I’ve thought about this some more and I have some idea of the kind of process I would use if I were trying to curate the best content in EA.
I don’t trust myself to make intuitive judgments about which posts are best—I’m going to end up picking the ones that were the most fun to read. I believe I could mitigate this by creating an explicit checklist of the things I would want in a “best of” post, and then look for posts matching it.
Actually the #1 thing I’d look for in a post is, did I do substantially more good as a result of reading this post? Sometimes it’s obvious how something you read helps you do good and sometimes it’s more vague, but you should at least be able to say why a post substantially benefited you if you’re going to nominate it as a “best of” post.
This is a pretty difficult test to pass. Some things I read that did cause me to do noticeably more good include:
Peter Singer’s All Animals Are Equal, because it played a significant role in me becoming vegetarian (and later vegan) and taking animal welfare seriously
GiveWell’s writeup on VillageReach because it taught me that finding good charities is hard and you shouldn’t rely on naive cost-effectiveness estimates
GiveWell’s suggested questions to ask when evaluating charities (I don’t know if this is still on the site)
The book The Intelligent Asset Allocator, which ostensibly has nothing to do with doing good, but helped me learn how to better manage my investments which indirectly enables me to do a lot more good
None of these are from 2016 so they’re not eligible. As far as I can remember, the only things I’ve read in 2016 that caused me to do substantially more good were charities’ writeups about their own activities.
I’ve thought about this some more and I have some idea of the kind of process I would use if I were trying to curate the best content in EA.
I don’t trust myself to make intuitive judgments about which posts are best—I’m going to end up picking the ones that were the most fun to read. I believe I could mitigate this by creating an explicit checklist of the things I would want in a “best of” post, and then look for posts matching it.
Actually the #1 thing I’d look for in a post is, did I do substantially more good as a result of reading this post? Sometimes it’s obvious how something you read helps you do good and sometimes it’s more vague, but you should at least be able to say why a post substantially benefited you if you’re going to nominate it as a “best of” post.
This is a pretty difficult test to pass. Some things I read that did cause me to do noticeably more good include:
Peter Singer’s All Animals Are Equal, because it played a significant role in me becoming vegetarian (and later vegan) and taking animal welfare seriously
GiveWell’s writeup on VillageReach because it taught me that finding good charities is hard and you shouldn’t rely on naive cost-effectiveness estimates
GiveWell’s suggested questions to ask when evaluating charities (I don’t know if this is still on the site)
Brian Tomasik’s The Importance of Wild Animal Suffering because it convinced me that wild animal suffering is important
Brian Tomasik’s cost-effectiveness analysis on factory farming interventions
The book The Intelligent Asset Allocator, which ostensibly has nothing to do with doing good, but helped me learn how to better manage my investments which indirectly enables me to do a lot more good
Alexei Andreev’s Maximizing Your Donations via a Job
None of these are from 2016 so they’re not eligible. As far as I can remember, the only things I’ve read in 2016 that caused me to do substantially more good were charities’ writeups about their own activities.
Givewell’s suggested questions to ask are at their Do-It-Yourself Charity Evaluation Questions page.