Thanks for this question! As the person who oversees content for that site, here are my thoughts:
EA.org has been a fairly low priority compared to various other CEA content projects, but that might change soon.
(For context, my role has been tied up in active community engagement work more than web content for a while, so I havenât been able to give the site as much attention as Iâd like.)
Iâve made some small changes over the last year (removing and editing material in the introduction, updating the Resources page), but I predict that Iâll make bigger changes over the next six months, once weâve published EA Fellowship material on the Forum and fully launched the wiki.
Iâm not making any concrete commitments here â our priorities over that time period arenât yet set in stone â but here are things Iâd like to do, in case anyone has responses to these initial plans:
Change up the introductory material a lot. The current âIntroduction to EAâ essay seems good to me, but itâs been a long time since we overhauled the rest of the intro content. Now that we have a centralized EA Fellowship, Iâd want to encourage people interested in EA to read that material, and we may cross-post some of it to EA.org so that people donât have to leave the site to read further.
These changes will also lead to the Resources page changing quite a bit â right now, that page is centered on the EA.org intro material, but there are other org resource pages that have been updated more recently (like GWWCâs), and I expect to draw heavily from those.
Change the âGet Involvedâ section â there are a lot of updates we could make here, but rather than having to make continuous edits to keep this up to date as part of a single website, weâd like there to be a dedicated resource where people can share concrete opportunities to get involved on a day-to-day basis. Some groups have created their own resources of this type (sometimes with a focus on local opportunities), so weâre likely to draw from that in creating ours.
This project wonât necessarily be owned by CEA; thereâs a chance that one groupâs resource list will develop into something we want to link everyone to, or it could be a better fit for the EA Hub.
My best guess is that this wonât be hosted on the Forum: the âGet Involvedâ tag is nice, but doesnât allow much visibility into what an opportunity looks like, isnât very sortable, etc. Something like a big Airtable or other database seems better to me.
This list covers nearly all the content people read on the website â there are some old transcripts and blog posts archived there, which weâll gradually be cross-posting to the Forum as part of a general âcross-post everything to the Forumâ project that will stretch across the year.
Overall, weâre looking to de-emphasize EA.org and use the Forum as a portal to a wider range of EA content/ââopportunities, though that siteâs great URL and SEO mean weâll still want it to be a good landing page.
Iâm glad there are some changes planned to the introductory materials and resources page. As you update this material, what reference class will you be using? Do you want effectivealtruism.org to reflect the views of the EA community? Engaged EAs? CEA? EA âleadersâ?
Iâm also curious if/âhow that reference class will be communicated on the site, as I think thatâs been a problem in the past. For the past few years (until the modest changes you made recently) the resources page has been virtually identical to the EA Handbook 2.0, which (for better or worse) âemphasized [CEAâs] longtermist view of cause prioritization, contained little information about why many EAs prioritize global health and animal advocacy, and focused on risks from AI to a much greater extent than any other cause.â If it was a problem that the handbook âostensibly represented EA thinking as a whole, but actually represented the views of some of CEAâs staffâ, Iâd think that problem is magnified immensely when that content is on ea.org.
2. Change the âGet Involvedâ section⊠This project wonât necessarily be owned by CEA
Would CEA ever consider temporarily or permanently transferring the broader ownership of effectivealtruism.org to another person/ââorganization? It seems like the site could easily be a full time job for one or more people. Beyond updating the content, someone could be A/ââB testing different types of content and sharing those lessons with the community, optimizing conversions, running marketing tests, doing SEO, publishing regular updates on traffic and engagement, etc.
CEA hasnât really prioritized ea.org over the last couple of years and doesnât want to commit to prioritizing it going forward (and I commend you for trying to give realistic expectations about your future priorities). But it really feels like a missed opportunity that the landing page for people who google âeffective altruismâ has been deprioritized for so long. With so many EAs looking for jobs and/ââor volunteer opportunities and $1.8 million in the EA Infrastructure Fund (which is now considering active grantmaking), it seems like CEA might be able to delegate this work to someone who could make substantial progress (even if CEA wants to âuse the Forum as a portal to a wider range of EA content/ââopportunitiesâ in parallel.)
(And ironically, effectivealtruism.org is down at time of writing. Just submitted a ticket via the EA funds pageâŠ)
In the future, Iâd like CEA to take a more agnostic approach to cause prioritisation, trying to construct non-gameable mechanisms for making decisions about how much we talk about different causes. An example of how this might work is that we might pay for an independent contractor to try to figure out who has spent more than two years full time thinking about cause prioritization, and then surveying those people. Obviously that project would be complicatedâitâs hard to figure out exactly what âcause prioâ means, it would be important to reach out through diverse networks to make sure there arenât network biases etc.
Although we havenât yet commissioned that research, thatâs still the spirit I want us to have as we create content. We are consulting with non-longtermists as we develop the content. I agree that itâs a shame that the EA.org resources are still quite similar to the handbook content. Weâre working on a replacement which should be more up to date, but Iâm not sure when weâll make the relevant changes.
Would CEA ever consider temporarily or permanently transferring the broader ownership of effectivealtruism.org to another person/ââorganization?
Weâd consider offers (contact us), but I think weâre more likely to aim to develop the capacity to do this in-house rather than finding someone external to take this on (though I donât want to make specific commitments).
1. Iâm torn. On one hand (as I mentioned to Aaron) I appreciate that CEA is making efforts to offer realistic estimates instead of overpromising or telling people what they want to hear. If CEA is going to prioritize the EA Wiki and would rather not outsource management of EA.org, Iâm legitimately grateful that youâre just coming out and saying that. I may not agree with these prioritization decisions (I see it as continuing a problematic pattern of taking on new responsibilities before fulfilling existing ones), but at the end of the day those decisions are yours to make and not mine.
Global Health is currently a glaring omission since it is the most popular cause in the EA community and it is highly accessible to an introductory audience. And I think nearly everyone (near-or-long-termist) would agree that âCrucial Considerationsâ (currently second on the reading list after a brief introduction to EA) is quite obviously not meant for an introductory audience. It assumes a working understanding of x-risk (in general and specific x-risks), has numerous slides with complex equations, and uses highly technical language that will be inscrutable to most people who have only read a brief intro to EA (e.g. âwe should oppose extra funding for nanotechnology even though superintelligence and ubiquitous surveillance might be very dangerous on their own, including posing existential risk, given certain background assumptions about the technological completion conjecture.â
Youâve written (in the same comment you quoted): âI think that CEA has a history of pushing longtermism in somewhat underhand ways⊠given this background of pushing longtermism, I think itâs reasonable to be skeptical of CEAâs approach on this sort of thing.â You donât need to hire a contractor or prioritize an overhaul of the ea.org site to address my skepticism. But it would go a long way if Aaron were to spend a day looking for low hanging fruit like my suggested change, or even if you just took the tiny step of adding Global Health to the list of (mostly longtermist) causes on the homepage. I assume the omission of Global Health was an oversight. But now that itâs been called to your attention, if you still donât think Global Health should be added to the homepage I doubt thereâs anything you can say or do to resolve my skepticism.
2. Running EffectiveAltruism.org is just one example of work that CEA undertakes on behalf of the broader community (EAG, groups work, and community health are other examples). Generally speaking, how (if at all) do you think CEA should be accountable to the broader community when conducting this work? To use an absurd example, if CEA announced that the theme for EAG 2022 is going to be âFactory farmed beef⊠itâs whatâs for dinnerâ, what would you see as the ideal process for resolving the inevitable objections?
Now may not be the right time for you to explain how you think about this, and this comment thread almost certainly isnât the right place. But I think itâs important for you to address these issues at some point in the not too distant future. And before you make up your mind, I hope youâll gather input from as broad a cross section of the community as possible.
Edit: The screenshots below no longer reflect the exact look of the site, since I went ahead and did some of the reshuffling of the âKey Ideasâ series that I mentioned. But the only change to the content of that series was the removal of âCrucial Considerations and Wise Philanthropy, which Iâd been meaning to get to for a while. Thanks for the prompt!
*****
Though Iâm a bit confused by this comment (see below), Iâm really glad youâve been keeping up the conversation! At any given time, there are many things I could be working on, and itâs quite plausible that Iâve invested too little time in EA.org relative to other things with less readership. Iâm glad to be poked and prodded into rethinking that approach.
Which reading list are you referring to? (Edit: see here)
The âKey Ideasâ list of introductory articles (see the bottom of this page) has always included the GHD article (at least since I started working at CEA in late 2018):
I think it would be perfectly reasonable to have more than one article on this topic (as we will once the Fellowship content becomes our main set of intro resources). And I do plan to reshuffle the article list a bit this week to move the Global Health and Animal Welfare articles towards the top (I agree they should be more prominent). But I wanted to make sure we didnât have some other part of the site where this article isnât showing up.
As for future variants on our intro content:
You can see the EA Fellowship curriculum here. That set of articles is almost identical to what will show up on the Forum soon (I have several sequences published in âhiddenâ mode, and will publicize them once my project partner signs off).
To briefly summarize, there are eight separate âsequencesâ in the Fellowship:
Two on general EA principles + cost-effectiveness calculation (mostly explained through examples from global health)
One on moral circle expansion (mostly animal welfare)
One on longtermism, generally
One on existential risk, generally
One on biorisk + AI risk
One on epistemics and forecasting
One on âputting it into practiceâ (careers + donations + research ideas)
Once weâve adapted EA.org to refer to this content as our default introduction, I anticipate weâll remove most of our current intro articles from prominent places on the site (though Iâm not certain of which will remain).
Iâve already shared this list of articles with a lot of people in the categories âfocuses on non-longtermist causesâ and/âor âhas written good critiques of EA thingsâ, to get feedback on what they think of the topic balance/âexact articles chosen. Iâd also welcome feedback from anyone seeing this â and of course, once we actually publish the Forum version, Iâll be hoping to get lots of suggestions from the hundreds of people who will see it soon afterward.
Thank you for making these changes Aaron, and for your openness to this discussion and feedback!
Youâre correct, I was referring to the reading list on the homepage. The changes you made there, to the key ideas series, and to the resources page (especially when you complete the planned reordering) all seem like substantial improvements. I really appreciate that youâve updated the site!
I took a quick look at the Fellowship content, and it generally looks like youâve chosen good content and done a reasonable job of providing a balanced overview of EA (thanks for getting input from the perspectives you mentioned). Ironically, my main quibble with the content (and itâs note a huge one) is that itâs too EA-centric. For example, if I was trying to convince someone that pandemics are important Iâd show them Bill Gatesâ TED Talk on pandemics rather than an EA podcast as the former approach leverages Gatesâ and TEDâs credibility.
While I generally think the Fellowship content appears good (at least after a brief review), I still think itâd be a very big mistake to âadapt EA.org to refer to this content as our default introduction.â The Fellowship is for people who opt into participating in an 8 week program with an estimated 2-3 hours of preparation for each weekly session. EA.org is for people who google âeffective altruismâ. Thereâs an enormous difference between those two audiences, and the content they see should reflect that difference.
As an example, the first piece of core content in the Fellowship is a 30 minute intro to EA video, whereas Iâd imagine EA.org should try to communicate key ideas in just a few minutes and then quickly try to get people to e.g. sign up for the EA Newsletter. That said, we shouldnât have to guess what content works best on the EA.org homepage, we should be able to figure it out experimentally through A/ââB testing.
It generally looks like youâve chosen good content and done a reasonable job of providing a balanced overview of EA.
Credit goes to James Aung, Will Payne, and others (I donât know the full list) who created the curriculum! I was one of many people asked to provide feedback, but Iâm responsible for maybe 2% of the final content, if that.
Ironically, my main quibble with the content (and itâs note a huge one) is that itâs too EA-centric. For example, if I was trying to convince someone that pandemics are important Iâd show them Bill Gatesâ TED Talk on pandemics rather than an EA podcast as the former approach leverages Gatesâ and TEDâs credibility.
I think this is a very reasonable quibble. In the context of âthis person already signed up for a fellowshipâ, the additional credibility may be less important, but this is definitely a consideration that could apply to ârandom people finding the content onlineâ.
The Fellowship is for people who opt into participating in an 8 week program with an estimated 2-3 hours of preparation for each weekly session. EA.org is for people who google âeffective altruismâ. Thereâs an enormous difference between those two audiences, and the content they see should reflect that difference.
I wholly agree, and I certainly wouldnât subject our random Googlers to eight weeksâ worth of material! To clarify, by âthis contentâ I mean âsome of this content, probably a similar amount to the amount of content we now feature on EA.orgâł, rather than âall ~80 articlesâ.
The current introduction to EA, which links people to the newsletter and some other basic resources, will continue to be the first piece of content we show people. Some of the other articles are likely to be replaced by articles or sequences from the Fellowship â but with an emphasis on relatively brief and approachable content.
I certainly wouldnât subject our random Googlers to eight weeksâ worth of material! To clarify, by âthis contentâ I mean âsome of this content, probably a similar amount to the amount of content we now feature on EA.orgâł, rather than âall ~80 articlesâ.
Ah, thanks for clarifying :) The devil is always in the details, but âbrief and approachable contentâ following the same rough structure as the fellowship sounds very promising. I look forward to seeing the new site!
Aha! I now believe you were referring to this list:
Thatâs a very good thing to have noticed â we did not, in fact, have the Global Health and Development article in that list, only at the âRead Moreâ link (which goes to the Resources page). Iâve added it. Thank you for pointing this out.
For a bit of context that doesnât excuse the oversight: Of ~2500 visitors to EA.org in the last week, more than 1000 clicked through to the âKey Ideasâ series (which has always included the article) or the âResourcesâ page (ditto). Fewer than 100 clicked any of the articles in that list, which is why it didnât come to mind â but Iâll be happy to see the occasional click for âCrucial Considerationsâ go to global dev instead.
Part of my plan for EA.org has been some refactoring on the back end. Looks like this should include âmake sure the same reading materials appear in each place, rather than having multiple distinct listsâ.
On the last point: our hosting provider Netlify had an outage affecting a subset of their customers that happened to include us. We were down for about 2 hours, which is the longest outage I can remember in the last 3 years.
Thanks for this question! As the person who oversees content for that site, here are my thoughts:
EA.org has been a fairly low priority compared to various other CEA content projects, but that might change soon.
(For context, my role has been tied up in active community engagement work more than web content for a while, so I havenât been able to give the site as much attention as Iâd like.)
Iâve made some small changes over the last year (removing and editing material in the introduction, updating the Resources page), but I predict that Iâll make bigger changes over the next six months, once weâve published EA Fellowship material on the Forum and fully launched the wiki.
Iâm not making any concrete commitments here â our priorities over that time period arenât yet set in stone â but here are things Iâd like to do, in case anyone has responses to these initial plans:
Change up the introductory material a lot. The current âIntroduction to EAâ essay seems good to me, but itâs been a long time since we overhauled the rest of the intro content. Now that we have a centralized EA Fellowship, Iâd want to encourage people interested in EA to read that material, and we may cross-post some of it to EA.org so that people donât have to leave the site to read further.
These changes will also lead to the Resources page changing quite a bit â right now, that page is centered on the EA.org intro material, but there are other org resource pages that have been updated more recently (like GWWCâs), and I expect to draw heavily from those.
Change the âGet Involvedâ section â there are a lot of updates we could make here, but rather than having to make continuous edits to keep this up to date as part of a single website, weâd like there to be a dedicated resource where people can share concrete opportunities to get involved on a day-to-day basis. Some groups have created their own resources of this type (sometimes with a focus on local opportunities), so weâre likely to draw from that in creating ours.
This project wonât necessarily be owned by CEA; thereâs a chance that one groupâs resource list will develop into something we want to link everyone to, or it could be a better fit for the EA Hub.
My best guess is that this wonât be hosted on the Forum: the âGet Involvedâ tag is nice, but doesnât allow much visibility into what an opportunity looks like, isnât very sortable, etc. Something like a big Airtable or other database seems better to me.
This list covers nearly all the content people read on the website â there are some old transcripts and blog posts archived there, which weâll gradually be cross-posting to the Forum as part of a general âcross-post everything to the Forumâ project that will stretch across the year.
Overall, weâre looking to de-emphasize EA.org and use the Forum as a portal to a wider range of EA content/ââopportunities, though that siteâs great URL and SEO mean weâll still want it to be a good landing page.
Iâm glad there are some changes planned to the introductory materials and resources page. As you update this material, what reference class will you be using? Do you want effectivealtruism.org to reflect the views of the EA community? Engaged EAs? CEA? EA âleadersâ?
Iâm also curious if/âhow that reference class will be communicated on the site, as I think thatâs been a problem in the past. For the past few years (until the modest changes you made recently) the resources page has been virtually identical to the EA Handbook 2.0, which (for better or worse) âemphasized [CEAâs] longtermist view of cause prioritization, contained little information about why many EAs prioritize global health and animal advocacy, and focused on risks from AI to a much greater extent than any other cause.â If it was a problem that the handbook âostensibly represented EA thinking as a whole, but actually represented the views of some of CEAâs staffâ, Iâd think that problem is magnified immensely when that content is on ea.org.
Would CEA ever consider temporarily or permanently transferring the broader ownership of effectivealtruism.org to another person/ââorganization? It seems like the site could easily be a full time job for one or more people. Beyond updating the content, someone could be A/ââB testing different types of content and sharing those lessons with the community, optimizing conversions, running marketing tests, doing SEO, publishing regular updates on traffic and engagement, etc.
CEA hasnât really prioritized ea.org over the last couple of years and doesnât want to commit to prioritizing it going forward (and I commend you for trying to give realistic expectations about your future priorities). But it really feels like a missed opportunity that the landing page for people who google âeffective altruismâ has been deprioritized for so long. With so many EAs looking for jobs and/ââor volunteer opportunities and $1.8 million in the EA Infrastructure Fund (which is now considering active grantmaking), it seems like CEA might be able to delegate this work to someone who could make substantial progress (even if CEA wants to âuse the Forum as a portal to a wider range of EA content/ââopportunitiesâ in parallel.)
(And ironically, effectivealtruism.org is down at time of writing. Just submitted a ticket via the EA funds pageâŠ)
I touched on this in an earlier comment:
Although we havenât yet commissioned that research, thatâs still the spirit I want us to have as we create content. We are consulting with non-longtermists as we develop the content. I agree that itâs a shame that the EA.org resources are still quite similar to the handbook content. Weâre working on a replacement which should be more up to date, but Iâm not sure when weâll make the relevant changes.
Weâd consider offers (contact us), but I think weâre more likely to aim to develop the capacity to do this in-house rather than finding someone external to take this on (though I donât want to make specific commitments).
Thanks for this response Max!
1. Iâm torn. On one hand (as I mentioned to Aaron) I appreciate that CEA is making efforts to offer realistic estimates instead of overpromising or telling people what they want to hear. If CEA is going to prioritize the EA Wiki and would rather not outsource management of EA.org, Iâm legitimately grateful that youâre just coming out and saying that. I may not agree with these prioritization decisions (I see it as continuing a problematic pattern of taking on new responsibilities before fulfilling existing ones), but at the end of the day those decisions are yours to make and not mine.
On the other hand, I feel like substantial improvements could be made with negligible effort. For instance, I think youâd make enormous progress if you simply added the introductory article on Global Health and Development to the reading list on the EA.org homepage, replacing âCrucial Considerations and Wise Philanthropyâ.
Global Health is currently a glaring omission since it is the most popular cause in the EA community and it is highly accessible to an introductory audience. And I think nearly everyone (near-or-long-termist) would agree that âCrucial Considerationsâ (currently second on the reading list after a brief introduction to EA) is quite obviously not meant for an introductory audience. It assumes a working understanding of x-risk (in general and specific x-risks), has numerous slides with complex equations, and uses highly technical language that will be inscrutable to most people who have only read a brief intro to EA (e.g. âwe should oppose extra funding for nanotechnology even though superintelligence and ubiquitous surveillance might be very dangerous on their own, including posing existential risk, given certain background assumptions about the technological completion conjecture.â
Youâve written (in the same comment you quoted): âI think that CEA has a history of pushing longtermism in somewhat underhand ways⊠given this background of pushing longtermism, I think itâs reasonable to be skeptical of CEAâs approach on this sort of thing.â You donât need to hire a contractor or prioritize an overhaul of the ea.org site to address my skepticism. But it would go a long way if Aaron were to spend a day looking for low hanging fruit like my suggested change, or even if you just took the tiny step of adding Global Health to the list of (mostly longtermist) causes on the homepage. I assume the omission of Global Health was an oversight. But now that itâs been called to your attention, if you still donât think Global Health should be added to the homepage I doubt thereâs anything you can say or do to resolve my skepticism.
2. Running EffectiveAltruism.org is just one example of work that CEA undertakes on behalf of the broader community (EAG, groups work, and community health are other examples). Generally speaking, how (if at all) do you think CEA should be accountable to the broader community when conducting this work? To use an absurd example, if CEA announced that the theme for EAG 2022 is going to be âFactory farmed beef⊠itâs whatâs for dinnerâ, what would you see as the ideal process for resolving the inevitable objections?
Now may not be the right time for you to explain how you think about this, and this comment thread almost certainly isnât the right place. But I think itâs important for you to address these issues at some point in the not too distant future. And before you make up your mind, I hope youâll gather input from as broad a cross section of the community as possible.
Edit: The screenshots below no longer reflect the exact look of the site, since I went ahead and did some of the reshuffling of the âKey Ideasâ series that I mentioned. But the only change to the content of that series was the removal of âCrucial Considerations and Wise Philanthropy, which Iâd been meaning to get to for a while. Thanks for the prompt!
*****
Though Iâm a bit confused by this comment (see below), Iâm really glad youâve been keeping up the conversation! At any given time, there are many things I could be working on, and itâs quite plausible that Iâve invested too little time in EA.org relative to other things with less readership. Iâm glad to be poked and prodded into rethinking that approach.
Regarding my confusion:
Which reading list are you referring to? (Edit: see here)
The âKey Ideasâ list of introductory articles (see the bottom of this page) has always included the GHD article (at least since I started working at CEA in late 2018):
So has the Resources page:
I think it would be perfectly reasonable to have more than one article on this topic (as we will once the Fellowship content becomes our main set of intro resources). And I do plan to reshuffle the article list a bit this week to move the Global Health and Animal Welfare articles towards the top (I agree they should be more prominent). But I wanted to make sure we didnât have some other part of the site where this article isnât showing up.
As for future variants on our intro content:
You can see the EA Fellowship curriculum here. That set of articles is almost identical to what will show up on the Forum soon (I have several sequences published in âhiddenâ mode, and will publicize them once my project partner signs off).
To briefly summarize, there are eight separate âsequencesâ in the Fellowship:
Two on general EA principles + cost-effectiveness calculation (mostly explained through examples from global health)
One on moral circle expansion (mostly animal welfare)
One on longtermism, generally
One on existential risk, generally
One on biorisk + AI risk
One on epistemics and forecasting
One on âputting it into practiceâ (careers + donations + research ideas)
Once weâve adapted EA.org to refer to this content as our default introduction, I anticipate weâll remove most of our current intro articles from prominent places on the site (though Iâm not certain of which will remain).
Iâve already shared this list of articles with a lot of people in the categories âfocuses on non-longtermist causesâ and/âor âhas written good critiques of EA thingsâ, to get feedback on what they think of the topic balance/âexact articles chosen. Iâd also welcome feedback from anyone seeing this â and of course, once we actually publish the Forum version, Iâll be hoping to get lots of suggestions from the hundreds of people who will see it soon afterward.
Thank you for making these changes Aaron, and for your openness to this discussion and feedback!
Youâre correct, I was referring to the reading list on the homepage. The changes you made there, to the key ideas series, and to the resources page (especially when you complete the planned reordering) all seem like substantial improvements. I really appreciate that youâve updated the site!
I took a quick look at the Fellowship content, and it generally looks like youâve chosen good content and done a reasonable job of providing a balanced overview of EA (thanks for getting input from the perspectives you mentioned). Ironically, my main quibble with the content (and itâs note a huge one) is that itâs too EA-centric. For example, if I was trying to convince someone that pandemics are important Iâd show them Bill Gatesâ TED Talk on pandemics rather than an EA podcast as the former approach leverages Gatesâ and TEDâs credibility.
While I generally think the Fellowship content appears good (at least after a brief review), I still think itâd be a very big mistake to âadapt EA.org to refer to this content as our default introduction.â The Fellowship is for people who opt into participating in an 8 week program with an estimated 2-3 hours of preparation for each weekly session. EA.org is for people who google âeffective altruismâ. Thereâs an enormous difference between those two audiences, and the content they see should reflect that difference.
As an example, the first piece of core content in the Fellowship is a 30 minute intro to EA video, whereas Iâd imagine EA.org should try to communicate key ideas in just a few minutes and then quickly try to get people to e.g. sign up for the EA Newsletter. That said, we shouldnât have to guess what content works best on the EA.org homepage, we should be able to figure it out experimentally through A/ââB testing.
Credit goes to James Aung, Will Payne, and others (I donât know the full list) who created the curriculum! I was one of many people asked to provide feedback, but Iâm responsible for maybe 2% of the final content, if that.
I think this is a very reasonable quibble. In the context of âthis person already signed up for a fellowshipâ, the additional credibility may be less important, but this is definitely a consideration that could apply to ârandom people finding the content onlineâ.
I wholly agree, and I certainly wouldnât subject our random Googlers to eight weeksâ worth of material! To clarify, by âthis contentâ I mean âsome of this content, probably a similar amount to the amount of content we now feature on EA.orgâł, rather than âall ~80 articlesâ.
The current introduction to EA, which links people to the newsletter and some other basic resources, will continue to be the first piece of content we show people. Some of the other articles are likely to be replaced by articles or sequences from the Fellowship â but with an emphasis on relatively brief and approachable content.
Ah, thanks for clarifying :) The devil is always in the details, but âbrief and approachable contentâ following the same rough structure as the fellowship sounds very promising. I look forward to seeing the new site!
Aha! I now believe you were referring to this list:
Thatâs a very good thing to have noticed â we did not, in fact, have the Global Health and Development article in that list, only at the âRead Moreâ link (which goes to the Resources page). Iâve added it. Thank you for pointing this out.
For a bit of context that doesnât excuse the oversight: Of ~2500 visitors to EA.org in the last week, more than 1000 clicked through to the âKey Ideasâ series (which has always included the article) or the âResourcesâ page (ditto). Fewer than 100 clicked any of the articles in that list, which is why it didnât come to mind â but Iâll be happy to see the occasional click for âCrucial Considerationsâ go to global dev instead.
Part of my plan for EA.org has been some refactoring on the back end. Looks like this should include âmake sure the same reading materials appear in each place, rather than having multiple distinct listsâ.
On the last point: our hosting provider Netlify had an outage affecting a subset of their customers that happened to include us. We were down for about 2 hours, which is the longest outage I can remember in the last 3 years.
FYI, Iâm still seeing an error message, albeit a different one than earlier. Hereâs what I get now:
That said, I didnât mean to imply the site has historically had abnormal downtime, sorry for not making that clear.
This problem should be fixed now too.