Thanks Holden. The first post was excellent. Really keen to read more of your work.
The target audience for many posts will be people who are interested in EA-ish topics, but don't necessarily have any background in them. Sharing the blog and/or its posts in ways that are likely to find readers like that would be appreciated.
This is probably not a very useful suggestion but I will make it anyway on the off chance that it is.
Given the target audience and your request for help to grow it have you considered doing some videos in parallel? I think that you could probably reach a pretty large audience on YouTube who are interested in EA-ish topics (particularly stuff around the future and AI) but not really connected to the the forum and EA community.
I think that this audience is probably quite hard to reach/engage (at least initially) with a blog posts or long articles (that feels like work for a lot of people). However, I think that they can probably be engaged relatively easily by short videos, similar to those made by crash course and kurzgesagt. I might be underestimating the work involved though - I have no experience here.
For instance, I think that your first post could be the basis for an awesome video that could change a lot of people's predictions about i) how the future might play out and ii) what they should focus on by implication. I imagine that your blog/forum post will have the same effect for readers but will reach a lot fewer people. A video linking to the post could increase reach while also keeping fidelity pretty high.
One reason I make this suggestion is that I would really like see/watch more engaging short videos on EA related concepts/themes. I like crash course and kurzgesagt etc but feel as thought there isn't anything good out there that is really communicating EA ideas effectively via video. For instance, this seems to be the only engaging video intro to longtermism that I can find.
I also think that it would be really good to have a very knowledgeable person, like yourself, lead such a project rather than risk having someone start transmitting key EA ideas with lower fidelity.
More generally, I'd be interested to hear if anyone i) disagrees with any of my thoughts, ii) thinks that we have already good a pretty good outlet for disseminating EA concepts and themes via video iii) has had similar ideas or wants to set something up.
I too am excited about this! In the "about" page, you say:
So my question here is, what's your preferred feedback policy/commenting norms? Should we bias towards more normal "EA Forum commenting norms" or closer to "write out our comments at least a month before they're posted, sometimes much longer, and only comment if upon >1 month of reflection we still think they're worth your time/attention to read?"
This comment made me laugh out loud, all the more so because I couldn't tell whether you were joking.
It was a serious question, maybe presented in a slightly glib way.
No need to follow any unusual commenting norms! The "cold" nature of the blog is due to my style and schedule, not a request for others.