This looks great, I’m so glad that the EA Hub is getting revamped! My main question has to do with this:
Our project is intended to serve a complementary and supportive role to both Effective Altruism Forum and LessWrong 2.0, and will hopefully contribute to the multiplication of impact generated by already existing and newly formed EA groups.
EA Hub is obviously branded specifically for EA groups, but given that you mentioned LessWrong, I was wondering if you’re planning to include resources for organizers of LessWrong/rationality groups as well? I know that there are branding issues, but there’s a lot of overlap in the problems the groups are trying to solve, their activities, and their membership, and plenty of groups even double as EA and rationality groups (e.g. in cities where the community is small), so I really think it makes sense to have all the resources in one place.
This is important to me because I’ve been involved in efforts to centralize resources for rationality groups and coordinate among group organizers, but there have been some confusions regarding whether or not to include EA groups, since some of them are reasonably worried about the PR implications of associating with LessWrong/rationality. Unfortunately this makes coordination and centralization quite difficult. I guess I’m just wondering how you’re thinking about that issue.
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I also second OllieBase’s concern that despite (or maybe because of?) multiple attempts to centralize these types of resources, they remain spread out among many sites (EA Hub, CEA’s website, the LessWrong community page, various semi-private Google Docs, etc). I see several possible solutions to this—the pages could all link to one another as ‘additional resources’ (definitely not ideal, but easiest), one group could explicitly be given the mandate for this work by the others, or each site could narrow its scope to fill a particular niche. None of these solutions seem great. It might be a good idea for LEAN, CEA, and LessWrong to get together and discuss this?
It might be a good idea for LEAN, CEA, and LessWrong to get together and discuss this?
We actually did! With resources.eahub.org, we wanted to share LEAN’s idea of what texts you should look into when you’re a group organizer. We discussed this with our partners at CEA and decided that offering 2 perspectives is better than offering 1 and that we should work together on 2 independent products.
We figured out we don’t want the Resources to be a fixed, static list, but an open, collaborative platform. This way, you’re all invited to decide on its shape and content.
LEAN wants to make sure we only add features that offer a lot of value to the community, which is why we rely on your feedback. As a matter of fact, this is why we released this humble feature before the whole thing is ready.
The new Hub will come with a number of new features, some of which offer integration across multiple platforms like forum.effectivealtruism.org or www.lesswrong.com. One of those is a cross-platform search allowing for searching through a multitude of sources with a single search box [that can be implemented across multiple platforms].
Based on the recent EA Survey data, we believe that there’s a significant value in fostering coordination and bridging the gap between EA and rationality circles. While these two may often overlap at the local level, our sample indicated that the ratio of people on one platform (EA Forum or LessWrong) to these on both of them is over 2.6:1. In addition, it pointed out to surprisingly low numbers of EAs on Forum (20%) or LW (19%) compared with EA FB (50%) and in groups (40%). From a more personal perspective, chatting with many EA organizers in person taught me that many of them haven’t previously heard about important sources like the Slate Star Codex blog, while their questions and intellectual dilemmas were satisfyingly explainable by posts written few years ago.This state of things likely results in missing out on important insights and valuable interactions with a mostly goal-aligned group having useful comparative advantages and a slightly different demographic composition.
Given these, it seems beneficial to encourage non-intrusive cross-posting and linking to each other in the spirit of a more interconnected network. While there might be some benefits to decentralizing the centralization of resources, we obviously intend to stay in touch with each “big player” to avoid duplication of work and maintain mutually beneficial relationships. This is also largely reflected by our choice of a specific niche—providing time- and effort-saving services tailored to the needs of current and future leaders managing local high-impact groups.
This looks great, I’m so glad that the EA Hub is getting revamped! My main question has to do with this:
EA Hub is obviously branded specifically for EA groups, but given that you mentioned LessWrong, I was wondering if you’re planning to include resources for organizers of LessWrong/rationality groups as well? I know that there are branding issues, but there’s a lot of overlap in the problems the groups are trying to solve, their activities, and their membership, and plenty of groups even double as EA and rationality groups (e.g. in cities where the community is small), so I really think it makes sense to have all the resources in one place.
This is important to me because I’ve been involved in efforts to centralize resources for rationality groups and coordinate among group organizers, but there have been some confusions regarding whether or not to include EA groups, since some of them are reasonably worried about the PR implications of associating with LessWrong/rationality. Unfortunately this makes coordination and centralization quite difficult. I guess I’m just wondering how you’re thinking about that issue.
-
I also second OllieBase’s concern that despite (or maybe because of?) multiple attempts to centralize these types of resources, they remain spread out among many sites (EA Hub, CEA’s website, the LessWrong community page, various semi-private Google Docs, etc). I see several possible solutions to this—the pages could all link to one another as ‘additional resources’ (definitely not ideal, but easiest), one group could explicitly be given the mandate for this work by the others, or each site could narrow its scope to fill a particular niche. None of these solutions seem great. It might be a good idea for LEAN, CEA, and LessWrong to get together and discuss this?
Thanks, mingyuan!
We actually did! With resources.eahub.org, we wanted to share LEAN’s idea of what texts you should look into when you’re a group organizer. We discussed this with our partners at CEA and decided that offering 2 perspectives is better than offering 1 and that we should work together on 2 independent products.
We figured out we don’t want the Resources to be a fixed, static list, but an open, collaborative platform. This way, you’re all invited to decide on its shape and content.
LEAN wants to make sure we only add features that offer a lot of value to the community, which is why we rely on your feedback. As a matter of fact, this is why we released this humble feature before the whole thing is ready.
The new Hub will come with a number of new features, some of which offer integration across multiple platforms like forum.effectivealtruism.org or www.lesswrong.com. One of those is a cross-platform search allowing for searching through a multitude of sources with a single search box [that can be implemented across multiple platforms].
Thanks for your feedback and stay tuned!
Based on the recent EA Survey data, we believe that there’s a significant value in fostering coordination and bridging the gap between EA and rationality circles. While these two may often overlap at the local level, our sample indicated that the ratio of people on one platform (EA Forum or LessWrong) to these on both of them is over 2.6:1. In addition, it pointed out to surprisingly low numbers of EAs on Forum (20%) or LW (19%) compared with EA FB (50%) and in groups (40%). From a more personal perspective, chatting with many EA organizers in person taught me that many of them haven’t previously heard about important sources like the Slate Star Codex blog, while their questions and intellectual dilemmas were satisfyingly explainable by posts written few years ago. This state of things likely results in missing out on important insights and valuable interactions with a mostly goal-aligned group having useful comparative advantages and a slightly different demographic composition.
Given these, it seems beneficial to encourage non-intrusive cross-posting and linking to each other in the spirit of a more interconnected network. While there might be some benefits to decentralizing the centralization of resources, we obviously intend to stay in touch with each “big player” to avoid duplication of work and maintain mutually beneficial relationships. This is also largely reflected by our choice of a specific niche—providing time- and effort-saving services tailored to the needs of current and future leaders managing local high-impact groups.