Hi Rob, I also like the idea of “there being a wide variety of ‘intro’ EA resources that reflect different views of what EA causes and approaches are best, cater to different audiences, and employ different communication/pedagogy methods.”
However, it’s not easy for “people make new intro resources to compete with the old one, rather than trying to make any one resource universally beloved (which can lead to mediocre or uncohesive designed-by-committee end products).” Most people do not have the brand or reach of 80,000 Hours.
It’s likely that only very popular figures in the EA community would get substantial reach if they made an Intro to EA collection, and it would still likely not be as large as the reach of 80,000 Hours’s. As such, 80,000 Hours’s choice of what Intro to EA resources to include is quite hard to compete with, and thus should ideally be more representative of what the community thinks.
I do see that many hours probably went into picking the ten episodes. But it seems like 80K didn’t get enough feedback from more people (or a wider variety of people) before releasing this. Hence I’m giving my feedback this way, and judging from the upvotes, quite a few people agree with me.
Of course, I agree that more testing and re-listening could be done. But I would think that a significant % of people who get interested in EA, including quite a few people who are into longtermism, first get interested in global health and development or animal welfare, before getting interested in longtermism. And I think 80K might be losing out on these people with this feed.
Hi Rob, I also like the idea of “there being a wide variety of ‘intro’ EA resources that reflect different views of what EA causes and approaches are best, cater to different audiences, and employ different communication/pedagogy methods.”
However, it’s not easy for “people make new intro resources to compete with the old one, rather than trying to make any one resource universally beloved (which can lead to mediocre or uncohesive designed-by-committee end products).” Most people do not have the brand or reach of 80,000 Hours.
It’s likely that only very popular figures in the EA community would get substantial reach if they made an Intro to EA collection, and it would still likely not be as large as the reach of 80,000 Hours’s. As such, 80,000 Hours’s choice of what Intro to EA resources to include is quite hard to compete with, and thus should ideally be more representative of what the community thinks.
80K will somewhat solve this problem themselves since they will create their own feed that exposes people to a wider variety of problems and topics, and possibly they could create a near-termist feed aside from that too. But I still think it would be better if what 80K marketed as an “Intro to EA” feed had more global health and dev’t and animal welfare content. I talk more about this here.
I do see that many hours probably went into picking the ten episodes. But it seems like 80K didn’t get enough feedback from more people (or a wider variety of people) before releasing this. Hence I’m giving my feedback this way, and judging from the upvotes, quite a few people agree with me.
Of course, I agree that more testing and re-listening could be done. But I would think that a significant % of people who get interested in EA, including quite a few people who are into longtermism, first get interested in global health and development or animal welfare, before getting interested in longtermism. And I think 80K might be losing out on these people with this feed.