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Why fun writing can save lives: the case for it being high impact to make EA writing entertaining — EA Forum

forum.effectivealtruism.org · 411 words · saved by 1 readers

EA writing can’t have an impact if the right people don’t read it, and the right people are more likely to read it if it’s interesting. Therefore, if you want to maximize impact (which I imagine you do since you’re reading this), you shouldn’t make your writing dry. In the rest of this essay I'll explain why it's a problem, potential objections, and practical tips for how to make writing more engaging. Of course, there’s a spectrum of how entertaining EA writing is and it’s a wide distribution, with some very engaging writing being produced. Joe Carlsmith’s “Against neutrality about creating happy lives” and Nate Soares’ Replacing Guilt series come to mind. However, I think we can all agree that a large amount of the writing is a bit. . . well, mostly sticking to a dry, unobjectionable list of claims and arguments. The percentage of posts that have a single joke in them is probably less than half, perhaps as low as 10%. The numbers are similarly bad for most other ways that an article

Peter Wildeford 4y 63 0 0 I don't fully agree with this article. The main issue is that a lot of good research (especially that done by Rethink Priorities) is not specifically aimed at impact through a broad audience but rather by changing the opinions of a few specifically interested people with a lot of resources and influence (e.g., Open Phil staff). You mention "impact weighting" audience numbers but this is actually a much bigger point than you're making it to be - an audience of ten people can very frequently be a lot more important than an audience of 10,000 if the audience of ten is ca

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