The ideal of an open society—a society with high levels of democracy and openness—is related to many EA causes and policy goals. For example, open societies are associated with long-run economic growth, and an open society is conducive to the “long reflection.” This tag could host discussion about the value of open societies, the meaning of openness, and how to protect and expand open societies.
I agree that the concept of an open society as you characterize it has a clear connection to EA. My sense is that the term is commonly used to describe something more specific, closely linked to the ideas of Karl Popper and the foundations of George Soros (Popper’s “disciple”), in which case the argument for adding a Wiki entry would weaken. Is my sense correct? I quickly checked the Wikipedia article, which broadly confirmed my impression, but I haven’t done any other research.
The direct democracy tag is meant for investments in creating specific kinds of change through the democratic process. But people are using it for other things now anyway—probably it’s good to have a “ballot initiatives” tag and rename this tag to “democracy” or something else. Good catch!
I added two new entries: democracy and safeguarding liberal democracy. The first covers any posts related to democracy, while the second covers specifically posts about safeguarding liberal democracy as a potentially high-impact intervention.
I still need to do some tagging and add content to the new entries.
I do see this concept as relevant to various EA issues for the reasons you’ve described, and I think high-quality content covering “the value of open societies, the meaning of openness, and how to protect and expand open societies” would be valuable. But I can’t immediately recall any Forum posts that do cover those topics explicitly. Do you know of posts that would warrant this tag?
If there aren’t yet posts that’d warrant this tag, then we have at least the following (not mutually exclusive) options:
This tag could be made later, once there are such posts
You could write a post of those topics yourself
An entry on those topics could be made
It’s ok to have entries that don’t have tagged posts
But it might be a bit odd for someone other than Pablo to jump to making an entry on a topic as one of the first pieces of EA writing on that topic?
Since wikis are meant to do things more like distilling existing work.
But I’m not sure.
This is related to the question of to what extent we should avoid “original research” on the EA Wiki, in the way Wikipedia avoids it
Open society
The ideal of an open society—a society with high levels of democracy and openness—is related to many EA causes and policy goals. For example, open societies are associated with long-run economic growth, and an open society is conducive to the “long reflection.” This tag could host discussion about the value of open societies, the meaning of openness, and how to protect and expand open societies.
I agree that the concept of an open society as you characterize it has a clear connection to EA. My sense is that the term is commonly used to describe something more specific, closely linked to the ideas of Karl Popper and the foundations of George Soros (Popper’s “disciple”), in which case the argument for adding a Wiki entry would weaken. Is my sense correct? I quickly checked the Wikipedia article, which broadly confirmed my impression, but I haven’t done any other research.
Yes, I think your sense is correct.
Yeah, maybe something broader like “democracy” or “liberal democracy.” Perhaps we could rename the “direct democracy” tag to “democracy”?
The direct democracy tag is meant for investments in creating specific kinds of change through the democratic process. But people are using it for other things now anyway—probably it’s good to have a “ballot initiatives” tag and rename this tag to “democracy” or something else. Good catch!
Here’s what I did:
I renamed direct democracy to ballot initiative.
I added two new entries: democracy and safeguarding liberal democracy. The first covers any posts related to democracy, while the second covers specifically posts about safeguarding liberal democracy as a potentially high-impact intervention.
I still need to do some tagging and add content to the new entries.
I agree. I’ll deal with this tomorrow (Thursday), unless anyone wants to take care of it.
I do see this concept as relevant to various EA issues for the reasons you’ve described, and I think high-quality content covering “the value of open societies, the meaning of openness, and how to protect and expand open societies” would be valuable. But I can’t immediately recall any Forum posts that do cover those topics explicitly. Do you know of posts that would warrant this tag?
If there aren’t yet posts that’d warrant this tag, then we have at least the following (not mutually exclusive) options:
This tag could be made later, once there are such posts
You could write a post of those topics yourself
An entry on those topics could be made
It’s ok to have entries that don’t have tagged posts
But it might be a bit odd for someone other than Pablo to jump to making an entry on a topic as one of the first pieces of EA writing on that topic?
Since wikis are meant to do things more like distilling existing work.
But I’m not sure.
This is related to the question of to what extent we should avoid “original research” on the EA Wiki, in the way Wikipedia avoids it
See also
Some other entry/tag could be made to cover similar ground