The recent discussions around community norms, tradeoffs, and power dynamics have come from a number of cases of alleged and admitted sexual assault and harassment in the community.
I’m going to link back to a previous comment I made when the initial announcement of the changes to community. I sense I haven’t really changed my mind on this (though Lizka if you are reading I really appreciated your response, even if I disagree with parts of it :) ). I’m still unsure if this is a positive change or not for the Forum and EA. I sense, perhaps unfairly, that some people believe that the problem is community posts themselves, and that the more we downsample, downweight, or plain remove them the better Forum discussions and epistemics will be. I think I just completely disagree. I’m not even sure that there really is a community vs object-level distinction. Everything is part of the world! It’s all one wave-function![3] EA learning how to conduct itself better as a community has a real, causal effect on its priorities, choices, and effectiveness. The Community is not an epiphenomenon.
To conclude, in some ways this isn’t a solveable problem, and maybe it shouldn’t be. If the EA Community itself is turbulent, then the Forum will be to. The solution to the latter will come with a solution, or improvement, to the former.
There’s some good suggestions here already, so I don’t want to duplicate those. Instead, I want to offer a perspective that the (perceived) quality of discussion on the Forum is downstream of broader events in the EA movement. For example:
The perception of there being an increase in poor quality epistemics[1], that’s a topic that has generated a lot of ongoing discussion on the Forum. But the major events that kicked that off seem to have been the response to ‘Open EA Global’ and the FTX crash.
The debate about ‘normie EA’[2] vs longtermism, again, seems to have been boosted by the fallout from FTX, and whether and to what extent the philosophy of longtermism is at fault for these crises.
The recent discussions around community norms, tradeoffs, and power dynamics have come from a number of cases of alleged and admitted sexual assault and harassment in the community.
I’m going to link back to a previous comment I made when the initial announcement of the changes to community. I sense I haven’t really changed my mind on this (though Lizka if you are reading I really appreciated your response, even if I disagree with parts of it :) ). I’m still unsure if this is a positive change or not for the Forum and EA. I sense, perhaps unfairly, that some people believe that the problem is community posts themselves, and that the more we downsample, downweight, or plain remove them the better Forum discussions and epistemics will be. I think I just completely disagree. I’m not even sure that there really is a community vs object-level distinction. Everything is part of the world! It’s all one wave-function![3] EA learning how to conduct itself better as a community has a real, causal effect on its priorities, choices, and effectiveness. The Community is not an epiphenomenon.
To conclude, in some ways this isn’t a solveable problem, and maybe it shouldn’t be. If the EA Community itself is turbulent, then the Forum will be to. The solution to the latter will come with a solution, or improvement, to the former.
I disagree with this take fwiw
I hate this typology but it seems to have some legs?
Dive down the rabbit-hole here if you must :)