Basic Idea
The CEA team is thinking of creating a list of the best content from the Effective Altruism community during 2016. This would be distributed on effectivealtruism.org and potentially in the EA Newsletter and elsewhere.
The goals of the project would be to:
- Help busy people stay up-to-date with the best content from the community;
- give some additional recognition to EAs that work hard to produce excellent content.
We'll figure out some method of choosing the winning content and will distribute it in December.
The goal of this thread is to get a sense of how valuable people think this project would be and to solicit nominations for some of the best content of the year.
What we're looking for in a nomination
We're looking for the best content from around EA. The term "content" is intentionally vague since we're interested in forum posts, personal blog posts, blog posts from EA organizations, podcasts, videos, even particularly good posts on social media. If it made you think or changed your mind then it's likely something worth nominating.
We're mostly interested in content from the "EA community" broadly conceived, but it may make sense to include content that is relevant to the EA community but produced elsewhere. So, feel free to nominate any content that you think is especially good.
Some prompts to help
Below are some prompts you might use to help remember some of your favorite content.
- What was the most important thing you changed your mind about this year? What made you change your mind?
- What was the most surprising thing you learned this year?
- What was the best content you read about in some of the major cause areas (e.g. global poverty, animal welfare, far future, EA community building, Cause X, bio security, open borders and others)?
- What was the best post from the blog of an EA organization?
- What was the best post from someone's personal blog?
What we need from you
- Please upvote this post if you think this is a worthwhile project (the response we get here will, in part, determine how much time we spend on this).
- Please post a link to your favorite content and, if you have time, a quick explanation of why you liked it. (Please post a single article per post so that we can get up/downvoting data on each article).
- Please upvote posts you also found impactful.
I believe that when people describe content as "best", what they usually mean is "most fun to read", which is probably not what you want. People naturally like things better when they're fun to read, or when they "feel" insightful. People enjoy reading motivational blogs, even though they're basically useless; people do not enjoy reading statistics textbooks, even though they're extremely useful. I don't believe I personally can do a good job of separating posts/articles that are important to read and ones that I enjoyed reading.
On the other hand, I cannot think of a better strategy for curating good content than asking people to submit the posts they like best. Maybe something like peer review would work better, where you get a small group of people who consciously optimize for finding valuable articles, not necessarily interesting ones?
I've thought about this some more and I have some idea of the kind of process I would use if I were trying to curate the best content in EA.
I don't trust myself to make intuitive judgments about which posts are best--I'm going to end up picking the ones that were the most fun to read. I believe I could mitigate this by creating an explicit checklist of the things I would want in a "best of" post, and then look for posts matching it.
Actually the #1 thing I'd look for in a post is, did I do substantially more good as a result of reading this post? ... (read more)