Any forum post absorbs hours of time and attention from the community, so I support there being a norm of getting questions answered by emailing the group that probably knows the answer, where doing so is possible.
But asking privately only gives one person the answer, instead of many. I’m a bit surprised by your response—I had expected that the group who knows the answer usually has better things to do than answer random emails, while there are a lot of individuals who probably have knowledge like this whose time isn’t as valuable.
In my experience, formal EA orgs tend to respond to questions of this kind reasonably quickly (I’m deliberately only thinking of cases from before I actually worked for CEA). GiveWell and Open Phil in particular usually respond to comments on their blog posts within days.
Have you attempted to contact GV or OpenPhil directly about this?
Any forum post absorbs hours of time and attention from the community, so I support there being a norm of getting questions answered by emailing the group that probably knows the answer, where doing so is possible.
My current model is that formal EA orgs are deluged with incoming email, which makes email a pretty noisy channel.
I would reply to an email asking something like this about 75% of the time within 1-2 weeks, and suspect the same is true of most other orgs.
Admittedly the answer might be only a few sentences, and might be ‘sorry I don’t know try asking X.’
But it seems worth trying in the first instance. :)
But asking privately only gives one person the answer, instead of many. I’m a bit surprised by your response—I had expected that the group who knows the answer usually has better things to do than answer random emails, while there are a lot of individuals who probably have knowledge like this whose time isn’t as valuable.
In my experience, formal EA orgs tend to respond to questions of this kind reasonably quickly (I’m deliberately only thinking of cases from before I actually worked for CEA). GiveWell and Open Phil in particular usually respond to comments on their blog posts within days.
I asked about it on Open Phil’s most recent open thread.