Agree that there's a different incentive for cooperative writing than for clickbait-y news in particular. And I agree with your recommendations. That said, I think many community writers may undervalue making their content more goddamn readable. Scott Alexander is a verbose and often spends paragraphs getting to the start of his point, but I end up with a better understanding of what he's saying by virtue of being fully interested.

All in all though, I'd recommend people try to write like Paul Graham more than either Scott Alexander or an internal memo. He is in general more concise than Scott and more interesting than a memo.

He has several essays about how he writes.

Writing, Briefly — Laundry list of tips

Write like you talk

The Age of the Essay — History of the essays we write in school versus the essays that are useful

A Version 1.0 — "The Age of the Essay" in rough draft form with color coding for if it was kept

Edit: This is now The illusion of consensus about EA celebrities

Something to try to dispel the notion that every EA thinker is respected/ thought highly of by every EA community member. Like, you tend to hear strong positive feedback, weak positive feedback, and strong negative feedback, but weak negative feedback is kind of awkward and only comes out sometimes

something about the role of emotions in rationality and why the implicit / perceived Forum norm against emotions is unhelpful, or at least not precisely aimed

(there's a lot of nuance here, I'll put it in dw)

edit: I feel like the "notice your confusion" meme is arguably an example of emotional responses providing rational value.

Take a list of desirable qualities of a non-profit board (either Holden's or another that was posted recently) and look at some EA org boards and do some comparison / review their composition and recent activity.

edit: I hear Nick Beckstead has written about this too

I have an intuition that the baseline average for institutional dysfunction is quite high, and I think I am significantly less bothered by negative news about orgs than many people because I already expect the average organisation (from my experience both inside and outside EA) to have a few internal secrets that seem "shockingly bad" to a naive outsider. This seems tricky to communicate / write about because my sense of what's bad enough to be worthy of action even relative to this baseline is not very explicit, but maybe something useful could be said.

Disclosure-based regulation (in the SEC style) as a tool either for internal community application or perhaps in AI or biosecurity

Something contra "excited altruism": lots of our altruistic opportunities exist because the world sucks and it's ok to feel sad about that and/or let down by people who have failed to address it.

Encouraging people to take community health interventions into their own hands. Like, ask what you wish someone in community health would do, and then consider just doing it. With some caveats for unilateralist curse risks.

I think the forum would be better if people didn't get hit so hard by negative feedback, or by people not liking what they have to say. I don't know how to fix this with a post, but at least arguing the case might have some value.

The Optimal Number of Innocent People's Careers Ruined By False Allegations Is Not Zero

(haha just kidding... unless? 🥺)

I have a Google Sheet set up that daily records the number of unread emails in my inbox. Might be a cute shortform post.

Some criticism of the desire to be the donor of last resort, skepticism of the standard counterfactual validity concerns.

If everyone has no idea what other people are funding and instead just donates a scaled down version of their ideal community-wide allocation to everything, what you get is a wealth-weighted average of everyone's ideal portfolios. Sometimes this is an okay outcome. There's some interesting dynamics to write about here, but equally I'm not sure it leads to anything actionable.

I'd like to write something about my skepticism of for-profit models of doing alignment research. I think this is a significant part of why I trust Redwood more than Anthropic or Conjecture.

(This could apply to non-alignment fields as well, but I'm less worried about the downsides of product-focused approaches to (say) animal welfare.)

That said, I would want to search for existing discussion of this before I wade into it.

Things I've learned about good mistake culture, no-blame post-mortems, etc. This is pretty standard stuff without a strong EA tilt so I'm not sure it merits a place on the forum, but it's possible I overestimate how widely known it is, and I think it's important in basically any org culture.

Something about the value of rumours and the whisper network

Also see:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/08/can-short-apocalypse.html