Thank you for sharing your disagreements about this! :)
I would love for there to be more discussion on the Forum about how current events affect key EA priorities. I agree that those discussions can be quite valuable, and I strongly encourage people who have relevant knowledge to post about this.
Iāll re-up my ask from my Forum update post: we are a small team (Toby is our only content manager, and he doesnāt spend his full 1 FTE on the Forum) and we would love community support to make this space better:
We donāt currently have the capacity to maintain expertise and situational awareness in all the relevant cause areas. Weāre considering deputizing others to actively support the Forum community ā if youāre interested in volunteering some time, please let us know (feel free to DM myself or Toby).
In general, we are happy to provide support for people who may want to discuss or post something on the Forum but are unsure how to, or are unsure if thatās a good fit. For example, if you want to run an AMA, or something like a Symposium for a specific topic, you can ask us for help! :) Please have a low bar for reaching out to myself or Toby to ask for support.
Historically, the EA Forum has strongly leaned in the direction of community-run space (rather than CEA-run space). Recently weāve done a bit more proactively organizing content (like Giving Season and debate weeks), but I really donāt want to discourage the rest of the community from making conversations happen on the Forum that you think are important. We have such little capacity and expertise on our team, relative to the entirety of the community, so we wonāt always have the right answers!
To address your specific concerns: Iāll just say that Iām not confident about what the right decision would have been, though I currently lean towards āthis was fine, and led to some interesting posts and valuable discussionsā. I broadly agree with other commenters so Iāll try not to repeat their points. Here are some additional considerations:
Debate weeks take a long time to plan out (around a month, though it depends on the topic), since it requires a bunch of coordination, which makes it particularly hard to do this around current events (for example, at some point I thought that the USAID cut was going to be reversed, and if that happened after we decided on the debate week topic weād need to pivot our plans, and possibly this would make posts that people wrote in advance pretty useless).
USAID in particular wasdiscussedatvariouspoints on the Forum previously and those posts got a lot of karma/āattention, so itās not clear to me if a debate week on that topic would have been clearly more valuable.
Traditional news sources, and even some relevant academic communities, are likely much better at reaching non-EA funders than the Forum could do right now, even on our best days. So if our goal were around influencing non-EA funders, I donāt think we would do any interventions that utilize the EA Forum.
RE: āI do think that Forum weeks are significant attentional devices signaling what we see as prioritiesā ā I would be surprised if anyone who doesnāt actively use the Forum thought this, partially because thereās not really a way to access Forum events after they are done, so they are quite hard to find. The biggest Forum event that we run is Giving Season (it spans ~2 months), which I think youād agree is much more action-relevant and palatable to people who donāt associate with EA, and I would be somewhat surprised to learn that that event influenced any non-EA funders (at least I havenāt heard any stories about this happening), so I would be significantly more surprised if any non-EA funders were influenced by a debate week. (I think these rarely get any outside coverage, and I even know of people who work at EA orgs who donāt know about our debate week events.)
Thank you for sharing your disagreements about this! :)
I would love for there to be more discussion on the Forum about how current events affect key EA priorities. I agree that those discussions can be quite valuable, and I strongly encourage people who have relevant knowledge to post about this.
Iāll re-up my ask from my Forum update post: we are a small team (Toby is our only content manager, and he doesnāt spend his full 1 FTE on the Forum) and we would love community support to make this space better:
We donāt currently have the capacity to maintain expertise and situational awareness in all the relevant cause areas. Weāre considering deputizing others to actively support the Forum community ā if youāre interested in volunteering some time, please let us know (feel free to DM myself or Toby).
In general, we are happy to provide support for people who may want to discuss or post something on the Forum but are unsure how to, or are unsure if thatās a good fit. For example, if you want to run an AMA, or something like a Symposium for a specific topic, you can ask us for help! :) Please have a low bar for reaching out to myself or Toby to ask for support.
Historically, the EA Forum has strongly leaned in the direction of community-run space (rather than CEA-run space). Recently weāve done a bit more proactively organizing content (like Giving Season and debate weeks), but I really donāt want to discourage the rest of the community from making conversations happen on the Forum that you think are important. We have such little capacity and expertise on our team, relative to the entirety of the community, so we wonāt always have the right answers!
To address your specific concerns: Iāll just say that Iām not confident about what the right decision would have been, though I currently lean towards āthis was fine, and led to some interesting posts and valuable discussionsā. I broadly agree with other commenters so Iāll try not to repeat their points. Here are some additional considerations:
Debate weeks take a long time to plan out (around a month, though it depends on the topic), since it requires a bunch of coordination, which makes it particularly hard to do this around current events (for example, at some point I thought that the USAID cut was going to be reversed, and if that happened after we decided on the debate week topic weād need to pivot our plans, and possibly this would make posts that people wrote in advance pretty useless).
USAID in particular was discussed at various points on the Forum previously and those posts got a lot of karma/āattention, so itās not clear to me if a debate week on that topic would have been clearly more valuable.
Traditional news sources, and even some relevant academic communities, are likely much better at reaching non-EA funders than the Forum could do right now, even on our best days. So if our goal were around influencing non-EA funders, I donāt think we would do any interventions that utilize the EA Forum.
RE: āI do think that Forum weeks are significant attentional devices signaling what we see as prioritiesā ā I would be surprised if anyone who doesnāt actively use the Forum thought this, partially because thereās not really a way to access Forum events after they are done, so they are quite hard to find. The biggest Forum event that we run is Giving Season (it spans ~2 months), which I think youād agree is much more action-relevant and palatable to people who donāt associate with EA, and I would be somewhat surprised to learn that that event influenced any non-EA funders (at least I havenāt heard any stories about this happening), so I would be significantly more surprised if any non-EA funders were influenced by a debate week. (I think these rarely get any outside coverage, and I even know of people who work at EA orgs who donāt know about our debate week events.)