1. You and Your Blog:
Your blog should typically be the combination of two things: your own curiosities, interests, and passions as well as themes and intellectual currents in the communities with which you want to engage. To win the Effective Ideas blog prize, we’ve provided a few examples of the themes and currents we suggest you tap into.
- Using reason, evidence, expected value, and the scout mindset to think clearly about the world, and to think clearly about how to do good.
- Big picture thinking about science, philosophy, economics and the long-term trajectory of humanity.
- Cutting-edge discussion of traditional areas like AI, biorisk, and weird utilitarian philosophy, as well as exploring potentially important new areas, like population, China, and institutions for space settlement.
- Personal agency, ambition, and opposing the cheems mindset.
- The principles and areas of interest pages on the FTX Foundation website are good overviews of themes we are interested in.
For further inspiration: What’s up with the Most Important Century and AGI, and what should we do about it? How do we strengthen liberal democracies and stop authoritarians from taking over the world, but also avoid potentially cataclysmic great power war? What are the next 100 years going to look like? How can we encourage institutional experimentation, and how do we overcome vetocracy and fix our broken state capacity? What will happen when we settle space, and what should a constitution for the future look like? How much does economic growth matter, what determines growth in the very long run, and what should we do about it? What concrete, big projects should EA launch? What is EA totally missing, or totally wrong about? How can we bring more people, and a more diverse set of people, into the fold, and empower them to do ambitious things? More generally, how can we think clearly about the world, applying reason, evidence, expected value, and the scout mindset?
We would also recommend you ask yourself what your goals are for your blog beyond the possibility of winning a prize. Do you want to accelerate your career or develop your expertise? Make the world a better place? Win friends and influence people? Simply explore your interests? All of these goals are fine and we think that having some idea of your personal motivations will help you create a successful blog.