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I think the work you do is vastly important, and it is especially heartening that it originated in academia. In the age of choose-your-own-facts, academics of all stripes have a moral duty to engage the public on what is - and, crucially, what isn’t - known about nature and society. And they’re largely asleep at the switch. So this is major progress. A couple of long-term ideas: - breadth of topic: global development trends are a natural and important place to start. However, this is pretty remote, non-experiential stuff for most people. What about a canonical, accessible repository of what is known about nutrition and health, for instance? (“Is bacon really bad for me?” ... with links to every study ever, statistical meta-studies on top of these “research atoms”, and a Vox-esque explainer/lit review layered on top, giving laypeople the tldr). This example is well outside your (well-chosen) scope, probably, but IMO the generic problem here is access to intelligible (scientific) knowledge about anything that affects people and their understanding of the world around them. - moving the data to the “point of sale”: a huge fraction of the people asking “is the world getting more violent” won’t ever find your website, because people don’t think in terms of “global development trends data websites”, but they just ask questions, and expect Google to answer them. It seems like the long term play is to make expert knowledge itself computational and linked, and for domain-specific knowledge aggregators and synthesizers such as yourselves to work with the Googles of the world so that when I ask “hey Siri, is the world getting more violent?” I get a crisp “no. There are fewer wars and crime trends are declining in most countries, tap to find out more,” with the tap taking me to a source I can trust (because it references said underlying knowledge base) instead of some random shallow news article. I’m in in no way knocking your current product strategy of putting up a high quality space on the web you can curate and control - it’s practical, valuable, and honorable - but I think the future ultimately lies in making expert knowledge structured, and linking it directly to answers to low-intent, everyday questions that everybody has, instead of hoping people know about the domain / are motivated enough to find and dig through your website. |
It became apparent to us, as you say, that most people will find this stuff simply by asking google specific questions e.g. "how many people are there in the world?". And a lot of our existing content will not appear in Google or Siri as the answer, despite us having it in longer articles on the site.
So we've been very recently trying to answer much more explicit questions that people would ask (although we should have been doing this much earlier), and are thinking of reformatting a lot of our existing content in this way too.
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts - it's really helpful perspective for us.