Online: much of the content on the EA forum is quite specialized. I, in principle, absolutely love it that people are writing 10,000 word reports on shrimp sentience and posting it on the forum. That is what actually doing the work looks like—rather than speculating at a high level about whether shrimp could suffer and if so what that would mean for us, you go out and actually try to push our knowledge forward in detail. However, I have absolutely no desire to read it.
I have long had the opposite criticism; that almost everything that gets high engagement on the Forum is lowest-common-denominator content, usually community-related posts or something about current events, rather than technical writing that has high signal and helps us make progress on a topic. So in a funny way, I have also come to the same conclusion as you:
I won’t sugar-coat it: the main reason I don’t engage so much with EA these days is that I find it boring.
I sort of see where both criticisms are coming from. The lowest-common-denominator, community-related posts get the highest engagement (including from people like the OP) because they require little context. The high context technical stuff is much harder to parse, and necessarily has a smaller audience, so gets less engagement (perhaps with the exception for AI Safety, which is currently experiencing a “boom”).
There will naturally be fewer technical posts in the areas I’m interested in and, like Michael_PJ, I have no desire to read long technical posts in areas I’m not interested in, so I end up engaging disproportionately with community-related posts.
Fiddling with the forum filters helps—I personally have downweighted posts tagged “Community” and “Building effective altruism”—but I suspect few people do this.
I have long had the opposite criticism; that almost everything that gets high engagement on the Forum is lowest-common-denominator content, usually community-related posts or something about current events, rather than technical writing that has high signal and helps us make progress on a topic. So in a funny way, I have also come to the same conclusion as you:
but for the opposite reason.
I sort of see where both criticisms are coming from. The lowest-common-denominator, community-related posts get the highest engagement (including from people like the OP) because they require little context. The high context technical stuff is much harder to parse, and necessarily has a smaller audience, so gets less engagement (perhaps with the exception for AI Safety, which is currently experiencing a “boom”).
There will naturally be fewer technical posts in the areas I’m interested in and, like Michael_PJ, I have no desire to read long technical posts in areas I’m not interested in, so I end up engaging disproportionately with community-related posts.
Fiddling with the forum filters helps—I personally have downweighted posts tagged “Community” and “Building effective altruism”—but I suspect few people do this.