Maybe they have more funding (vis-à-vis their goals)… I guess their main goal is to get more attention to a well-defined agenda, while I think EAs are usually more concerned with debating things.
We have strong models for how to do a popular blog about progress (Tyler Cowen, Anton Howes, Jason Crawford, etc). We have fewer of those sorts of models for EA.
Progress studies, as it exists, sort of only is blogging, so all intellectual effort is channeled to it. EA encourages people to do lots of other things.
Progress studies is innately better suited for blogging. This seems unlikely to me. But I do believe some subjects (philosophy stands out) are harder to blog about. Related: History seems especially easy to podcast about.
Summarizing it: would you say we are more “foxes”, Progress Studies is more “hedgehog”?
Progress studies is innately better suited for blogging. This seems unlikely to me.
On the other hand, I’d say that Progress Studies is better suited for “catchy blogging”. Perhaps I’m still thinking of it as fox v. hedgehog… but I think content about how the world has improved since the industrial revolution and can keep improving is more likely to get engagement from the avg internet joe than something like “how to do good better? it turns out it’s quite hard, and unsurprisingly it costs time and money, indeed”… or you could say that psychological traits predicting interest in Progress (and I am not even considering political implications) are more prevalent than those predicting interest in EA.
Having said this, I really like the idea of the contest, it’s a very generous incentive to start new blogs… but what’s the theory of change here? I’m truly curious about what you’d expect to achieve. For instance, do you think people who are talented and well-positioned to start new influential blogs will do it because of this contest? Or (which is an often neglected positive effect of awards) this will mostly help identify and promote new talented bloggers, who’d otherwise take a long time to be noticed?
Maybe they have more funding (vis-à-vis their goals)… I guess their main goal is to get more attention to a well-defined agenda, while I think EAs are usually more concerned with debating things.
Hypotheses:
We have strong models for how to do a popular blog about progress (Tyler Cowen, Anton Howes, Jason Crawford, etc). We have fewer of those sorts of models for EA.
Progress studies, as it exists, sort of only is blogging, so all intellectual effort is channeled to it. EA encourages people to do lots of other things.
Progress studies is innately better suited for blogging. This seems unlikely to me. But I do believe some subjects (philosophy stands out) are harder to blog about. Related: History seems especially easy to podcast about.
Summarizing it: would you say we are more “foxes”, Progress Studies is more “hedgehog”?
On the other hand, I’d say that Progress Studies is better suited for “catchy blogging”. Perhaps I’m still thinking of it as fox v. hedgehog… but I think content about how the world has improved since the industrial revolution and can keep improving is more likely to get engagement from the avg internet joe than something like “how to do good better? it turns out it’s quite hard, and unsurprisingly it costs time and money, indeed”… or you could say that psychological traits predicting interest in Progress (and I am not even considering political implications) are more prevalent than those predicting interest in EA.
Having said this, I really like the idea of the contest, it’s a very generous incentive to start new blogs… but what’s the theory of change here? I’m truly curious about what you’d expect to achieve. For instance, do you think people who are talented and well-positioned to start new influential blogs will do it because of this contest? Or (which is an often neglected positive effect of awards) this will mostly help identify and promote new talented bloggers, who’d otherwise take a long time to be noticed?