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.
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.