I am a researcher on global health at Our World in Data, and a founder and editor of Works in Progress at Stripe.
My research interests are in health, epidemiology and the social sciences.
You can contact me at saloni@ourworldindata.org or find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/salonium
This is an interesting critique! I think it misses a lot, though, so would like to push back on it.
Full disclosure/conflict of interest – I’m one of Nick’s colleagues – we’re both editors at Works in Progress.
1) Blogs are short content. – I think a lot of your critiques here (that they become outdated quickly, don’t provide much long-term value, fall prey to replication crises) actually apply to all forms of published, static content – newspapers, tweet threads, newsletters, books, etc. We’ve all heard of books and news content that have aged badly – it’s unclear why you’ve listed this as a drawback of blogs. If anything, blogs are much easier to keep updated than the others (as you mention), especially compared to printed content – you can easily update an old blogpost and signpost when you’ve done that. You can’t edit a tweet thread, a printed book, or a news article easily.
I don’t think people need to read through entire archives of blogs for them to be useful. People often share links to particular old blogposts as references on a particular topic, and that’s fine. In the same way, we don’t say that newspapers are bad because people don’t read through newspaper archives.
2) Did anybody think about the incentives? – as you mention later on, the purpose of the prize is to incentivise new blogs to be created and maintained, so it wouldn’t make sense to reward ones that already exist. I don’t think it’s ironic because the topic is on longtermism – and it’s likely that at least some of these blogs will be maintained in the longterm, which may be another way to look at it. Many projects (and blogs) are likely to be unfinished, but that’s a feature of new projects in general. One way to improve the prize might be to reward blogs that stay maintained years from now, but I don’t think you make that point.
3) Examples – skipping over this as it looks like you liked many of them.
4) There’s not that many longtermist blogs around. To me, it seems like the EA and longtermist movements are growing rapidly in size and could be a lot bigger than they currently are, so what may seem like a sufficient number of blogs now wouldn’t be later. If you recognise all the blogs on that list, that seems like an indication that there aren’t very many of them. Ambitiously, people might want to reach a level where there were so many EA blogs that they weren’t able to keep track of all of them. EA Forum is great, but if EA was huge, people might not use this as the central forum to cross-post all their blogposts. This seems more like a central node or bridge to other content than The place to put everything EA related.
5) Blogs are for discourse. I think you may not be aware that Nick’s already an editor at Works in Progress (the long form magazine you mentioned). Blogs and longer form discourse magazines don’t seem like an either/or to me, and not to Nick who’s involved in both. I think they actually feed into each other: We sometimes recruit authors because we’ve read their blogs and want to develop their content further. And we’d be very happy if bloggers riffed off ideas that we’ve published on another platform like their own blog. In short, why not both?