The Effective Altruism Forum will be launched at effective-altruism.com on September 10, British time.
Now seems like a good time time to discuss why we might need an Effective Altruism Forum, and how it might compare to LessWrong.
About the Effective Altruism Forum
The motivation for the Effective Altruism Forum is to improve the quality of effective altruist discussion and coordination. A big part of this is to give many of the useful features of LessWrong to effective altruists, including:
- Archived, searchable content (this will begin with archived content from effective-altruism.com)
- Meetups
- Nested comments
- A karma system
- A dynamically upated list of external effective altruist blogs
- Introductory materials (this will begin with these articles)
The Effective Altruism Forum has been designed by Mihai Badic. Over the last month, it has been developed by Trike Apps, who have built the new site using the LessWrong codebase. I'm glad to report that it is now basically ready, looks nice, and is easy to use.
I expect that at the new forum, as on the effective altruist Facebook and Reddit pages, people will want to discuss the which intellectual procedures to use to pick effective actions. I also expect some proposals of effective altruist projects, and offers of resources. So users of the new forum will share LessWrong's interest in instrumental and epistemic rationality. On the other hand, I expect that few of its users will want to discuss the technical aspects of artificial intelligence, anthropics or decision theory, and to the extent that they do so, they will want to do it at LessWrong. As a result, I expect the new forum to cause:
- A bunch of materials on effective altruism and instrumental rationality to be collated for new effective altruists
- Discussion of old LessWrong materials to resurface
- A slight increase to the number of users of LessWrong, possibly offset by some users spending more of their time posting at the new forum.
At least initially, the new forum won't have a wiki or a Main/Discussion split and won't have any institutional affiliations.
Next Steps:
It's really important to make sure that the Effective Altruism Forum is established with a beneficial culture. If people want to help that process by writing some seed materials, to be posted around the time of the site's launch, then they can contact me at ry [dot] duff [at] gmail.com. Alternatively, they can wait a short while until they automatically receive posting priveleges.
It's also important that the Effective Altruism Forum helps the shared goals of rationalists and effective altruists, and has net positive effects on LessWrong in particular. Any suggestions for improving the odds of success for the effective altruism forum are most welcome.
Also, I think this "Well-kept gardens die by pacifism" post might be kind of a good illustration of a problem I have with how the sequences are regarded in general. The epistemological quality of this post seems pretty poor: although it's discussing phenomena that are best studied empirically (as opposed to phenomena that are best studied theoretically, like math), it cites no studies, and doesn't make an attempt to become a proto-study itself by trying to, say, find a method to do quasi-random sampling of online communities and figure out whether each community constitutes evidence for or against its thesis. Instead, its argument is based mainly on personal experience (even concrete examples in the form of actual specific anecdotes, like 4chan say, are few).
This phenomena could also have been productively studied theoretically: say, by making references to the expected quality of any given post, thinking about how frequently users are likely to return to a given forum and important it is for them to see new/valuable content each time they return, etc. But EY makes no attempt to do that either. (At least MBlume starts to think about modeling things in a more mathematical fashion.)
And yet it's a featured post voted up 91 points... as far as I can tell, largely on the strength of the author's charisma. I'm glad this post was written. I found it valuable to read; it has a couple novel arguments and insights. But it seems suboptimal when people cite it as if it was the last word on the question it addresses. And it seems weird that mostly on the strength of that post's advice, posts as epistemologically weak as it are no longer being written as often on LW any more. Tossing around novel perspectives can be really valuable even if they aren't supported by strong theoretical or empirical evidence yet.