# Asterisk

Link: "[_Asterisk_ is a quarterly magazine of clear writing and clear thinking about things that matter](https://asteriskmag.com/)."

> _Asterisk_ is a new quarterly journal of ideas from in and around Effective Altruism. Our goal is to provide clear, engaging, and deeply researched writing about complicated questions. This might look like a superforecaster giving a detailed explanation of the reasoning they use to make a prediction, a researcher discussing a problem in their work, or deep-dive into something the author noticed didn’t quite make sense. While everything we publish should be useful (or at least interesting) to committed EAs, our audience is the wider penumbra of people who care about improving the world but aren't necessarily routine readers of, say, the EA forum.

Includes "Speculative pieces with 'epistemic signposts'"

{% embed url="https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Mts84Mv5cFHRYBBA8/introducing-asterisk" %}

**Possible scope for collaboration or sharing**

* Followup on crucial research—I will share non-sensitive parts of Airtable
* Sharing a database/CRM of
  * Experts to vouch
  * Interested academics and good writers
* Shared thinking on "what is relevant" and "how to classify things"
* _Unjournal_ could '"feed in" to Asterisk: Academic article, then you do a writeup; they have funding, can pay authors \~$4,000 for 4000 words; can't guarantee that academic work will feed into Asterisk
* Passing back and forth relevant work and directions to go in
* Some shared cross-promotion (e.g., at universities and in policy circles, where both _Unjournal_ and Asterisk are relevant)

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<summary>Discussing their "theory of change" and unique selling point</summary>

In a lot of newsy media, it's very hard to find big-picture reporting without a confidence threshold.

Future Perfect is about popularizing EA ideas; Asterisk is about writing about EA ideas in ways that non-EAs can understand but EAs will also be interested in.

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists as a comparison example ... international control of nuclear weapons .. clarify their thinking for people who did not have the tech

EA outreach is focused on "making people EAs" ... but it's more important to make the ideas acceptable without the polarizing EA brand.

A lot is in the realm of intellectual tools ...

</details>
