This is great! 

In the intro article, I don't think I really like the comparison between pandemic prevention and counterterrorism.

A couple reasons:

First, counterterrorism might be construed to include counter bio terrorism. In which case, it's not obvious to me that pandemic prevention and counterterrorism are even exclusive.

Second, both pandemics and counterterrorism are heavy-tailed and dominated by tail events. Tail events don't happen...until they do. To give an example, here is the same graph but for 2009-2019:

Essentially no deaths from COVID-19! Looks like it's unimportant!

Knowing almost nothing about terrorism, I would expect that a terrorism tail event, such as the detonation of a nuclear dirty bomb, could be similar: we wouldn't see it in the statistics until it was too late.

When we broaden the scope, we can see that many more people died in global pandemics (other than COVID, since COVID barely existed) in that time period than terrorism:

However, this is extremely influenced by another tail event: HIV/AIDS. In a world without HIV/AIDS, it would look like this:

This would imply that in some counterfactual world where nothing was different except that AIDS did not exist, I should have thought in 2019 that global pandemics were about equal to terrorism in scale. This is not a conclusion that should be drawn from the data, because for tail-dominated phenomena, you can't just consider historical average data (certainly not from a ten year period), you have to consider black swan events: events unlike any that have ever happened.

Comparing the most recent pandemic tail event to the average statistics on terrorism doesn't make sense: it's comparing apples to oranges. Either compare the average statistics over a long time period or the probability and severity of possible tail events. For newly emerging threats like engineered pandemics, average statistics doesn't even make sense at all, since we've never had an engineered pandemic.

LOVE the new intro article!! 

Feedback

At least for me, it was hard to tell the hierarchy of the content. I wonder if a table of contents might be helpful? 

I think the issue stems from H3 and H4 tags being hard for me to tell apart, so a little confusing to subconsciously keep track of where I was in the document. Another problem could be the "What values unite effective altruism?" and "What are some examples of effective altruism in practice?" are H3 but "How can you take action?" and "FAQ" are H2 but in my mind they should all have been at the same level? Maybe just promoting the first two headers to H2 would be good enough to solve most of my confusion. 

Also, the preview image when sending the link to someone on LinkedIn strikes me as a little odd and might hinder virality when it's time to share it on social media. 

Ideas for Iteration

If the intro article takes off and becomes the "top of the funnel" of effective altruism for a lot of people, optimizing the "conversion rate" of this article could have big downstream effects.  

I would definitely encourage collecting 1 on 1 feedback by having people new to EA read the content in person and speak their thoughts out loud. 

Qualitative feedback can also be gathered more quickly with a tool like Intercom to directly chat with people while they're reading it and hear their thoughts / answer their questions. 

It might also be a good idea to get some quantitative feedback with a tool like hotjar to see how far people scroll. 

If the goal of the article is to get people intrigued with EA and diving deeper, perhaps emphasizing the "How can you take action" or the other parts in the "What's next?" section with special graphics or banners kind of like the newsletter box would be helpful. Then you can A/B test different iterations to see what gets people to tap more. 

Speaking of A/B tests, you might be able to squeeze out a few more percentage of engagement by experimenting with the order of the examples, the number of examples, which examples are shown, the actual words in the content itself, the preview image, etc. 

One quick note about that new introduction article: 

The article says "From 2011-2022, about 260,000 people were killed by terrorism globally, compared to over 20 million killed by COVID-19."

However, the footnote provided seemingly cuts off terrorism deaths data at 2020: "258,350 people were killed by terrorism globally between 2011 and 2020 inclusive."

In my view, this isn't substantive, but it seems worth trying to fix if this is "the" introduction article.

The new intro article is excellent. I appreciate all the work that must have gone into it. Reading with a critical eye, there were a few things I might consider changing. I'll post each below as a reply to this so people can upvote/downvote agreement or disagreement.