Blog Posts - Centre for Effective Altruism

CEA’s 2017 Review and 2018 Plans

This has been a big year for CEA. We launched EA Grants which funded 21 projects in the EA community; we created a new donation platform called EA Funds to help people donate more effectively; and we ran 3 EA Global conferences to bring the community together. In this post we share what the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) has been doing this year, and give you a taste of the things we will be working on in 2018.

CEA Update, December 2017

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

CEA Update, November 2017

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

CEA Update, October 2017

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

Announcing grant from the Open Philanthropy Project to the Centre for Effective Altruism

Today the Open Philanthropy Project announced a grant of $2.5 million to the Centre for Effective Altruism. The aim of this post is to share information about the grant, what we plan to do with the additional funds and how we’re addressing the reservations Open Phil had before making the grant.

CEA Update, August 2017

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

Considering Considerateness: Why communities of do-gooders should be exceptionally considerate

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.

Selecting the appropriate model for diminishing returns

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.

Defining Returns Functions and Funding Gaps

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:

What CEA is currently focusing on and why

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.