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I like this idea and I would put some money towards funding it if EA had crowdfunding mechanisms [put that in your list]!
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This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
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Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
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This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
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Hey,
This (meta idea :) ) comes up sometimes, my simplistic answer is that I think it solves a problem that doesn't really exist, or if it does, then I personally don't understand it.
User Interviews / Product Market Fit
My "challenge" to you would be to find a real person (or 3 people, or 10) who has one of these pain points, and couldn't solve it using this forum (for example, the search bar), or by posting updates to their project or posting asking for feedback as you are doing here (+1 for that!). And I'd ask this person "what would you search for [or otherwise do] in the new tool? Would you do that now if I told you the tool is ready?". And if they say "omg yes", that's a promising first step for product market fit.
What I wouldn't do is ask people "what will others probably want". You'll get replies about complicated filtering mechanisms, but then if you ask "would you use it yourself?", I predict you'll get "no". I encourage you to find actual potential users.
Network Effects
After you have a product idea that real people actually want to use, you have the normal problems of "why would anyone search for ideas there if no ideas exist + why would anyone post an idea there if nobody searches for ideas". I wrote a shortform about this
Join forces with others?
If you're passionate about solving this, I'd consider joining the EA Wiki and/or helping CEA develop this feature. Maybe the thing missing is a "project" tag? I don't know. I think there is a big advantage in collaborating with a project that has a critical mass of users, especially if you resonate with their team+philosophy
Or maybe don't listen to me!
Maybe I'm just slowing you down and you could open an Airtable, post about it, and see what happens
P.S - I am a potential user!
I tried going over ideas that EA CTOs could pick up and build. I ended up posting this, but I consider my search to have generally been a failure - almost no results.
I believe that the users of this idea have repeatedly popped up, e.g. the many lists of everything that people spend many hours creating (coaches, AI safety organizations, etc.). The issue seems to be that the current tools to manage these things are not adequate. For example, all of these lists are not in a universally discoverable place so it's difficult for people to find. They are either uneditable, or editable by anyone, and both setups are not helpful. If it's uneditable, the content cannot easily be kept up-to-date, and if anyone can edit it, this introduces quality issues. I am not certain if the EA Forum or EA Forum wiki feature are meant for this sort of more arbitrary, less factual content, e.g. projects and projects ideas. This in in fact one of the reasons Golden exists as a competitor to Wikipedia.
TL;DR: If you think those are your users, probably talk to them. Can you describe a version of an EA directory of ideas that they would use right now?
Maybe even be concrete, draw it on a paper (or Google Doc) and ask them what they'd click. Don't be vague, like "imagine the ideas on the list were really good", put examples. Or if you don't have any, find a user that would add examples.
My prior is that there is a version of "EA directory of ideas" that would work really well, but I'm not sure what it is, and (especially in a project that has a network effect) I wouldn't assume that "if you build it they will come"
Again, just my priors, totally feel free to ignore
Thanks Yonatan! Perhaps I should have made it clear in my comment, but I have already performed or am in the process of performing these steps, and am aware of this associated validation toolkit (which is one of many possible toolkits to follow when validating an idea) in my roles as an entrepreneur and product manager.
A few other examples in addition to the ones I listed are the Pineapple Operations talent directory and the EA Mental Health directory. I believe that going to publishers first, rather than users, is one way to overcome the network effects, since there is clearly demand on the publisher side, and people are consuming what known publishers are creating. Publishers are then connected with users and are aware of user concerns around information consumption. Going to the commenters reading EA lists is another way to reach users (and is also validation for the idea).
I'm a little worried that blanket statements like "This (meta idea :) ) comes up sometimes, my simplistic answer is that I think it solves a problem that doesn't really exist, or if it does, then I personally don't understand it." immediately discourage the adoption of ideas and could be unhelpful if the idea itself is useful. A similar idea with modest variations, or executed in different ways, could indeed be useful. I'm seeing promising early validation for this idea. I also think it's important to highlight that two people can try to validate the same idea and see drastically different results.
I think that it's incredibly difficult to add features like this to the EA Forum, but I do believe that working on others with this is highly valuable. I happen to be a user of this broad idea in many ways, including not having access to a shared directory of technical talent in EA to find collaborators. If you have any EA CTOs in mind for this idea, please let me know!
In terms of describing a concrete version of this idea, I have a large vision for this, but in short: it would be great to enable people and organizations to publish organized collections of information that are better structured, easy to access, and support a range of contribution systems (including voting and reputation-weighted voting to decide on adding entries). People and organizations currently use Airtable bases, Google Docs/Sheets, and the EA Forum. None of these systems are collaboratively editable, so they're poor for enabling community knowledge. They're also not great for structured knowledge (especially docs and posts) and they're not very user accessible (the broader post mentions easy filtering, for example, which could be better in published Airtable bases).
Nice!
I'm not good enough at writing to transfer this point.. I'm just sharing thoughts and priors, no need to even convince me, I don't want my comments-about-problems to become discouragement-or-something.
You can post something in the forum with "Looking for CTO" in the title, or add the "software" tag to this post, or comment here, or post in the EA Software Facebook group, or post in the software engineering subforum.
(Consider asking people to, if they don't want to join, to explain why not, if you want)
By the way, another project that seems a bit similar is https://alignment.dev/