Huh.. I think I may have been too rude, sorry if that’s the case.
To clarify, I think that the question of where the useful knowledge is, is a bit distracting from the question of whether good content should be written on the forum and also content which is directed at the EA community I’d expect to be best distributed through the forum itself.
I agree that more impact is probably done in professional settings where the topic is something related to solving one of the most important problems, if that content is strong enough, but I think that topics related to the EA community or to cause prioritization could have a lot of impact here. There is also good reasons to believe that writing cause-specific content here has impact in terms of collaborations and education. Also, I think that the forum is a great place to flesh out content which is not quite at the level of perfection needed for publications to get peer feedback.
The comment was probably strong-downvoted because it is confidently wrong in two dimensions:
1. The EA Forum only exists to promote impactful ideas. So to say that the question “where are impactful ideas?” is a distraction from the question “when should we post on the Forum?” is to have things entirely backwards. To promote good ideas, we do need to know where they are.
2. We are trying to address what a community-builder should do, not a content-creator. It is a non-sequitur to try to replace the important meta-questions of what infrastructure and incentives there should be, with the question of when an individual should post to the forum.
Ah, thanks! I think I was perceived as saying “content creators publish stuff which is highly valuable to the forum as well, and therefore we should give them a prize!”. It is definitely not what I intended, and it was a very sloppy writing from me 🤦♂️
What I do think is that the forum is a good platform and that it makes total sense to optimise on building better incentives there. Not as a matter of job descriptions, but generally when building organisations and platforms I think that it makes sense to focus some of the efforts and resources on itself even if there might be alternatives which might be better for that org/platform’s stated goals but they do not really work together well with other parts of the org/platform.
The questions were there because I specifically didn’t understand why you think that “Almost all content useful to EAs is not written on the forum, and almost all authors who could write such content will not write it on the forum”, regardless of what we think about the previous point. I’m very interested in your take on that!
Huh.. I think I may have been too rude, sorry if that’s the case.
To clarify, I think that the question of where the useful knowledge is, is a bit distracting from the question of whether good content should be written on the forum and also content which is directed at the EA community I’d expect to be best distributed through the forum itself.
I agree that more impact is probably done in professional settings where the topic is something related to solving one of the most important problems, if that content is strong enough, but I think that topics related to the EA community or to cause prioritization could have a lot of impact here. There is also good reasons to believe that writing cause-specific content here has impact in terms of collaborations and education. Also, I think that the forum is a great place to flesh out content which is not quite at the level of perfection needed for publications to get peer feedback.
The comment was probably strong-downvoted because it is confidently wrong in two dimensions:
1. The EA Forum only exists to promote impactful ideas. So to say that the question “where are impactful ideas?” is a distraction from the question “when should we post on the Forum?” is to have things entirely backwards. To promote good ideas, we do need to know where they are.
2. We are trying to address what a community-builder should do, not a content-creator. It is a non-sequitur to try to replace the important meta-questions of what infrastructure and incentives there should be, with the question of when an individual should post to the forum.
Ah, thanks! I think I was perceived as saying “content creators publish stuff which is highly valuable to the forum as well, and therefore we should give them a prize!”.
It is definitely not what I intended, and it was a very sloppy writing from me 🤦♂️
What I do think is that the forum is a good platform and that it makes total sense to optimise on building better incentives there. Not as a matter of job descriptions, but generally when building organisations and platforms I think that it makes sense to focus some of the efforts and resources on itself even if there might be alternatives which might be better for that org/platform’s stated goals but they do not really work together well with other parts of the org/platform.
The questions were there because I specifically didn’t understand why you think that “Almost all content useful to EAs is not written on the forum, and almost all authors who could write such content will not write it on the forum”, regardless of what we think about the previous point. I’m very interested in your take on that!