The Alignment Forum team put quite a lot of effort into ensuring that there would be content when launching the Forum—there were three sequences of posts that were posted over the course of a couple of months after the launch, and several users who were already writing posts were encouraged to use the Forum. I think this was important to ensure the Forum was actually used, and you’d want to do something similar for this idea.
Interesting, I didn’t know that. Yes, there is a trade-off between how much work we put in the forum and the probability that it get’s used. But even if something like this would substantially increase the probability of it being used, it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing without it for the chance that the EAA forum does take-off, even if you think it’s somewhat slim (not that you were implying that).
Actually, I am against low-effort interventions that redirect people’s attention, because if they fail, they “poison the well” for future potentially high-effort interventions.
(That is, a low-effort EAA Forum that fails might make a future high-effort EAA Forum fail where it would otherwise have succeeded, because people now expect EAA Forums to fail and so don’t engage when they otherwise would have.)
Obviously specific details matter but I don’t think it’s as simple as “some probability of success for low effort is worth doing”.
I would also guess that a low-effort version / skin would fail, but I do have a lot of uncertainty there because I don’t know the EAA community very well any more.
The Alignment Forum team put quite a lot of effort into ensuring that there would be content when launching the Forum—there were three sequences of posts that were posted over the course of a couple of months after the launch, and several users who were already writing posts were encouraged to use the Forum. I think this was important to ensure the Forum was actually used, and you’d want to do something similar for this idea.
Interesting, I didn’t know that. Yes, there is a trade-off between how much work we put in the forum and the probability that it get’s used. But even if something like this would substantially increase the probability of it being used, it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing without it for the chance that the EAA forum does take-off, even if you think it’s somewhat slim (not that you were implying that).
Actually, I am against low-effort interventions that redirect people’s attention, because if they fail, they “poison the well” for future potentially high-effort interventions.
(That is, a low-effort EAA Forum that fails might make a future high-effort EAA Forum fail where it would otherwise have succeeded, because people now expect EAA Forums to fail and so don’t engage when they otherwise would have.)
Obviously specific details matter but I don’t think it’s as simple as “some probability of success for low effort is worth doing”.
I would also guess that a low-effort version / skin would fail, but I do have a lot of uncertainty there because I don’t know the EAA community very well any more.