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 haven’t been able to give the site as much attention as I’d like.)
I’ve made some small changes over the last year (removing and editing material in the introduction, updating the Resources page), but I predict that I’ll make bigger changes over the next six months, once we’ve published EA Fellowship material on the Forum and fully launched the wiki.
I’m not making any concrete commitments here — our priorities over that time period aren’t yet set in stone — but here are things I’d like to do, in case anyone has responses to these initial plans:
Change up the introductory material a lot. The current “Introduction to EA” essay seems good to me, but it’s been a long time since we overhauled the rest of the intro content. Now that we have a centralized EA Fellowship, I’d 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 don’t have to leave the site to read further.
These changes will also lead to the Resources page changing quite a bit — 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 GWWC’s), and I expect to draw heavily from those.
Change the “Get Involved” section — 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, we’d 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 we’re likely to draw from that in creating ours.
This project won’t necessarily be owned by CEA; there’s a chance that one group’s 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 won’t be hosted on the Forum: the “Get Involved” tag is nice, but doesn’t allow much visibility into what an opportunity looks like, isn’t 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 — there are some old transcripts and blog posts archived there, which we’ll gradually be cross-posting to the Forum as part of a general “cross-post everything to the Forum” project that will stretch across the year.
Overall, we’re looking to de-emphasize EA.org and use the Forum as a portal to a wider range of EA content/opportunities, though that site’s great URL and SEO mean we’ll still want it to be a good landing page.
I’m 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 “leaders”?
I’m also curious if/how that reference class will be communicated on the site, as I think that’s 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) “emphasized [CEA’s] 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.” If it was a problem that the handbook “ostensibly represented EA thinking as a whole, but actually represented the views of some of CEA’s staff”, I’d think that problem is magnified immensely when that content is on ea.org.
2. Change the “Get Involved” section… This project won’t necessarily be owned by CEA
Would CEA ever consider temporarily or permanently transferring the broader ownership of effectivealtruism.org to another person/organization? 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/B 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 hasn’t really prioritized ea.org over the last couple of years and doesn’t 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 “effective altruism” has been deprioritized for so long. With so many EAs looking for jobs and/or 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 “use the Forum as a portal to a wider range of EA content/opportunities” in parallel.)
(And ironically, effectivealtruism.org is down at time of writing. Just submitted a ticket via the EA funds page…)
In the future, I’d 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 complicated—it’s hard to figure out exactly what “cause prio” means, it would be important to reach out through diverse networks to make sure there aren’t network biases etc.
Although we haven’t yet commissioned that research, that’s 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 it’s a shame that the EA.org resources are still quite similar to the handbook content. We’re working on a replacement which should be more up to date, but I’m not sure when we’ll make the relevant changes.
Would CEA ever consider temporarily or permanently transferring the broader ownership of effectivealtruism.org to another person/organization?
We’d consider offers (contact us), but I think we’re more likely to aim to develop the capacity to do this in-house rather than finding someone external to take this on (though I don’t want to make specific commitments).
1. I’m 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, I’m legitimately grateful that you’re 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 “Crucial Considerations” (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. “we 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.”
You’ve written (in the same comment you quoted): “I think that CEA has a history of pushing longtermism in somewhat underhand ways… given this background of pushing longtermism, I think it’s reasonable to be skeptical of CEA’s approach on this sort of thing.” You don’t 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 it’s been called to your attention, if you still don’t think Global Health should be added to the homepage I doubt there’s 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 “Factory farmed beef… it’s what’s for dinner”, 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 isn’t the right place. But I think it’s 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 you’ll 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 “Key Ideas” series that I mentioned. But the only change to the content of that series was the removal of “Crucial Considerations and Wise Philanthropy, which I’d been meaning to get to for a while. Thanks for the prompt!
*****
Though I’m a bit confused by this comment (see below), I’m really glad you’ve been keeping up the conversation! At any given time, there are many things I could be working on, and it’s quite plausible that I’ve invested too little time in EA.org relative to other things with less readership. I’m glad to be poked and prodded into rethinking that approach.
Which reading list are you referring to? (Edit: see here)
The “Key Ideas” 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 didn’t have some other part of the site where this article isn’t 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 “hidden” mode, and will publicize them once my project partner signs off).
To briefly summarize, there are eight separate “sequences” 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 “putting it into practice” (careers + donations + research ideas)
Once we’ve adapted EA.org to refer to this content as our default introduction, I anticipate we’ll remove most of our current intro articles from prominent places on the site (though I’m not certain of which will remain).
I’ve already shared this list of articles with a lot of people in the categories “focuses on non-longtermist causes” and/or “has written good critiques of EA things”, to get feedback on what they think of the topic balance/exact articles chosen. I’d also welcome feedback from anyone seeing this — and of course, once we actually publish the Forum version, I’ll 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!
You’re 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 you’ve updated the site!
I took a quick look at the Fellowship content, and it generally looks like you’ve 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 it’s note a huge one) is that it’s too EA-centric. For example, if I was trying to convince someone that pandemics are important I’d show them Bill Gates’ TED Talk on pandemics rather than an EA podcast as the former approach leverages Gates’ and TED’s credibility.
While I generally think the Fellowship content appears good (at least after a brief review), I still think it’d be a very big mistake to “adapt EA.org to refer to this content as our default introduction.” 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 “effective altruism”. There’s 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 I’d 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 shouldn’t have to guess what content works best on the EA.org homepage, we should be able to figure it out experimentally through A/B testing.
It generally looks like you’ve 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 don’t know the full list) who created the curriculum! I was one of many people asked to provide feedback, but I’m responsible for maybe 2% of the final content, if that.
Ironically, my main quibble with the content (and it’s note a huge one) is that it’s too EA-centric. For example, if I was trying to convince someone that pandemics are important I’d show them Bill Gates’ TED Talk on pandemics rather than an EA podcast as the former approach leverages Gates’ and TED’s credibility.
I think this is a very reasonable quibble. In the context of “this person already signed up for a fellowship”, the additional credibility may be less important, but this is definitely a consideration that could apply to “random people finding the content online”.
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 “effective altruism”. There’s an enormous difference between those two audiences, and the content they see should reflect that difference.
I wholly agree, and I certainly wouldn’t subject our random Googlers to eight weeks’ worth of material! To clarify, by “this content” I mean “some of this content, probably a similar amount to the amount of content we now feature on EA.org″, rather than “all ~80 articles”.
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 — but with an emphasis on relatively brief and approachable content.
I certainly wouldn’t subject our random Googlers to eight weeks’ worth of material! To clarify, by “this content” I mean “some of this content, probably a similar amount to the amount of content we now feature on EA.org″, rather than “all ~80 articles”.
Ah, thanks for clarifying :) The devil is always in the details, but “brief and approachable content” 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:
That’s a very good thing to have noticed — we did not, in fact, have the Global Health and Development article in that list, only at the “Read More” link (which goes to the Resources page). I’ve added it. Thank you for pointing this out.
For a bit of context that doesn’t excuse the oversight: Of ~2500 visitors to EA.org in the last week, more than 1000 clicked through to the “Key Ideas” series (which has always included the article) or the “Resources” page (ditto). Fewer than 100 clicked any of the articles in that list, which is why it didn’t come to mind — but I’ll be happy to see the occasional click for “Crucial Considerations” 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 “make sure the same reading materials appear in each place, rather than having multiple distinct lists”.
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 haven’t been able to give the site as much attention as I’d like.)
I’ve made some small changes over the last year (removing and editing material in the introduction, updating the Resources page), but I predict that I’ll make bigger changes over the next six months, once we’ve published EA Fellowship material on the Forum and fully launched the wiki.
I’m not making any concrete commitments here — our priorities over that time period aren’t yet set in stone — but here are things I’d like to do, in case anyone has responses to these initial plans:
Change up the introductory material a lot. The current “Introduction to EA” essay seems good to me, but it’s been a long time since we overhauled the rest of the intro content. Now that we have a centralized EA Fellowship, I’d 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 don’t have to leave the site to read further.
These changes will also lead to the Resources page changing quite a bit — 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 GWWC’s), and I expect to draw heavily from those.
Change the “Get Involved” section — 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, we’d 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 we’re likely to draw from that in creating ours.
This project won’t necessarily be owned by CEA; there’s a chance that one group’s 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 won’t be hosted on the Forum: the “Get Involved” tag is nice, but doesn’t allow much visibility into what an opportunity looks like, isn’t 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 — there are some old transcripts and blog posts archived there, which we’ll gradually be cross-posting to the Forum as part of a general “cross-post everything to the Forum” project that will stretch across the year.
Overall, we’re looking to de-emphasize EA.org and use the Forum as a portal to a wider range of EA content/opportunities, though that site’s great URL and SEO mean we’ll still want it to be a good landing page.
I’m 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 “leaders”?
I’m also curious if/how that reference class will be communicated on the site, as I think that’s 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) “emphasized [CEA’s] 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.” If it was a problem that the handbook “ostensibly represented EA thinking as a whole, but actually represented the views of some of CEA’s staff”, I’d 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/organization? 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/B 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 hasn’t really prioritized ea.org over the last couple of years and doesn’t 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 “effective altruism” has been deprioritized for so long. With so many EAs looking for jobs and/or 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 “use the Forum as a portal to a wider range of EA content/opportunities” in parallel.)
(And ironically, effectivealtruism.org is down at time of writing. Just submitted a ticket via the EA funds page…)
I touched on this in an earlier comment:
Although we haven’t yet commissioned that research, that’s 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 it’s a shame that the EA.org resources are still quite similar to the handbook content. We’re working on a replacement which should be more up to date, but I’m not sure when we’ll make the relevant changes.
We’d consider offers (contact us), but I think we’re more likely to aim to develop the capacity to do this in-house rather than finding someone external to take this on (though I don’t want to make specific commitments).
Thanks for this response Max!
1. I’m 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, I’m legitimately grateful that you’re 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 you’d 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 “Crucial Considerations and Wise Philanthropy”.
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 “Crucial Considerations” (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. “we 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.”
You’ve written (in the same comment you quoted): “I think that CEA has a history of pushing longtermism in somewhat underhand ways… given this background of pushing longtermism, I think it’s reasonable to be skeptical of CEA’s approach on this sort of thing.” You don’t 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 it’s been called to your attention, if you still don’t think Global Health should be added to the homepage I doubt there’s 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 “Factory farmed beef… it’s what’s for dinner”, 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 isn’t the right place. But I think it’s 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 you’ll 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 “Key Ideas” series that I mentioned. But the only change to the content of that series was the removal of “Crucial Considerations and Wise Philanthropy, which I’d been meaning to get to for a while. Thanks for the prompt!
*****
Though I’m a bit confused by this comment (see below), I’m really glad you’ve been keeping up the conversation! At any given time, there are many things I could be working on, and it’s quite plausible that I’ve invested too little time in EA.org relative to other things with less readership. I’m glad to be poked and prodded into rethinking that approach.
Regarding my confusion:
Which reading list are you referring to? (Edit: see here)
The “Key Ideas” 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 didn’t have some other part of the site where this article isn’t 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 “hidden” mode, and will publicize them once my project partner signs off).
To briefly summarize, there are eight separate “sequences” 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 “putting it into practice” (careers + donations + research ideas)
Once we’ve adapted EA.org to refer to this content as our default introduction, I anticipate we’ll remove most of our current intro articles from prominent places on the site (though I’m not certain of which will remain).
I’ve already shared this list of articles with a lot of people in the categories “focuses on non-longtermist causes” and/or “has written good critiques of EA things”, to get feedback on what they think of the topic balance/exact articles chosen. I’d also welcome feedback from anyone seeing this — and of course, once we actually publish the Forum version, I’ll 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!
You’re 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 you’ve updated the site!
I took a quick look at the Fellowship content, and it generally looks like you’ve 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 it’s note a huge one) is that it’s too EA-centric. For example, if I was trying to convince someone that pandemics are important I’d show them Bill Gates’ TED Talk on pandemics rather than an EA podcast as the former approach leverages Gates’ and TED’s credibility.
While I generally think the Fellowship content appears good (at least after a brief review), I still think it’d be a very big mistake to “adapt EA.org to refer to this content as our default introduction.” 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 “effective altruism”. There’s 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 I’d 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 shouldn’t have to guess what content works best on the EA.org homepage, we should be able to figure it out experimentally through A/B testing.
Credit goes to James Aung, Will Payne, and others (I don’t know the full list) who created the curriculum! I was one of many people asked to provide feedback, but I’m responsible for maybe 2% of the final content, if that.
I think this is a very reasonable quibble. In the context of “this person already signed up for a fellowship”, the additional credibility may be less important, but this is definitely a consideration that could apply to “random people finding the content online”.
I wholly agree, and I certainly wouldn’t subject our random Googlers to eight weeks’ worth of material! To clarify, by “this content” I mean “some of this content, probably a similar amount to the amount of content we now feature on EA.org″, rather than “all ~80 articles”.
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 — but with an emphasis on relatively brief and approachable content.
Ah, thanks for clarifying :) The devil is always in the details, but “brief and approachable content” 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:
That’s a very good thing to have noticed — we did not, in fact, have the Global Health and Development article in that list, only at the “Read More” link (which goes to the Resources page). I’ve added it. Thank you for pointing this out.
For a bit of context that doesn’t excuse the oversight: Of ~2500 visitors to EA.org in the last week, more than 1000 clicked through to the “Key Ideas” series (which has always included the article) or the “Resources” page (ditto). Fewer than 100 clicked any of the articles in that list, which is why it didn’t come to mind — but I’ll be happy to see the occasional click for “Crucial Considerations” 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 “make sure the same reading materials appear in each place, rather than having multiple distinct lists”.
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, I’m still seeing an error message, albeit a different one than earlier. Here’s what I get now:
That said, I didn’t mean to imply the site has historically had abnormal downtime, sorry for not making that clear.
This problem should be fixed now too.