How did you decide on “blog posts, cross-posted to EA Forum” as the main output format for your organization? How deliberate was this choice, and what were the reasons going into it? There are many other output formats that could have been chosen instead (e.g. papers, wiki pages, interactive/tool website, blog+standalone web pages, online book, timelines).
This was a very deliberate decision on our part. Our primary goal is to get EA decision-makers to make better decisions as a result of our work. We thought the most likely place these decision-makers would see our work is on the EA Forum. We also thought people would be more likely to read the work if we wrote it in an article that didn’t require clicking through to a further page or PDF, on the idea that the clickthrough rate to reports is pretty low. It’s also nice to be able to track our impact via some loose proxies like upvotes and the EA Forum prize.
That being said, I think now that external PDFs might be better to have on hand to use for non-EAs, especially those that think of the EA Forum as looking lower prestige relative to a nice, glossy PDF. So that might be something we consider more in the future as we aim to grow our audience and influence.
Lastly, we thought there might be some additional small spillover impact on the EA community by creating a stronger culture of research around the EA Forum. I think having Rethink Priorities host our research here invites other people to be more interested in the EA Forum and more likely to post their own research here, which seems like a good thing.
Follow-up question: Have you been happy with this choice so far? Are there ways the Forum could change such that you’d expect to get a lot more value out of posting research here?
We still feel pretty good about this decision. I think for me the most useful things the EA Forum could do is adding native support for tables, followed by adding some sort of tagging system. Other people on the team might have different opinions though.
How did you decide on “blog posts, cross-posted to EA Forum” as the main output format for your organization? How deliberate was this choice, and what were the reasons going into it? There are many other output formats that could have been chosen instead (e.g. papers, wiki pages, interactive/tool website, blog+standalone web pages, online book, timelines).
This was a very deliberate decision on our part. Our primary goal is to get EA decision-makers to make better decisions as a result of our work. We thought the most likely place these decision-makers would see our work is on the EA Forum. We also thought people would be more likely to read the work if we wrote it in an article that didn’t require clicking through to a further page or PDF, on the idea that the clickthrough rate to reports is pretty low. It’s also nice to be able to track our impact via some loose proxies like upvotes and the EA Forum prize.
That being said, I think now that external PDFs might be better to have on hand to use for non-EAs, especially those that think of the EA Forum as looking lower prestige relative to a nice, glossy PDF. So that might be something we consider more in the future as we aim to grow our audience and influence.
Lastly, we thought there might be some additional small spillover impact on the EA community by creating a stronger culture of research around the EA Forum. I think having Rethink Priorities host our research here invites other people to be more interested in the EA Forum and more likely to post their own research here, which seems like a good thing.
Follow-up question: Have you been happy with this choice so far? Are there ways the Forum could change such that you’d expect to get a lot more value out of posting research here?
We still feel pretty good about this decision. I think for me the most useful things the EA Forum could do is adding native support for tables, followed by adding some sort of tagging system. Other people on the team might have different opinions though.