About CEA
Our mission
We want to help build a radically better world, which will take the best effort of many people (and a bit of luck). We want to aim for this ambitious vision, even if we can only help to build a somewhat better world.
More concretely, we want to contribute to a world where humanity has solved a range of pressing global problems — like global poverty, factory farming, and existential risk — and is prepared to face the challenges of tomorrow.
Our mission
Nurture a community of people who are thinking carefully about pressing problems
Our mission is to nurture a community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s pressing problems and taking impactful action to solve them.
We are focused on this because we believe that capable and determined people can improve the world if they carefully consider which problems to work on and take action.
We’re excited about supporting the effective altruism community (or the “EA community”), which is doing this kind of work—seriously attempting to address the world’s biggest problems. The EA community is a place where people can learn about and discuss which ways of doing good are most effective, based on impartially altruistic, truth-seeking principles. It also provides people with social support and connections that allow them to help others, whether they become researchers, run their own charities, focus on personal philanthropy, or follow another path. We are excited about the potential for this community to grow over the coming years, increasing its impact.
The future
Our hopes for the community
Primarily, we are focused on helping to build a project and community with the following attributes:
Clear and sound thinking
That the community overall has good mechanisms for generating and sharing knowledge, and norms that support thoughtful discussion.
Action orientation
That the community is vigorously driving forward work on its top priorities.
Cooperative
That the community is appropriately collaborative with those we disagree with, cooperative between different sub-communities, respectful of ethical norms, and self-critical.
We think that these attributes have been critical to the success that effective altruism has had to date, including saving over 150,000 lives via effective global health interventions, helping to free 70 million chickens from battery cages, and helping to establish AI safety as a field of study.
If the EA community can maintain these attributes, we think that it has a chance of radically improving the world. One way to view CEA's work is that our primary goal is to make this more likely by promoting core principles or tools: principles like making tradeoffs, holding a scout mindset, and scope sensitivity.
We do not think of ourselves as having or wanting control over the EA community. We believe that a wide range of ideas and approaches are consistent with the core principles underpinning EA, and encourage others to identify and experiment with filling gaps left by our work.
How we think about moderation
When representing this diverse community we think that we have a duty to be thoughtful about how we approach moderation and content curation. In general, we are trying to create spaces where people can think carefully, where people can support and encourage each other to take meaningful action on global problems, and where we are cooperative with each other and the world. We think that we can do this without taking an organizational stance on which cause or strategy is most effective.