I also think this suggests something is going wrong. I’m guessing a lot of it is that people feel a need to justify posts as on-topic. If they post a thing because it seems interesting, confusing, exciting, etc., they’re likely to get challenged about why the post belongs on the EA Forum.
This means that EAs can’t talk about ideas and areas unless either (a) they’ve already been sufficiently well-explored by EAs elsewhere (e.g., in an 80K blog post or an Open Phil report) that there’s a pre-existing consensus this is an especially good thing to talk about; or (b) they’re willing to make the discussion very meta-oriented and general. (“Why don’t EAs care more about reducing rates of medical error?”, as opposed to “Hey, here’s an interesting study on things that mediate medical error rates!”)
This seems OK iff the EA Forum is only intended to intervene on a particular part of the idea pipeline — maybe the idea is for individuals and groups to explore new frontiers elsewhere, and bring them to the EA Forum once they’re already well-established enough that everyone can agree they make sense as an EA priority. In that case, it might be helpful to have canonical locations people can go to have those earlier discussions.
I also think this suggests something is going wrong. I’m guessing a lot of it is that people feel a need to justify posts as on-topic. If they post a thing because it seems interesting, confusing, exciting, etc., they’re likely to get challenged about why the post belongs on the EA Forum.
This means that EAs can’t talk about ideas and areas unless either (a) they’ve already been sufficiently well-explored by EAs elsewhere (e.g., in an 80K blog post or an Open Phil report) that there’s a pre-existing consensus this is an especially good thing to talk about; or (b) they’re willing to make the discussion very meta-oriented and general. (“Why don’t EAs care more about reducing rates of medical error?”, as opposed to “Hey, here’s an interesting study on things that mediate medical error rates!”)
This seems OK iff the EA Forum is only intended to intervene on a particular part of the idea pipeline — maybe the idea is for individuals and groups to explore new frontiers elsewhere, and bring them to the EA Forum once they’re already well-established enough that everyone can agree they make sense as an EA priority. In that case, it might be helpful to have canonical locations people can go to have those earlier discussions.