Top-of-funnel community growth in EA is slower than it could and should be. At the same time, EA is relatively underrepresented in intellectual discourse compared to newer and smaller movements like Progress Studies.
These sentences make sense coming from a marketing executive eager to make sure that their employer, the EA Corporation, triumphs over its rival Progress Studies. These sentences don't make sense from the standpoint of trying to figure out how to do the most good possible, as contrasted to assuming the effectiveness of "Effective Altruism"-branded institutions. Why would the value of a blog to the world depend on whether it's affiliated with "EA" or newer and smaller movements? If Progress Studies is already putting out better blogging than "us", maybe "we" should be funding them?
From the EA Forum:
We want to encourage a broader, public conversation around effective altruism and longtermism. To that end, we’re offering up to 5 awards of $100,000 each for the best new and recent blogs. We’re also making grants to promising young writers in the community.
You can learn more about the project and get on our radar here.
Why does this matter?
Top-of-funnel community growth in EA is slower than it could and should be. At the same time, EA is relatively underrepresented in intellectual discourse compared to newer and smaller movements like Progress Studies. EA is producing a ton of thoughtful writing, but the majority takes place in internal discussions and private documents. For some discussions, this would be the only sensible way to have them. But having other discussions in public should help to raise the salience of EA in the broader discourse and bring more people in. It could also help spark new ideas.
Further, we think EA needs more strong writers who can share key ideas in prestigious and popular venues — to persuade people to work on the most pressing issues of our time and to advance our thinking about them. We want to incentivize EAs to develop those skills.
What’s the plan?
We want to jumpstart these ambitions with the Blog Prize. Over the course of 2022, we want to find the very best new blogs exploring themes related to effective altruism and longtermism. Up to 5 winning bloggers will receive a prize of $100,000 each. (We were inspired by Tyler Cowen’s “Liberalism 2.0” blog prize). You can read more about our rules and guidelines on our website.
The judging panel for the blog prize is me (Nick Whitaker), Leopold Aschenbrenner, Avital Balwit, and Fin Moorhouse. Most blogs will be considered via our self-nomination form, but please feel free to send us recommendations.
What next?
We hope this can be a first step towards a more ambitious effort to support an ecosystem of public-facing writing for EA and longtermism. We believe that EA blogs could soon make up a major part of the general blogosphere, finding audiences (and potential EAs) we wouldn’t have found otherwise. Hopefully, we will also inspire the writing of foundational blog posts and posts that evolve into great projects.
To help potential bloggers, we’ve compiled a “How to start a blog” guide. We’re also offering mentorship on writing and editorial strategy to bloggers amid our private Slack community of bloggers. Self-nominate your blog on our website if you’d like to join. We have fostered a lively community for discussion, cross-promotion, and peer-to-peer feedback. Eventually, we hope to offer bloggers seminars from established EA writers.
While this is our first big announcement, stay tuned for future plans and follow ongoing efforts from Effective Ideas to build and foster a written media ecosystem for EA. Watch this space.
This project is supported by FTX Future Fund and Longview Philanthropy.