My first thought was to look at the various contests that have been run, since winning entries in those would be the most likely to have high impact. Not a contest exactly, but the most obvious starting place is the First Decade review, and I don’t know whether I see large changes to EA that reflect those posts. Many of them are not prescriptive posts anyway, but rather descriptive posts that captured something important.
When Open Philanthropy ran its Cause Exploration Prizes, two of the winning posts jumped out at me; on organophosphate pesticides, and violence against women and girls. The latter seems to have led The Life You Can Save to add a fund for the cause, which is a pretty large impact. I don’t have any information about the former, but the author now works at OP, and OP also launched a cause area in global public health policy that would clearly cover organophosphate pesticides, so I would speculate that that post was very influential to them.
The EA criticism and red-teaming contest had some entries that were specific to organizations, that plausibly had effects, but I wouldn’t be in a position to observe those, so I don’t know. Similarly with GiveWell’s Change our Mind contest, I’m sure those posts have had some impact, but the only one that GiveWell explicitly acknowledged was this one on deworming.
What are some examples of EA forum posts or comments that had a big influence on EA as a whole or on an EA-aligned organisation?
My first thought was to look at the various contests that have been run, since winning entries in those would be the most likely to have high impact. Not a contest exactly, but the most obvious starting place is the First Decade review, and I don’t know whether I see large changes to EA that reflect those posts. Many of them are not prescriptive posts anyway, but rather descriptive posts that captured something important.
When Open Philanthropy ran its Cause Exploration Prizes, two of the winning posts jumped out at me; on organophosphate pesticides, and violence against women and girls. The latter seems to have led The Life You Can Save to add a fund for the cause, which is a pretty large impact. I don’t have any information about the former, but the author now works at OP, and OP also launched a cause area in global public health policy that would clearly cover organophosphate pesticides, so I would speculate that that post was very influential to them.
The EA criticism and red-teaming contest had some entries that were specific to organizations, that plausibly had effects, but I wouldn’t be in a position to observe those, so I don’t know. Similarly with GiveWell’s Change our Mind contest, I’m sure those posts have had some impact, but the only one that GiveWell explicitly acknowledged was this one on deworming.