Blog Posts - Centre for Effective Altruism

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.

CEA strategic update, March 2017 (what we learned 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.

Understanding cause-neutrality

The term “cause-neutrality” has been used for at least four concepts. The first aim of this article is to define those concepts.

CEA update, February 2017

This blog post is part of our series of monthly strategic updates so that those that want to can stay up to date with what we are working on and why. Previously Will MacAskill has posted these updates on the Effective Altruism Forum. I (Tara) am taking over writing the updates moving forward and will post them here on our blog.

Advisory panel at CEA

CEA has put together a small advisory panel to help us think through decisions we make. We want to get input from people who have different viewpoints from our staff and can provide us with an outside view.