Posted on behalf of the research team at the Centre for Effective Altruism
The effective altruism community has surfaced a number of important ideas, identified existing research which is relevant to decisions, and in some cases pursued its own valuable research. Although there is a vast amount yet to learn, we’ve come a long way from a position of ignorance about how to help the world. At the same time, as the body of knowledge grows, it poses a number of challenges:
- There isn’t always an easy reference for some important concepts or ideas.
- It’s not obvious to someone coming into the area what to start reading, or where to find information on a given topic.
- It can be obscure how the different branches of research are supposed to fit into the same overarching intellectual project.
Over the last month or two, the research team at the Centre for Effective Altruism has been working on a resource which attempts to address these challenges. The current version is somewhere between a reading list, an encyclopedia, and a textbook.
- It is like a reading list in that we started with some of the highest-quality external material we know of, and wanted to provide readers a guide for this material.
- It is like an encyclopedia in that it has separate short articles for different ideas, so users can dip into a part of it and browse.
- It is like a textbook in that we provide a conceptual map of the space, which may help people orient their idea of how different concepts or pieces of work relate to others. This also gives people a natural place to start reading.
We think it’s important for the success of a project that it be useful from the outset, so we’ve put work into making sure that we have reasonable content across the entire space. However, we regard this as very much a starting point. We’re interested in finding out whether and how people use it. We’re interested in continuing to develop and improve the content. And we’re interested in whether we are missing important features, and how such a tool should work and accept contributions going forwards.
We've tried to do a good job of presenting a balanced view of important topics. We are confident some errors (of comission and omission) remain. The fault for these is all ours, but if you spot them please let us know. For broad discussion of the project, please use the comment thread here on the forum. For specific suggestions or feedback, or if you want to make a private comment, please see the feedback page.
We hope you find it interesting!
What are the concrete use cases you guys have in mind? I can think of two:
Someone who's new to EA wants to get up to speed on EA thinking. They start at the top and either read systematically or click on whatever seems interesting.
People are having a discussion about EA online, and someone wants to explain an EA concept, so they link to the relevant page.
There are other hypothetical use cases for a tool such as this. If the pages were much more comprehensive, they could be useful to veteran EAs who wanted to get up to speed with regard to the latest thinking on a particular topic. But a tool like this would be different--it would probably have a wiki structure, and the content would be more speculative. It might be a sort of hybrid wiki and discussion forum, similar to how the original wiki was used. (I think this is plausibly a superior structure relative to a straight discussion forum like effective-altruism.com, because it increases the odds that discussions will be useful long after the discussion is finished.)
Both of the use cases with bullet points seem primarily targeted at people who are new to EA. EA forum users tend to be veteran EAs, so it might be worthwhile to usability test new EAs separately. For the first use case, you could simply present them with the top-level page and time how long it takes to lose interest. You'd probably want to concentrate on people who are dissatisfied with existing resources like Will MacAskill's book For the second use case, maybe you could have a conversation with a new EA, but try to use the tool to explain topics whenever possible? You could observe both how the person you were talking to responded and also how easy it was for you to find pages relevant to your conversation. It might also be useful to survey new EAs about their frustrations re: getting up to speed with EA, in case that gives you ideas for new features or approaches.
Your two suggestions are both close to things we had in mind (on the first one we were thinking less someone who's very new, as someone who's somewhat engaged already, and may be up-to-speed on some areas but want to learn more about others).
Another use case is helping people who are considering doing research or strategy work to orient themselves with respect to the whole space of current thinking. This can help people to understand how different parts of research translate into better decisions, which in turn can help them to pick more crucial questions ... (read more)