Epistemic status: A bit sad (I know that's not an epistemic status)

The best development Forum on the internet?

Three years ago a headline which went something like “FTX SBF EASUX” triggered my memory “oh that’s right, that effective altruism thing”. 

A few years earlier I had read “Doing Good Better” in our Northern Ugandan hut, and was excited by how the ideas matched my experience seeing the BINGOs ^[1] on the ground here doing not-much-good at all. Soon after my wife dragged me to Cambridge for a year and I joined an EA group. I was drawn in to a beautiful crew of good, ernest people trying to do the best they could with their lives -^[2] something I’d only seen before among a few people at church. I was most impressed by their veganism, practising what they preached.   

After going back to Uganda I forgot about the whole EA thing. But 3 years later the FTX headline and a google search led me to the EA forum, which to my delight was the best place on the internet to discuss global health and development. My first foray was a not-very-good post about cash benchmarking (there are now much better ones), but the iron-sharpens-iron forum feedback soon whipped my writing into better shape.

I had found the best place to discuss Global Health and Development on the internet.
 

A steady decline

Since then I’ve had many a rewarding GHD chat in these hallowed forum halls. But the chats have been in a state of gradual decline. Although there remains the same proportion of GHD posts (about 1 in 20),  engagement with these posts has dropped by over 60% and quality has dropped as well. Even the good posts don’t have the same vibrant discussion as of auld. These two graphs tell part of the story.

1. Engagement has plummeted. While the number of GHD posts has remained consistent, the number of comments per post is through the floor. A reduction from over 6 when I joined in December 2022 to only 2 today!
 

Thanks @Joey Bream🔸 and co for the claude code tutorial ;)
 

2. Post quality seems to have dropped too. Only 2 GHD posts curated in the last year is pretty dire. I don’t think quality it’s quite as dire as this indicates though, a few decent quality GHD related posts may have been missed ;).
 

Why?

Here are my best guesses why engagement might have dropped. I’m not at all sure though, and I might have missed the most important reasons.

1. GHD discussion has moved to other places. Substack has exploded, Charity entrepreneurship slack is buzzing. There remains however no central high quality GHD hub.
2. EA focus has shifted towards AI and longtermism
3. Animal advocacy post number, quality and discussion vibrancy has greatly increased which might drown out GHD a little.
4. Much GHD "thought" might have consolidated within Givewell, CoGi and AIM, so often doesn't need to reach the forum.
5. Much GHD prioritisation has been "solved", so there's less to discuss? I don't buy this so much as there have been many large funding shifts within GHD, for example a big shift towards more speculative / systems change work. Plenty to discuss here!
6. (Minor gripe) The admins aren’t obliged to, but I think they could do a little more to encourage GHD chat. They could maybe curate a few more posts. We were also about to have a great discussion about democracy in debate week, which wasn’t allowed ;).
7. (Very uncertain) Perhaps Global welfare folks might feel less welcome here than in the past? I feel this a little myself. When I look at the front pages I behold a sea of AI and animal welfare, it doesn’t feel like my intellectual “home” any more. 

Is this fine?

Perhaps the forum is more useful as an EA community/AI safety/Animal welfare forum and GHD chat has enough avenues elsewhere? Post-quality and engagement remains high on the forum. Priorities change and as favoured causes change, so perhaps the “front page of EA” should reflect that as well. I don't think it would be a disaster if GHD discussion dropped of completely. But....

Is this less fine?

I still don’t think there’s anywhere else on the internet where I can have a GHD discussion as good as I can here]. Besides that, there's other reasons we might want more GHD vibrancy.

1) A higher proportion of the EA community works on/ gives to GHD than is reflected on the forum. I would guess maybe 10%-20% of the EA community spends more of their money/time on GHD than anything else, which might be 2x-10x the GHD percent of forum content. Even with the shift in focus to other causes, GHD is still underrepresented here.

2) Truckloads of EA money still goes to GHD causes, so its probably good for the community to openly discuss the pros, cons, ins and outs of where that money goes. Without GHD chat on the forum, we'll lose some transparency and scrutiny on a good chunk of EA-related cash.

3) GHD remains a strong entry point into EA. We may shoot ourselves in the foot if we cut this public entry point off. With 80,000 hours, silicon valley and Oxford switching focus from GHD, a forum bereft of “lets-help-humans-now” might make EA even harder for some folks to understand and engage with. In the long run this might even mean less people working on animal welfare and AI safety as well.
 

How to Boost GHD discourse? 

If we did aimto boost GHD discourse here, how could we do that? I’m not sure there’s an easy answer here which doesn’t just ask people to write more.  My suggestions here are weak and I'd love some help...

1) A cohort of GHD folks (for example CE) decide to prioritise the forum more
2) Mods make a (perhaps disproportionate) effort to favour GHD content. 
3) Those of us who remain put in a bigger effort to write and respond more.

Make no mistake the forum is still a great place, and will remain so even if GHD discussion does die a dignified slow death :).

1. ^{^}

   Big International NGOs

2. ^{^}

   Em dash not generated by AI