There are currently key aspects of EA infrastructure that aren’t being run well, and I’d love to see EAIF fund improvements. For example, it could fund things like the operation of the effectivealtruism.org or the EA Newsletter. There are several important problems with the way these projects are currently being managed by CEA.
These projects get lost among CEA’s numerous priorities. For instance, “for several years promoting [effectivealtruism.org], including through search engine optimization, was not a priority for us. Prior to 2022, the website was updated infrequently, giving an inaccurate impression of the community and its ideas as they changed over time.” This lack of attention also led to serious oversites like Global Poverty (the community’s top priority at the time) not being represented on the homepage for an extended period. Similarly, Lizka recently wrote that “the monthly EA Newsletter seems quite valuable, and I had many ideas for how to improve it that I wanted to investigate or test.” But due to competing priorities, “I never prioritized doing a serious Newsletter-improvement project. (And by the time I was actually putting it together every month, I’d have very little time or brain space to experiment.”
There doesn’t seem to be much, if any, accountability for ensuring these projects are operated well. These projects are a relatively small part of CEA’s portfolio, CEA is just one part of EV, and EV is undergoing huge changes. So it wouldn’t be shocking if nobody was paying close attention. And perhaps because of that, the limited public data we have available on both effectivealtruism.org and the EA newsletter doesn’t look great. Per CEA’s dashboard (which last updated these figures in June), after years of steady growth the newsletter’s subscriber count has been falling modestly since FTX collapsed. And traffic to ea.org’s “introduction page”, which is where the first two links on the homepage are designed to direct people, is the lowest it has been in at least 7 years and continues to drift downward.
I think all these problems could be improved if EAIF funded these projects, either by providing earmarked funding (and accountability) to CEA or by finding applicants to take these projects over.
To be clear, these aren’t the only “infrastructure” projects that I’d like to see EAIF fund. Other examples include the EA Survey (which IMO is already being done well but would likely appreciate EAIF funding) and conducting an ongoing analysis of community growth at various stages of the growth funnel (e.g. by updating and/or expanding this work).
There are currently key aspects of EA infrastructure that aren’t being run well, and I’d love to see EAIF fund improvements. For example, it could fund things like the operation of the effectivealtruism.org or the EA Newsletter. There are several important problems with the way these projects are currently being managed by CEA.
Content does not reflect the community’s cause prioritization (a longstanding issue). And there’s no transparency about this. An FAQ on Effectivealtruism.org mentions that “CEA created this website to help explain and spread the ideas of effective altruism.” But there’s no mention of the fact that the site’s cause prioritization is influenced by factors including the cause prioritization of CEA’s (explicitly GCR-focused) main funder (providing ~80% of CEA’s funding).
These projects get lost among CEA’s numerous priorities. For instance, “for several years promoting [effectivealtruism.org], including through search engine optimization, was not a priority for us. Prior to 2022, the website was updated infrequently, giving an inaccurate impression of the community and its ideas as they changed over time.” This lack of attention also led to serious oversites like Global Poverty (the community’s top priority at the time) not being represented on the homepage for an extended period. Similarly, Lizka recently wrote that “the monthly EA Newsletter seems quite valuable, and I had many ideas for how to improve it that I wanted to investigate or test.” But due to competing priorities, “I never prioritized doing a serious Newsletter-improvement project. (And by the time I was actually putting it together every month, I’d have very little time or brain space to experiment.”
There doesn’t seem to be much, if any, accountability for ensuring these projects are operated well. These projects are a relatively small part of CEA’s portfolio, CEA is just one part of EV, and EV is undergoing huge changes. So it wouldn’t be shocking if nobody was paying close attention. And perhaps because of that, the limited public data we have available on both effectivealtruism.org and the EA newsletter doesn’t look great. Per CEA’s dashboard (which last updated these figures in June), after years of steady growth the newsletter’s subscriber count has been falling modestly since FTX collapsed. And traffic to ea.org’s “introduction page”, which is where the first two links on the homepage are designed to direct people, is the lowest it has been in at least 7 years and continues to drift downward.
I think all these problems could be improved if EAIF funded these projects, either by providing earmarked funding (and accountability) to CEA or by finding applicants to take these projects over.
To be clear, these aren’t the only “infrastructure” projects that I’d like to see EAIF fund. Other examples include the EA Survey (which IMO is already being done well but would likely appreciate EAIF funding) and conducting an ongoing analysis of community growth at various stages of the growth funnel (e.g. by updating and/or expanding this work).