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.
The fidelity model of spreading ideas
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.
The value of money going to different groups
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.
CEA Update, May 2017
This email was sent to CEA's supporters in May 2017.
Revision of "Effective altruism: an elucidation and a defence"
The article Effective altruism: an elucidation and a defence has been revised. The revisions concern the counterfactual impact of donations. The advice that the Open Philanthropy Project gives to Good Ventures changed in 2016. Our paper originally set out the advice given in 2015.
CEA Strategic Update March 2017 (what we learnt at YC and more)
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.
CEA Update, April 2017
This email was sent to CEA's supporters in April 2017.
Effective altruism: an elucidation and a defence
By John Halstead,[1] Stefan Schubert,[2] Joseph Millum,[3] Mark Engelbert,[4] Hayden Wilkinson,[5] and James Snowden[6]
Hard-to-reverse decisions destroy option value
Summary: Some strategic decisions available to the effective altruism movement may be difficult to reverse. One example is making the movement’s brand explicitly political. Another is growing large. Under high uncertainty, there is often reason to avoid or delay such hard-to-reverse decisions.