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!
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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”.
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”.