Hi Owen,

Thanks for producing all of this content. I agree that it is a highly leveraged activity to make important ideas known to more effective altruists, and that making an online repository of such materials to link to ought to be a scalable solution to this problem. Thanks also for launching the site in an early stage of development, and without promotion, in order to allow criticism!

I’ll pitch in on three issues: i) the strategy of EA Concepts ii) its user interface, and iii) possible alternative approaches. I discuss the user interface here because it relates to my overall thinking.

###Strategy The main challenges, to paraphrase, are 1) to provide a reference, 2) to convey basic information, and 3) to connections and relationships within EA. It's hard for a simple reference (1) to also compellingly convey knowledge (2,3). Conveying knowlege is in large part a process of figuring out what to leave out. An obvious way to improve the pedagogical value would be to leave out the abstract decision-making topics whose research isn't shaping altruistic decisions much. Another major part of conveying knowledge (or getting people to read the content at all) is communicating some clear answer to the overarching question: “Why do I care?”.

First, the issue of leaving things out. Where research rarely shapes EA activities, such as in the ‘idealized decision-making’ section, such topics should probably be budded off into a glossary. Then, what is left would be a well-organized discussion of why effective altruists find certain activities compelling. One could even add info about how effective altruists are in fact organizing and spending their time. Then, one would have a shareable repository of strategic thinking. The question of why the reader might care would then answer itself.

The need for readable strategy content is clear. When one runs an EA chapter, one of the commonest questions from promising participants is what EAs are supposed to do, other than attending meetings and reading canonical texts. (These days, it surely is not just donating, either.) Useful answers would discuss what similar attendees are doing, and why, and what person-sized holes still exist in EA efforts. Such online material would convince people that EA is executing on some (combination of) overall plan(s). The EA plan(s) of course have arisen partly from historical circumstance.

This brings me to a final reason for including more general strategic thinking. If the EA community was started again today, we would - from the outset - include people from industry and government, rather than just from the academic sector. There would be researchers from a range of fields, such as tech policy, synthetic biology, machine learning, and productivity enhancement rather than just from philosophy and decision theory. So we have an awesome opportunity to re-center the map of EA concepts, that I think has so far been missed.

To summarize, I think the map would be better if it: selected and emphasized action-related topics, re-centered the EA community on useful concrete domains of knowledge, not just abstract ones, and conveyed the connections between action and theory, in order to make the material readable and learnable.

###User interface Currently, the site lacks usability. There are lots and lots of issues, so I wonder why some existing technical solution was not used, like Workflowy or Medium. Obviously, it is a prototype, but this gives all the more reason to start with existing software.

To begin with:

• the site’s content should be visible on the front page with no clicks. It shouldn’t rely on anyone having the patience to click anything before closing the window. This means that the tree should be visible, and that the content from some or all pages should also be visible with minimal effort. One option, not necessarily a good one, would be to have the “+” button expand a node with mouse hover but regardless, some solution is required.
• The numbers in the tree that indicate how many daughters each node are uninteresting, and should be removed. (Once one figures out how to have nodes effortlessly expanded and collapsed this will be even more obvious)
• It should be possible to access content without going through to a separate page. Although it should be possible to link to pages, by default, they must appear on the homepage, and the only obvious way I see to do this to put them in the tree. This would make it effortless to return from content to the main tree, which is also necessary. (Currently you have to scroll to the bottom of the page to click the back button!)
• Clicking the text of a node must have the same effect as clicking the plus sign next to it. Plus signs are too small to expect anyone to click. The only thing that it would make sense to happen, then, is for clicking a link to cause its daughters to expand. On this approach, if you wanted to further characterize the non-leaf nodes, you would need some solution other than pages.
• When I hover over a page link in an article, nothing happens. It would be nice if a summary was provided, as in Arbital.
• The text in the tree and in the articles is too light and somewhat too small.
• One should be able to view pages alphabetically or to carry out a search.

So there is a ton of UI improvement to be done, that would seem to be a high priority, if one is to continue piloting the site.

###Alternatives So how else might a project like EA Concepts be built? I have already said that (1) might best be achieved by moving some of the drier topics into a glossary. (2,3) would be best achieved by whatever modality will reach a moderately large expected audience who will engage deeply with the content. In light of the fact that the current page has poor user interface, this could instead be done with blog posts, a book, an improved version of the current site, or the explanations platform Arbital. Arbital, a group of three ex-Google EAs have already made a crisp and useable site, and in order to attract more users, they are pivoting toward discussion of a range of consequential topics, rather than just mathematics. On the face of it, their mission is your mission, and it would be worth looking hard for synergies.

Overall, I think there's something useful to be done in this space, but I'm fairly unconvinced that the site is currently on track to capture (much of) that value.

What are the concrete use cases you guys have in mind? I can think of two:

• Someone who's new to EA wants to get up to speed on EA thinking. They start at the top and either read systematically or click on whatever seems interesting.

• People are having a discussion about EA online, and someone wants to explain an EA concept, so they link to the relevant page.

There are other hypothetical use cases for a tool such as this. If the pages were much more comprehensive, they could be useful to veteran EAs who wanted to get up to speed with regard to the latest thinking on a particular topic. But a tool like this would be different--it would probably have a wiki structure, and the content would be more speculative. It might be a sort of hybrid wiki and discussion forum, similar to how the original wiki was used. (I think this is plausibly a superior structure relative to a straight discussion forum like effective-altruism.com, because it increases the odds that discussions will be useful long after the discussion is finished.)

Both of the use cases with bullet points seem primarily targeted at people who are new to EA. EA forum users tend to be veteran EAs, so it might be worthwhile to usability test new EAs separately. For the first use case, you could simply present them with the top-level page and time how long it takes to lose interest. You'd probably want to concentrate on people who are dissatisfied with existing resources like Will MacAskill's book For the second use case, maybe you could have a conversation with a new EA, but try to use the tool to explain topics whenever possible? You could observe both how the person you were talking to responded and also how easy it was for you to find pages relevant to your conversation. It might also be useful to survey new EAs about their frustrations re: getting up to speed with EA, in case that gives you ideas for new features or approaches.

I like the idea of this. I think it's great you've put this together and it would be much improved by changing the UX/UI stuff. I'm currently not sure where to go once I open the site, so my instinct was just to wander away.

I wonder if it would help to have a 'start here' bit, maybe with a beginner, intermediate and advanced sections. because I'm unfamiliar with it, I don't know which ones would be most useful to me.

It might also be nice of the concept map was actually a map, and you could see how stuff relates to each other, rather than a split-out list where you need to click on stuff to find out what's there.

But good work!

Some of the articles seem like they emphasize weird things. First example I noticed was the page on consuming animal products has three links to fairly specific points related to eating animals but no links to articles that present an actual case for veg*anism, and the article itself does not contain a case. This post is the sort of thing I'm talking about.

The article on expected value theory incorrectly cites the VNM theorem as a defense of maximizing expected value. The VNM theorem says that for a rational agent, there must exist some measure of value for which the rational agent maximizes its expectation, but the theorem does not say anything about the structure of that measure of value. In particular, it does not say that value must be linear with respect to anything, so it does not give a reason not to be risk averse. There are good reasons for altruists to have very low risk aversion, but the VNM theorem is not a sufficient such reason.

Edit: I see the article on risk aversion clarifies that "risk aversion" means in the psychological sense, but without that context, it looks like the expected value article is saying that many EAs think altruists should have low risk aversion in the economic sense, which is true, an important point, and not supported by the VNM theorem. Also, the economics version of risk aversion is also an important concept for EAs, so I don't think it's a good idea to establish that "risk aversion" only refers to the psychological notion by default, rather than clarifying it every time.

Edit 2: Since this stuff is kind of a pet peeve of mine, I'd actually be willing to attempt to rewrite those articles myself, and if you're interested, I would let you use and modify whatever I write however you want.

CEA is now considering where to take this project next: how much effort we should put into expanding it, and what new features/content we should focus on. We'd welcome feedback from anyone, regardless of whether you've used the site before, via this Google form