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.
Changes to the EA Forum
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.
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.
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.