I downvoted your comment despite agreeing with a lot of your critiques because I very, very strongly disagree that posts like this aren’t a good fit for the forum (and my best guess is that discouraging this sort of post does significantly more harm than good). If someone who has a good understanding of what effective altruism is has an idea they think is plausibly a high impact use of time (or other resources), the forum is exactly where that sort of idea belongs! This post clearly reaches this standard. Once the idea is on the forum, open discussion can happen about whether it is a high impact idea, or even net positive.
If people only ever post ideas to the forum that they are already quite sure the effective altruism community will agree are high impact, it will be much harder for the effective altruism community to not be an echo chamber of only the “approved” ideas. I think the author has improved the forum by making this post for two reasons. The first reason is that the post created an interesting discussion on whether this idea is good one and how it could be improved (the critiques in your comment were an important contribution to this!). Secondly, more importantly, their post nudged the culture of the forum in a direction I liked; making it more normal to post ideas for plausibly* high impact projects that aren’t as obviously connected to one of the standard EA ideas that come up in every EA intro talk. Despite me not being sure that this idea is even net positive, it still seems almost absurd to me that this post isn’t a good fit for the EA forum (especially if people like you make compelling critiques and suggestions in the comments, ensuring the discussion isn’t too one-sided and maybe also allowing plausibly good ideas to iterate into better ideas)!
*To me, sufficiently plausible to be a good fit for a forum post, as I said above, is an author who understands what EA is who thinks the idea might be high impact. I actually think this author went well beyond and above what I think a good minimum bar is for such ideas; it sounds like this author put in a great deal of thought into this project, has put quite a bit of work already into getting this idea off the ground and also got feedback from multiple people in the EA community!
To be clear, I think this specific post was a reasonable fit for the forum, insomuch as it is a proposal for a newsletter, for the reasons you outlined. I agree the forum should accept ideas that are merely plausibly promising, so they can be refined, create useful discussion, and give people the opportunity for growth. And indeed I did not downvote this post.
The issue I was responding to was the question of whether every instalment of the newsletter should be shared on the forum:
It would be helpful to know if people think I should post each issue on the Forum. I know other newsletters, like EA London, do this but I don’t want to clutter the Forum with posts every 2 weeks if people think it’s too off-topic!
Given that the post explicitly raised the question I think it is perfectly legitimate to answer it in the negative.
Sorry if this was not clear. It actually did not even occur to me that this individual post might be inappropriate, so I made no attempt in my comment to distinguish this from my view.
FWIW I had a similar initial reaction to Sophia, though reading more carefully I totally agree that it’s more reasonable to interpret your comment as a reaction to the newsletter rather than to the proposal. I’d maybe add an edit to your high-level comment just to make sure people don’t get confused?
I downvoted your comment despite agreeing with a lot of your critiques because I very, very strongly disagree that posts like this aren’t a good fit for the forum (and my best guess is that discouraging this sort of post does significantly more harm than good). If someone who has a good understanding of what effective altruism is has an idea they think is plausibly a high impact use of time (or other resources), the forum is exactly where that sort of idea belongs! This post clearly reaches this standard. Once the idea is on the forum, open discussion can happen about whether it is a high impact idea, or even net positive.
If people only ever post ideas to the forum that they are already quite sure the effective altruism community will agree are high impact, it will be much harder for the effective altruism community to not be an echo chamber of only the “approved” ideas. I think the author has improved the forum by making this post for two reasons. The first reason is that the post created an interesting discussion on whether this idea is good one and how it could be improved (the critiques in your comment were an important contribution to this!). Secondly, more importantly, their post nudged the culture of the forum in a direction I liked; making it more normal to post ideas for plausibly* high impact projects that aren’t as obviously connected to one of the standard EA ideas that come up in every EA intro talk. Despite me not being sure that this idea is even net positive, it still seems almost absurd to me that this post isn’t a good fit for the EA forum (especially if people like you make compelling critiques and suggestions in the comments, ensuring the discussion isn’t too one-sided and maybe also allowing plausibly good ideas to iterate into better ideas)!
*To me, sufficiently plausible to be a good fit for a forum post, as I said above, is an author who understands what EA is who thinks the idea might be high impact. I actually think this author went well beyond and above what I think a good minimum bar is for such ideas; it sounds like this author put in a great deal of thought into this project, has put quite a bit of work already into getting this idea off the ground and also got feedback from multiple people in the EA community!
To be clear, I think this specific post was a reasonable fit for the forum, insomuch as it is a proposal for a newsletter, for the reasons you outlined. I agree the forum should accept ideas that are merely plausibly promising, so they can be refined, create useful discussion, and give people the opportunity for growth. And indeed I did not downvote this post.
The issue I was responding to was the question of whether every instalment of the newsletter should be shared on the forum:
Given that the post explicitly raised the question I think it is perfectly legitimate to answer it in the negative.
Sorry if this was not clear. It actually did not even occur to me that this individual post might be inappropriate, so I made no attempt in my comment to distinguish this from my view.
FWIW I had a similar initial reaction to Sophia, though reading more carefully I totally agree that it’s more reasonable to interpret your comment as a reaction to the newsletter rather than to the proposal. I’d maybe add an edit to your high-level comment just to make sure people don’t get confused?
That makes sense! My mistake.