What are the concrete use cases you guys have in mind? I can think of two:
Someone who’s new to EA wants to get up to speed on EA thinking. They start at the top and either read systematically or click on whatever seems interesting.
People are having a discussion about EA online, and someone wants to explain an EA concept, so they link to the relevant page.
There are other hypothetical use cases for a tool such as this. If the pages were much more comprehensive, they could be useful to veteran EAs who wanted to get up to speed with regard to the latest thinking on a particular topic. But a tool like this would be different—it would probably have a wiki structure, and the content would be more speculative. It might be a sort of hybrid wiki and discussion forum, similar to how the original wiki was used. (I think this is plausibly a superior structure relative to a straight discussion forum like effective-altruism.com, because it increases the odds that discussions will be useful long after the discussion is finished.)
Both of the use cases with bullet points seem primarily targeted at people who are new to EA. EA forum users tend to be veteran EAs, so it might be worthwhile to usability test new EAs separately. For the first use case, you could simply present them with the top-level page and time how long it takes to lose interest. You’d probably want to concentrate on people who are dissatisfied with existing resources like Will MacAskill’s book For the second use case, maybe you could have a conversation with a new EA, but try to use the tool to explain topics whenever possible? You could observe both how the person you were talking to responded and also how easy it was for you to find pages relevant to your conversation. It might also be useful to survey new EAs about their frustrations re: getting up to speed with EA, in case that gives you ideas for new features or approaches.
Your two suggestions are both close to things we had in mind (on the first one we were thinking less someone who’s very new, as someone who’s somewhat engaged already, and may be up-to-speed on some areas but want to learn more about others).
Another use case is helping people who are considering doing research or strategy work to orient themselves with respect to the whole space of current thinking. This can help people to understand how different parts of research translate into better decisions, which in turn can help them to pick more crucial questions to work on. The hierarchical structure can also make it more apparent if there’s a topic which should be worked on but hasn’t been: rather than just explore out from existing streetlights we can spot where there are big patches of darkness. This might be strengthened by your suggestion of a hybrid wiki/forum (we talked about something in this direction, and our feeling was “could be cool, revisit later”).
Yeah, I see potential for this to be useful even if no-one uses it who isn’t already familiar with the content: just structuring and categorising the information allows us to be clearer about which questions we can and can’t answer, and be more aware of our conceptual gaps or weak points. I see that as a really useful and underrated clarifying tool, and I’m excited to see it develop further.
If the structuring and organizing of the content is a big part of its added value, that can be hard to preserve in a wiki or forum, which are often chaotic by nature. There’s probably a trade-off between
curation of content, particularly ensuring that content meets overarching goals and broad organizational principles, avoids duplication, self-contradiction, etc.
quantity and depth of content, responsiveness to changes and developments, representation of a range of perspectives, and some sense of community-wide legitimacy
Broadly speaking, I’d guess that getting more people involved hurts (1) and helps (2). We already have a forum and a wiki, so maybe (2) is better served by existing resources, and your comparative advantage is (1). But I’m open-minded about the possibility that you can find a way to manage the tradeoff and maintain the structure despite an open contribution model.
What are the concrete use cases you guys have in mind? I can think of two:
Someone who’s new to EA wants to get up to speed on EA thinking. They start at the top and either read systematically or click on whatever seems interesting.
People are having a discussion about EA online, and someone wants to explain an EA concept, so they link to the relevant page.
There are other hypothetical use cases for a tool such as this. If the pages were much more comprehensive, they could be useful to veteran EAs who wanted to get up to speed with regard to the latest thinking on a particular topic. But a tool like this would be different—it would probably have a wiki structure, and the content would be more speculative. It might be a sort of hybrid wiki and discussion forum, similar to how the original wiki was used. (I think this is plausibly a superior structure relative to a straight discussion forum like effective-altruism.com, because it increases the odds that discussions will be useful long after the discussion is finished.)
Both of the use cases with bullet points seem primarily targeted at people who are new to EA. EA forum users tend to be veteran EAs, so it might be worthwhile to usability test new EAs separately. For the first use case, you could simply present them with the top-level page and time how long it takes to lose interest. You’d probably want to concentrate on people who are dissatisfied with existing resources like Will MacAskill’s book For the second use case, maybe you could have a conversation with a new EA, but try to use the tool to explain topics whenever possible? You could observe both how the person you were talking to responded and also how easy it was for you to find pages relevant to your conversation. It might also be useful to survey new EAs about their frustrations re: getting up to speed with EA, in case that gives you ideas for new features or approaches.
Your two suggestions are both close to things we had in mind (on the first one we were thinking less someone who’s very new, as someone who’s somewhat engaged already, and may be up-to-speed on some areas but want to learn more about others).
Another use case is helping people who are considering doing research or strategy work to orient themselves with respect to the whole space of current thinking. This can help people to understand how different parts of research translate into better decisions, which in turn can help them to pick more crucial questions to work on. The hierarchical structure can also make it more apparent if there’s a topic which should be worked on but hasn’t been: rather than just explore out from existing streetlights we can spot where there are big patches of darkness. This might be strengthened by your suggestion of a hybrid wiki/forum (we talked about something in this direction, and our feeling was “could be cool, revisit later”).
Yeah, I see potential for this to be useful even if no-one uses it who isn’t already familiar with the content: just structuring and categorising the information allows us to be clearer about which questions we can and can’t answer, and be more aware of our conceptual gaps or weak points. I see that as a really useful and underrated clarifying tool, and I’m excited to see it develop further.
If the structuring and organizing of the content is a big part of its added value, that can be hard to preserve in a wiki or forum, which are often chaotic by nature. There’s probably a trade-off between
curation of content, particularly ensuring that content meets overarching goals and broad organizational principles, avoids duplication, self-contradiction, etc.
quantity and depth of content, responsiveness to changes and developments, representation of a range of perspectives, and some sense of community-wide legitimacy
Broadly speaking, I’d guess that getting more people involved hurts (1) and helps (2). We already have a forum and a wiki, so maybe (2) is better served by existing resources, and your comparative advantage is (1). But I’m open-minded about the possibility that you can find a way to manage the tradeoff and maintain the structure despite an open contribution model.