Latest posts from the Centre for Effective Altruism

Over the last several years, the EA Forum has been run on a volunteer-led basis. Given how much the EA community has grown, the volunteers who have been running the Forum have decided to transition primary responsibility for the EA Forum to the Centre for Effective Altruism. In practice, this should mean that things run much as they have done, but means that volunteers no longer have to be responsible for coordinating the technical maintenance of the Forum.

Summary:[^1] When interacting with others you can be considerate of their preferences, for instance by being friendly or reliable. This normally has small positive direct effects. But, by improving your reputation or strengthening aspects of culture that make a community more cooperative, the positive indirect effects can be large.

In a previous post, Max suggested two key ways of thinking about diminishing returns: funding gaps and returns functions. He also set out two classes of considerations that are generally desirable in models: closeness of fit and clarity.

As organisations receive more funding, the value of extra funding changes. This is relevant for donation decisions. People have used various concepts to discuss this feature:

CEA is ultimately striving to help create an optimal world. We currently believe that building and strengthening the effective altruism community is one of the best ways we can both build our understanding of how to do the most good, and grow the total amount of concrete progress we make towards those goals as a community.

This blog post gives more background on our current vision and mission, discusses how we currently prioritise and review projects and summarises our Q2 objectives.

In this post I develop a distinction between mechanisms for spreading EA ideas according to how likely they are to keep the nuance of the ideas intact. I then use this distinction to argue that movement builders ought to prefer mechanisms for spreading EA ideas that retain the nuance of the ideas.

It is well known that an extra dollar is worth less when you have more money. This paper describes the way economists typically model that effect, using that to compare the effectiveness of different interventions. It takes remittances as a particular case study.

This email was sent to CEA's supporters in May 2017.

CEA have now officially completed Y Combinator (YC) and so in this month’s update I wanted to share with you what we learned and achieved as a result in Q1 and the sorts of things CEA is planning to prioritise and why in Q2.

This email was sent to CEA's supporters in April 2017.