Do you see most of the expected value of the forum coming from value/year similar to the current value/year but continuing into the future (maintaining what you currently have)? Or is most of the value coming from the possibility of producing much more value per year (going big)?
If you imagine going big as most of expected value, then how do you anticipate going big?
Thanks for this great question. It’s hard to answer this both because our model of how the Forum creates value includes lots of diffuse second and third order effects, as well as because well, predicting the future is hard! My guess is that the biggest factor here is the size of the EA movement. I would guess that the value of the Forum will scale as the EA movement and community scales.
Here’s a summary of how I think about the value of the Forum:
The Forum is an educational resource, providing different sorts of useful information to different users, from announcements and updates to novel research ideas and opinions.
The Forum helps segments of the EA community create common knowledge and make collective progress on important ideas, as well as coordinate on opportunities.
The Forum helps folks learn and get excited about EA ideas and causes and helps build a sense of community around them. This has the effect of motivating folks to work on the important ideas that are discussed in the space.
Often when we try to ask individual users how the Forum has been impactful for them, we hear that they enjoy reading and have learned about important ideas or made useful connections on the Forum. EA organizations tell us the Forum helps them establish their brand and ideas and later on recruit funding or employees.
Based on this, my guess is that the network of users that participate in the Forum is a huge factor in its value—a bigger EA movement would mean coordination and education would simply have a bigger audience and more potential for impact.
In terms of going big or maintaining what we have, I think we’re probably near to the edge of the impact we can get with tech improvements given the current size of the EA community, though there’s disagreement about this. A content specialist could add a lot of value in ways not through the tech, through content curation, special events, etc. That said, we do plan to take big swings that are outside of the core product of the EA forum, as JP mentions elsewhere.
Do you see most of the expected value of the forum coming from value/year similar to the current value/year but continuing into the future (maintaining what you currently have)? Or is most of the value coming from the possibility of producing much more value per year (going big)?
If you imagine going big as most of expected value, then how do you anticipate going big?
Thanks for this great question. It’s hard to answer this both because our model of how the Forum creates value includes lots of diffuse second and third order effects, as well as because well, predicting the future is hard! My guess is that the biggest factor here is the size of the EA movement. I would guess that the value of the Forum will scale as the EA movement and community scales.
Here’s a summary of how I think about the value of the Forum:
The Forum is an educational resource, providing different sorts of useful information to different users, from announcements and updates to novel research ideas and opinions.
The Forum helps segments of the EA community create common knowledge and make collective progress on important ideas, as well as coordinate on opportunities.
The Forum helps folks learn and get excited about EA ideas and causes and helps build a sense of community around them. This has the effect of motivating folks to work on the important ideas that are discussed in the space.
Often when we try to ask individual users how the Forum has been impactful for them, we hear that they enjoy reading and have learned about important ideas or made useful connections on the Forum. EA organizations tell us the Forum helps them establish their brand and ideas and later on recruit funding or employees.
Based on this, my guess is that the network of users that participate in the Forum is a huge factor in its value—a bigger EA movement would mean coordination and education would simply have a bigger audience and more potential for impact.
In terms of going big or maintaining what we have, I think we’re probably near to the edge of the impact we can get with tech improvements given the current size of the EA community, though there’s disagreement about this. A content specialist could add a lot of value in ways not through the tech, through content curation, special events, etc. That said, we do plan to take big swings that are outside of the core product of the EA forum, as JP mentions elsewhere.