The EA Forum is the central place to discuss effective altruism. Many students worry that they don’t have anything to contribute —but they probably do! In this EA Student Summit 2020 talk, Aaron explains how you can use the Forum to share your views and get feedback from experts. He also leads a brainstorming session to help you think of ideas for new posts.
This is the document referred to in the presentation.
In the future, we may post a transcript for this talk, but we haven’t created one yet. If you’d like to create a transcript for this talk, contact Aaron Gertler — he can help you get started.
Summary of the guidance here (roughly):
Each person has a unique nature that means most given ideas will probably be additive to EA if you’ve reflected on it for a bit. So have a low bar to ask questions or make a post, using the shortforum format to publish less fleshed out ideas.
Some specific useful bits:
The EA Forum is a flat intellectual hierarchy, so feel free to comment wherever you think you can be additive, despite the title of the person you may be commenting to
If you’ve engaged deeply with something recently (read a book most people in EA haven’t, took a class at university, etc.) it is probably worth it to try to condense what you learned and share it with others