Another new member here; while I’m familiar with how Reddit works, I find this whole forum a bit confusing. Thus, in an effort to make it a tad less confusing for myself and to perhaps point out some things that might result in potentially interested participants abandoning the site and the movement, I have some questions to ask:
1) Is this the right place to ask about things related to the whole EA movement, and what they are doing? Not just questions regarding individual research topics or concerns, but rather to provoke discussion and meaningful debate on how to improve the way of thinking and the means available to us for making a difference? Is there a collection on such discussion somewhere?
2) What kinds of things should be made into an article, rather than a comment on the open thread?
3) Why was a fork of LessWrong chosen over a traditional message board with well-defined categories that can help one focus on discussing the things they find relevant? With new articles posted only every few days, this might not be a problem, but surely it makes finding coherent posts on one topic a nightmare? I haven’t explored the search function in detail yet, but assume that it’s not helpful unless you know exactly what you are looking for.
4) Are there any other places for discussing effective altruism? What kind of proportions of unique users do the different EA-related websites have?
Apart from these, I have a huge amount of questions related to all sorts of aspects of the movement, and quite frankly find the current content available somewhat lacking beyond the very basics. Sure, the movement covers a large amount of people with possibly wildly varying opinions on all sorts of things, but I think that within those potential disagreements there might be a possibly untapped opportunity to learn more about both the situation of the world and ourselves.
While GiveWell in my opinion provides excellent reasoning behind the many things they do and thorough, detailed and well argumented thoughts on how they plan to approach things, I was not able to find much similar content or discussion elsewhere. If someone can point me to the right direction, that would be very much appreciated!
Best regards to all of you, and thank you for the time.
1) The EA open thread seems pretty inactive and I’m not sure why that is. On LessWrong that’s where most of the discussion happens. It would be the obvious place to post those sorts of things if it were more highly trafficked. I’d still submit articles here and ask questions in the comments section.
2) A simple heuristic might be put straightforward questions into here or alternatively the Facebook/Reddit as they seem more highly trafficked. If you have an idea you think others might share or want to discuss put it into an article.
3) I don’t know the answer to this. I’ve always been able to find what I was looking for, but I do see how it is more difficult.
4) Other places for EA Discussion are the Facebook Group, EA Subreddit and the Complice Room (never visited this one). If you discover any others, let me know, as I find myself confused as to why this site isn’t more active and wondering if there are other spaces out there I’m not seeing. It’s also worth considering going to a EA meetup as you’ll get a lot more quick back and forth that way.
If you want to go beyond the basics into discussion of specific problems (Animal Welfare, AI Control, Entrepreneurship, Rationality etc.) there groups around with more focused discussion. This is a non-comprehensive list along with all the blogs out there. This site is a catch all and also has meta discussions (cause prioritisation, outreach etc.).
1) Sure. Feel free to link them on the Facebook page if you want more responses.
2) Anything that’s more than a couple of well thought-through paragraphs. If it’s longer than other highly upvoted posts, then people will clearly enjoy reading it!
3) Because we have upvotes, downvotes, easy ways to find top posts, automatic hiding of downvoted posts, a good system for nested comments, a useful sidebar for finding recent content, and technical support that is provided voluntarily by Trike Apps. If we had 100x more posts, then I would probably ask someone to implement subfora.
Hi all,
Another new member here; while I’m familiar with how Reddit works, I find this whole forum a bit confusing. Thus, in an effort to make it a tad less confusing for myself and to perhaps point out some things that might result in potentially interested participants abandoning the site and the movement, I have some questions to ask:
1) Is this the right place to ask about things related to the whole EA movement, and what they are doing? Not just questions regarding individual research topics or concerns, but rather to provoke discussion and meaningful debate on how to improve the way of thinking and the means available to us for making a difference? Is there a collection on such discussion somewhere?
2) What kinds of things should be made into an article, rather than a comment on the open thread?
3) Why was a fork of LessWrong chosen over a traditional message board with well-defined categories that can help one focus on discussing the things they find relevant? With new articles posted only every few days, this might not be a problem, but surely it makes finding coherent posts on one topic a nightmare? I haven’t explored the search function in detail yet, but assume that it’s not helpful unless you know exactly what you are looking for.
4) Are there any other places for discussing effective altruism? What kind of proportions of unique users do the different EA-related websites have?
Apart from these, I have a huge amount of questions related to all sorts of aspects of the movement, and quite frankly find the current content available somewhat lacking beyond the very basics. Sure, the movement covers a large amount of people with possibly wildly varying opinions on all sorts of things, but I think that within those potential disagreements there might be a possibly untapped opportunity to learn more about both the situation of the world and ourselves.
While GiveWell in my opinion provides excellent reasoning behind the many things they do and thorough, detailed and well argumented thoughts on how they plan to approach things, I was not able to find much similar content or discussion elsewhere. If someone can point me to the right direction, that would be very much appreciated!
Best regards to all of you, and thank you for the time.
1) The EA open thread seems pretty inactive and I’m not sure why that is. On LessWrong that’s where most of the discussion happens. It would be the obvious place to post those sorts of things if it were more highly trafficked. I’d still submit articles here and ask questions in the comments section.
2) A simple heuristic might be put straightforward questions into here or alternatively the Facebook/Reddit as they seem more highly trafficked. If you have an idea you think others might share or want to discuss put it into an article.
3) I don’t know the answer to this. I’ve always been able to find what I was looking for, but I do see how it is more difficult.
4) Other places for EA Discussion are the Facebook Group, EA Subreddit and the Complice Room (never visited this one). If you discover any others, let me know, as I find myself confused as to why this site isn’t more active and wondering if there are other spaces out there I’m not seeing. It’s also worth considering going to a EA meetup as you’ll get a lot more quick back and forth that way.
If you want to go beyond the basics into discussion of specific problems (Animal Welfare, AI Control, Entrepreneurship, Rationality etc.) there groups around with more focused discussion. This is a non-comprehensive list along with all the blogs out there. This site is a catch all and also has meta discussions (cause prioritisation, outreach etc.).
Welcome and Good luck in your search.
RainbowSpacedancer has it about right.
1) Sure. Feel free to link them on the Facebook page if you want more responses.
2) Anything that’s more than a couple of well thought-through paragraphs. If it’s longer than other highly upvoted posts, then people will clearly enjoy reading it!
3) Because we have upvotes, downvotes, easy ways to find top posts, automatic hiding of downvoted posts, a good system for nested comments, a useful sidebar for finding recent content, and technical support that is provided voluntarily by Trike Apps. If we had 100x more posts, then I would probably ask someone to implement subfora.
4) The other site is https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/, which has higher volume, and lower average quality of analysis.