I think your comments are on average decent. I don’t think you need to change them dramatically in any direction. I think the EA Forum is a fairly decent training ground for thinking in certain useful ways about EA. Skimming some of your old comments, I think you’ve improved noticeably already. I think you will naturally improve more as you receive more engagement, and also as you think more about EA issues.
I’m personally pretty bullish about EA Forum and other public online communication, and am confused why other people don’t do it more, especially people in training who want to do professional EA work. My naive, independent, impression is that public online comms is good for skill-building for research. E.g., an econ PhD who wants a research job at Open Phil or GiveWell and currently spend 50 hours/week on their direct PhD work would be better off spending 45h/week on their PhD and 5h/week writing research blog posts and engaging on the Forum*. I think the actual cost-benefits ratio is stronger, as I expect the marginal hour of engagement on the Forum to be less psychologically costly for most people than most academic research work.** So the costs are lower and the marginal gains are higher.
Yet very few people do this, despite people often saying they want research jobs in EA. Other EA researchers also seem to recommend public communications less than I do. So my model is confused.
I do think rewriting comments may be helpful in some cases. Especially longer comments. I wish I’m better at this myself, but as I frequently told my interns, a guiding principle is “do as I say, not as I do.” But I think you will naturally improve over time even without doing that.
*entirely from a skill-building perspective, and assuming that a) employers never read the forum and b) that the direct impact of forum posts are useless, both of which I think is false. If you include those factors, they should probably add to rather than decrease the value of forum publications.
**though I guess many academics use Twitter instead for their public communication?
My own hot take:
I think your comments are on average decent. I don’t think you need to change them dramatically in any direction. I think the EA Forum is a fairly decent training ground for thinking in certain useful ways about EA. Skimming some of your old comments, I think you’ve improved noticeably already. I think you will naturally improve more as you receive more engagement, and also as you think more about EA issues.
I’m personally pretty bullish about EA Forum and other public online communication, and am confused why other people don’t do it more, especially people in training who want to do professional EA work. My naive, independent, impression is that public online comms is good for skill-building for research. E.g., an econ PhD who wants a research job at Open Phil or GiveWell and currently spend 50 hours/week on their direct PhD work would be better off spending 45h/week on their PhD and 5h/week writing research blog posts and engaging on the Forum*. I think the actual cost-benefits ratio is stronger, as I expect the marginal hour of engagement on the Forum to be less psychologically costly for most people than most academic research work.** So the costs are lower and the marginal gains are higher.
Yet very few people do this, despite people often saying they want research jobs in EA. Other EA researchers also seem to recommend public communications less than I do. So my model is confused.
I do think rewriting comments may be helpful in some cases. Especially longer comments. I wish I’m better at this myself, but as I frequently told my interns, a guiding principle is “do as I say, not as I do.” But I think you will naturally improve over time even without doing that.
*entirely from a skill-building perspective, and assuming that a) employers never read the forum and b) that the direct impact of forum posts are useless, both of which I think is false. If you include those factors, they should probably add to rather than decrease the value of forum publications.
**though I guess many academics use Twitter instead for their public communication?