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.
[epistemic status: this pattern-matches behaviour I've seen on LessWrong before, so I'm suspicious there may be a mass downvoter here. It could be a coincidence. Not above 40% confident at this point. Feel free to ignore.]
Someone keeps consistently downvoting Kerry's comments. I've been on LessWrong for a while, where that was an occasional nuisance for everyone, but a real bother for the few users who go the brunt of it. I imagine there's a future for the EA Forum where the almost universal upvoting stops, and more downvoting begins. In all honesty, I'd think that'd lead to healthier discourse. However, I'd like to denormalize mass downvoting all of one user's comments. Whoever you are, even if you're really mad at Kerry right now, I think we can at least agree we don't want to set a precedent of only downvoting comments without giving feedback and why we disagree. I'd like to set a precedent we do.
Joey and Michael have both weighed in that they think a CEA team spending a lot of time on this relative to a little time isn't worth it. Kerry agreed. Be assured CEA staffers aren't wasting time and valuable donor money, then. Even if you think this whole thread is a stupid idea of Kerry's, and his suggestions are stupid too, please come out and say why so whatever problem you perceive may be resolved.
What about doing a poll on FB (instead or additionally, idk)? Or a private poll elsewhere? (FB is good because people can comment explanations.)