All of TobyW's Comments + Replies
Thanks for posting this Vicky! It's a super interesting line of thought and I'd love to hear more about your research and how you view its path to effecting change in the world.
I'm commenting to flag one typo which threw me off the first time I read Vicky's comment for any future readers--I think Bernstein and Malone's Handbook of Collective Intelligence was published in 2015, rather than 2005.
It feels like CI has been coming into its own as an actual field of research over the last 10-15 years. It'd seem much less promising to me if there had been a handbook published in 2005 without any major synthesizing efforts since.
I have been thinking about this a lot recently, and it seems like a pretty perennial topic on the forum. This post raises good points--I'm especially interested in the idea that EA might be somewhere like a local maximum in terms of cause prioritization, such that if you "reran" EA you'd likely end up somewhere else--I but there are many ways to come at this issue. The general sentiment, as I understand it, is that the EA cause prioritization paradigm seems insufficient given how core it is.
For anyone who's landed here, here's a few very relevant posts, in...
I think a lot of people have spent time on this. I currently use Obsidian for longer-form note taking and building up more complex thoughts, but mainly I just use backlinks; the Roam-style graph view is hip but I don't find it particularly useful. Then I use apple notes for on-the-fly, unimportant jots that I may or may not get ingested by Obsidian in a more structured form when I'm on my computer. I manage all of my productivity and to-do lists on one Apple note and my Apple calendar. Longer-form works of writing that have taken something of a singl...
Location: Vermont, USA
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Needed to be said. I'm someone who gravitates to a lot of EA ideas, but I've avoided identifying as "an EA" for just this reason. Recently went to an EAG, which quelled some of my discomfort with EA's cultishness, but I think there's major room for improvement.
My lightly held hypothesis is that the biggest reason for this is EA's insularity. I think that using broader means of communication (publishing in journals and magazines, rather that just the EA forum) would go a really long way to enabling people to be merely inspired by EA, rather than "EAs" thems... (read more)