Personally, I think a big way to help ensure success is to not worry too much about drawing self-identifying “effective altruists”, but primarily focus on simply drawing active altruists. Obviously, if it only recruits from LW and its handful of bosom-buddies, there’ll hardly be a large-enough population. The mere title of the forum should do 70% of the work to keep everything on topic, and friendly reminders from mods should handle the rest.
I think that’s important enough I’m going to stress it again: if the EA community is 80% LW-ians, then I think it will loose most of it’s potential. LW already discusses effective altruism. Drawing people such as full-time active workers in existing charities such as public health works, economic support, missionary work, etc, seems a far higher priority to me. LW-like people already think along those lines, and generally have less energy/money dedicated to altruism than full-time charity workers. Attracting the later group would have a greater impact on the individuals, and target more important individuals to boot.
In that vein, I’ve already scoped out the blog, because I have several friends in mind who would take to this well. Currently, the front article has math. Lots of math. Here on LW that’s almost the norm, but if the whole EA site is like that, it’ll scare off a lot of good people. That’s not to say “don’t use math because people don’t like it”—math is very important—but rather “decide what audience to target on your front page.”
Personally, I think a big way to help ensure success is to not worry too much about drawing self-identifying “effective altruists”, but primarily focus on simply drawing active altruists. Obviously, if it only recruits from LW and its handful of bosom-buddies, there’ll hardly be a large-enough population. The mere title of the forum should do 70% of the work to keep everything on topic, and friendly reminders from mods should handle the rest.
I think that’s important enough I’m going to stress it again: if the EA community is 80% LW-ians, then I think it will loose most of it’s potential. LW already discusses effective altruism. Drawing people such as full-time active workers in existing charities such as public health works, economic support, missionary work, etc, seems a far higher priority to me. LW-like people already think along those lines, and generally have less energy/money dedicated to altruism than full-time charity workers. Attracting the later group would have a greater impact on the individuals, and target more important individuals to boot.
In that vein, I’ve already scoped out the blog, because I have several friends in mind who would take to this well. Currently, the front article has math. Lots of math. Here on LW that’s almost the norm, but if the whole EA site is like that, it’ll scare off a lot of good people. That’s not to say “don’t use math because people don’t like it”—math is very important—but rather “decide what audience to target on your front page.”
I’m excited! Thanks for putting it together.