Thank you for sharing the shortcomings of the old website and the reasonings for the changes. This is very helpful for others who are working on making their EA-related websites more successful.
LMKull
Karma: 37
Thank you for this analysis! While insightful, I found myself a bit puzzled. Are introductory fellowships and other courses run by local EA groups considered under “educational courses” or does that mean things like philosophy classes, where EA might be mentioned as a concept?
I am not sure what the primary outreach tool of other EA groups are, but for EA Estonia it is promoting our introductory courses/fellowships. This post made me wonder which category would the course participants choose as first exposure to EA—would it be Facebook (since we promote the course there), articles/blogs/80k Hours/LessWrong (as reading these is part of the course), local EA groups (since the national group runs the course), educational courses (as mentioned above) or friends (about 1⁄3 of participants find the course via a friend recommendation)?
The lack of mention of courses—aside from specifically EA Virtual Programs—makes me wonder if other EA groups take a different approach to attracting new members. Based on my rough estimates, >80% of our members found EA through our courses or became involved because of it. I would have expected to see “a course/fellowship run by a local EA group” as an option under “Factors important for getting involved.”
Did anyone mention a course under the “Other” section? Were there any survey questions about this? If not, would you consider adding it to the next survey? As a community builder, it would be very useful to see to which degree these fellowships and other courses play a role in engaging people or whether we should consider other approaches. Alternatively, would it be possible to ask for country-specific data analysis?
This year I donated monthly
1. Through GiEffektivt to their top recommended charities
2. to Nähtamatud Loomad
I also “donated” about 300-400 hours of my time to EA community building.
I think it is crucial to point out that while there may be little direct effect of plastic pollution on morality of animals, plastic (mainly microplastic) is a vessel for pollutants and can therefore transport in chemicals, which can cause death in the organism. Therefore the effect of plastic is indirect, while clearly still playing a very crucial role.
Unfortunately not at this stage. However, this could be a potential future development if we had more capacity and if we considered translating the page valuable enough project to pursue (our target group is people who pay (most of) their taxes in Estonia and they are majority Estonian-speaking).
Various extensions, such as Google translate function on Chrome, do work quite reasonably though, in case you wish to understand the content on our page.