It seems that effective altruists and similar folks have gravitated more towards Facebook than LinkedIn, largely because I think they generally like to spend more time discussing things, and Facebook is a much better place to carry out discussions (it has a good system for notifications, tagging, comments, replies, emoticons, etc.) LinkedIn is more heavily used by people who want networking benefits rather than as a place to carry out actual, on-site discussion.
In general, there is a tendency among some self-identified EAs to build their own tools, or their own versions of reality. It’s somewhat like the Not Invented Here syndrome. Look at all the Facebook groups with names of the form “EA X”—while some of the names make sense, others mainly serve to restrict discussion of X, when more could be gained from engaging with the wider pool of people and thought on X. The relatively low use of LinkedIn (which is the standard in the business world) and the significant effort spent on building niche tools is another facet of this.
LinkedIn is more heavily used by people who want networking benefits rather than as a place to carry out actual, on-site discussion.
An advantage of LinkedIn is that it has fewer irrelevant distractions than Facebook. I’m not sure how big of a factor this is.
Look at all the Facebook groups with names of the form “EA X”—while some of the names make sense, others mainly serve to restrict discussion of X, when more could be gained from engaging with the wider pool of people and thought on X.
One could say the same of many university clubs and university-branded Facebook groups. Humans are inherently tribal—it can be problematic at a certain level, but I wouldn’t worry about this kind of stuff. (Though I guess if there’s already a good Facebook group on a particular topic, it could be suboptimal to create an EA-branded duplicate.)
Couple of points.
It seems that effective altruists and similar folks have gravitated more towards Facebook than LinkedIn, largely because I think they generally like to spend more time discussing things, and Facebook is a much better place to carry out discussions (it has a good system for notifications, tagging, comments, replies, emoticons, etc.) LinkedIn is more heavily used by people who want networking benefits rather than as a place to carry out actual, on-site discussion.
In general, there is a tendency among some self-identified EAs to build their own tools, or their own versions of reality. It’s somewhat like the Not Invented Here syndrome. Look at all the Facebook groups with names of the form “EA X”—while some of the names make sense, others mainly serve to restrict discussion of X, when more could be gained from engaging with the wider pool of people and thought on X. The relatively low use of LinkedIn (which is the standard in the business world) and the significant effort spent on building niche tools is another facet of this.
An advantage of LinkedIn is that it has fewer irrelevant distractions than Facebook. I’m not sure how big of a factor this is.
One could say the same of many university clubs and university-branded Facebook groups. Humans are inherently tribal—it can be problematic at a certain level, but I wouldn’t worry about this kind of stuff. (Though I guess if there’s already a good Facebook group on a particular topic, it could be suboptimal to create an EA-branded duplicate.)
Facebook is definitely better for discussion. A big difference is that is has about 10x the level of activity.