I agree with most of this (Note: Peter is my manager).
You mention “impact weighting” audience numbers but this is actually a much bigger point than you’re making it to be—an audience of ten people can very frequently be a lot more important than an audience of 10,000 if the audience of ten is carefully selected and targeted.
I think if anything this understates things. I think my most impactful reports at RP have most of their impact come from improving the decision quality of <5 people, and most of those <5 people are ones we’ve ex ante identified well in advance (ie, whoever commissioned the report).
From the article:
One might make the case that the highest impact audience to target usually are those high achievers we all know and want to hate but can’t. Those terrible humans who seem to be in perfect control of their lives, who work 80 hours on a treadmill desk eating only the healthiest foods, whose idea of a vacation is a 10-day Vipassana retreat. Those sorts of people won’t care if it’s written in a dry style, and since it’s a power law of impact, then it mostly matters how these people respond.
The first argument against this is that even amongst the most conscientious people[...]
The second argument is that a lot of the highest impact people are, in fact, human
I understand that the article is exaggerating for comedic effect, but I think there’s an important reasoning slip. Namely, people with lots of decision-making power in EA are both trained and selected heavily for their ability to read lots of dense arguments and coming to a reasoned conclusion, and only moderately selected for general conscientiousness. So I would expect e.g. the top ~100 EAs in decision-making power to be much higher than average in revealed ability/inclination to read fairly dense arguments compared to eg the typical EAF reader, and only moderately or slightly higher in propensity to eat healthy foods or exercise regularly.
So in that regard, being more engaging in the sense that willbradshaw defines it as “reducing mental effort per unit information transferred”[1] to the target audience is great, but broad engagement isn’t as worthwhile.
That said, I think you (Peter) underestimate the value of broad (or relatively broad, e.g. “to highly educated Westerners”) engagement in improving the value of our own thoughts via public feedback, particularly in fields where EA does not have many of the relevant domain experts. For example, some of the comments on Neil and my summary on cultured meat TEAs were mildly helpful for us, as non-experts wading into and attempting to come to a reasoned conclusion on a deeply technical field, and I imagine it would be moderately helpful in improving our judgement if we got 10x the comments drawn from the same distribution.
In addition, I do think we are currently underutilizing resources on communicating ideas better/more efficiently to key stakeholders, though it appears that there are works in the plans for RP to be better at this in2022.
[1] Which is NOT, as I noted, how I would naturally define “interesting” or “engaging.”
I agree with most of this (Note: Peter is my manager).
I think if anything this understates things. I think my most impactful reports at RP have most of their impact come from improving the decision quality of <5 people, and most of those <5 people are ones we’ve ex ante identified well in advance (ie, whoever commissioned the report).
From the article:
I understand that the article is exaggerating for comedic effect, but I think there’s an important reasoning slip. Namely, people with lots of decision-making power in EA are both trained and selected heavily for their ability to read lots of dense arguments and coming to a reasoned conclusion, and only moderately selected for general conscientiousness. So I would expect e.g. the top ~100 EAs in decision-making power to be much higher than average in revealed ability/inclination to read fairly dense arguments compared to eg the typical EAF reader, and only moderately or slightly higher in propensity to eat healthy foods or exercise regularly.
So in that regard, being more engaging in the sense that willbradshaw defines it as “reducing mental effort per unit information transferred”[1] to the target audience is great, but broad engagement isn’t as worthwhile.
That said, I think you (Peter) underestimate the value of broad (or relatively broad, e.g. “to highly educated Westerners”) engagement in improving the value of our own thoughts via public feedback, particularly in fields where EA does not have many of the relevant domain experts. For example, some of the comments on Neil and my summary on cultured meat TEAs were mildly helpful for us, as non-experts wading into and attempting to come to a reasoned conclusion on a deeply technical field, and I imagine it would be moderately helpful in improving our judgement if we got 10x the comments drawn from the same distribution.
In addition, I do think we are currently underutilizing resources on communicating ideas better/more efficiently to key stakeholders, though it appears that there are works in the plans for RP to be better at this in 2022.
[1] Which is NOT, as I noted, how I would naturally define “interesting” or “engaging.”