Website traffic was initially low (i.e. 21k pageviews by 9k unique visitors from March to December 2020) but has since been gaining steam (i.e. 40k pageviews by 20k unique visitors in 2021 to date) as the website’s search performance has improved. We expect traffic to continue growing significantly as we add more content, gather more backlinks and rise up the search rank. For comparison, the Wikipedia article on utilitarianism has received ~ 480k pageviews in 2021 to date, which suggests substantial room for growth for utilitarianism.net.
Pageviews would also go up a lot if (as suggested in the post) articles from the website were included in intro fellowships/​other educational programs. I’ll discuss adding these articles/​others on the site to our intro syllabi.
One potential concern with adding articles from utilitarianism.net is that many (new-to-EA) people (from experience running many fellowships) have negative views towards utilitarianism (e.g. find it off-putting, think people use it to justify selfish/​​horrible/​​misguided actions, think it’s too demanding (e.g. implications of the drowning child argument), think it’s naive, etc etc. I think utilitarianism is often not brought up very charitably in philosophy/​​other classes (again, based on my impressions running fellowships).
So I worry about introducing ideas through the lens of utilitarianism. So one potential solution is to include these readings in fellowship syllabi after talking about utilitarianism more broadly (for what it’s worth, in our fellowship we try to present utilitarianism as we/​EAs tend interpret it and address misconceptions, but we can also do so much), or to bring them up in in-depth fellowships/​non-intro programs where what I’ve brought up might be less of a concern.
Website traffic was initially low (i.e. 21k pageviews by 9k unique visitors from March to December 2020) but has since been gaining steam (i.e. 40k pageviews by 20k unique visitors in 2021 to date) as the website’s search performance has improved. We expect traffic to continue growing significantly as we add more content, gather more backlinks and rise up the search rank. For comparison, the Wikipedia article on utilitarianism has received ~ 480k pageviews in 2021 to date, which suggests substantial room for growth for utilitarianism.net.
Pageviews would also go up a lot if (as suggested in the post) articles from the website were included in intro fellowships/​other educational programs. I’ll discuss adding these articles/​others on the site to our intro syllabi.
One potential concern with adding articles from utilitarianism.net is that many (new-to-EA) people (from experience running many fellowships) have negative views towards utilitarianism (e.g. find it off-putting, think people use it to justify selfish/​​horrible/​​misguided actions, think it’s too demanding (e.g. implications of the drowning child argument), think it’s naive, etc etc. I think utilitarianism is often not brought up very charitably in philosophy/​​other classes (again, based on my impressions running fellowships).
So I worry about introducing ideas through the lens of utilitarianism. So one potential solution is to include these readings in fellowship syllabi after talking about utilitarianism more broadly (for what it’s worth, in our fellowship we try to present utilitarianism as we/​EAs tend interpret it and address misconceptions, but we can also do so much), or to bring them up in in-depth fellowships/​non-intro programs where what I’ve brought up might be less of a concern.
Thanks!