My guess is that reading a bunch of EA posts is not the thing you really care about if, say, what you care about is people engaging fruitfully on EA topics with people already in the EA movement.
By way of comparison, over on LW I have the impression (that is, I think I have seen this pattern but don’t want to go to the trouble of digging up example links) that there are folks trying to engage on the site who claim to have read large chunks of the Sequences but also produce low quality content, and then there are also people who haven’t read a lot of the literature who manage to write things that engage well with the site or do well engaging in rationalist discussions in person.
Reading background literature seems like one way that sometimes works to make a person into the kind of person who can engage fruitfully with a community, but I don’t think it always works and it’s not the thing itself, hence why I think you see such differing views when you look for related thinking on the topic.
I didn’t necessarily take “engage with the literature” to refer to reading previous EA posts. That would be helpful in many cases, but doesn’t seem realistic until the Forum has a working search engine. However, I would like to see more people who write posts on topics like political science, computer science, international aid, or philosophy do a quick Google scholar search before posting their ideas.
My guess is that reading a bunch of EA posts is not the thing you really care about if, say, what you care about is people engaging fruitfully on EA topics with people already in the EA movement.
By way of comparison, over on LW I have the impression (that is, I think I have seen this pattern but don’t want to go to the trouble of digging up example links) that there are folks trying to engage on the site who claim to have read large chunks of the Sequences but also produce low quality content, and then there are also people who haven’t read a lot of the literature who manage to write things that engage well with the site or do well engaging in rationalist discussions in person.
Reading background literature seems like one way that sometimes works to make a person into the kind of person who can engage fruitfully with a community, but I don’t think it always works and it’s not the thing itself, hence why I think you see such differing views when you look for related thinking on the topic.
I didn’t necessarily take “engage with the literature” to refer to reading previous EA posts. That would be helpful in many cases, but doesn’t seem realistic until the Forum has a working search engine. However, I would like to see more people who write posts on topics like political science, computer science, international aid, or philosophy do a quick Google scholar search before posting their ideas.
site:forum.effectivealtruism.org
on Google has been working OK for me.