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!
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!