Thoughts on the Centre for Effective Altruism, weakly held, n = 1, but feeling like things someone should say:
EAGs seem good
Community Health seems better than replacement. It’s a hard job, not perfect, but I am glad someone is doing it.
the Forum seems like not a place I want to be despite having previously been here a lot. Hard to make sense of what’s important, somehow
I rarely see comms work I think is good. Maybe it’s in places I don’t see, but on twitter, is does EA have a reputation that is helped by CEA? The odd thread I guess?
Vision? I dunno. Is there meant to be some kind of movement-wide vision I am meant to understand and get behind? ‘Do AI safety/policy work’, I guess?
Functionalness? Has there been any EA org as mired in dysfunction as CEA (other than FTX)? Has that changed recently? Base rates aren’t good.
Uni teams, no idea.
I imagine that there are lots of good, hard-working people at CEA and my intention isn’t to hurt. But I think we should see the world as it is and perhaps this is information to some. It is so easy never to say anything and then wonder why nothing changes. If this seems false to you, downvote it. But if it is upvoted when you see it, update on it. CEA in some ways speaks for EA, or has been seen to. What is going on?
People are welcome to DM me to chat about this though I prefer twitter DMs or emails to nathanpmyoung@gmail.com
Thanks for sharing! I mostly agree. If you read my posts from the past 2 years you can see part of the story for why the Forum is the way it is. Broadly, the Online Team has been more focused on supporting the rest of CEA and doing growth-related work, and we’ve been putting less and less FTE toward the Forum over time (~1.5 FTE when I left).
I feel sad that we didn’t push as much on quality and community as I had originally wanted. I found it challenging to try to convince leadership of the impact of doing cultivation work on the Forum, partly because the impact is actually quite nebulous and risks being just entertainment for EAs. Ultimately I still believe that there are tipping points that would cause the Forum to lose the majority of its value, and community building on the Forum can have significant impact by preventing that.
When I was a Christian, I led a lot of Bible study groups. Christians care a lot about Truth. In theory any question was askable but in practise it was clear that some questions were not. If somebody asked them I maybe allowed some kind of response, and then moved the discussion on. Discussions about the historicity of the Bible often created a mess so you didn’t really want to have them. In practise I recall having them very rarely, if at all.
To me the EA forum often has the smell of the same kind of thing where many important questions are just ‘not the done thing’. Below, James links CEA’s growth discusison. Do I really want to engage with that? Not really. I think I’ll feel like someone who is grumpy at a wedding. But also, from a quick scroll, do I think that CEA getting it’s engagement numbers up is the central thing it should be tracking? Not really. How many career changes are there? What is some notion of total impact?
And, sure, these are hard questions and I am not sure there are good answers. But when I came on here 7 years ago, this felt like a place to have those discussions. And now.. it doesn’t.
I’d be interested to hear more about why you didn’t want to engage with posts like CEA’s, and what you mean by “many important questions are just ‘not the done thing’”. Not sure if it’s related, but I think people who push back on CEA tend to get lots of karma still. :)
Honestly you’d have a great time at EA in the Lakes and should come to the next one I run. More generally, you want to get yourself into an EA group space of people who make donations (of money and/or time) to EA infrastructure, rather than being in receipt of resources from EA infrastructure. The vibe is totally different: the questions are freer, and we help each other clarify the answers to being more truthful and more loving and more actionable because we all want our donations to be used well.
I am pretty happy with my EA circles, for what it’s worth. I have come here to say somethings about this place and to some extent about the powerful organisation that runs it.
But I’d hear more about your EA in the Lakes thing. Which lakes?
They said growth was their focus, set goals, and, by their own account, did well.
However, the only place I’ve ‘felt’ their growth (beyond their reports) was with EAGxAmsterdam (attendance was up 36%). But I don’t know how much of that was due to things we did vs what CEA did.
My guess is there really is growth, but it’s not ‘felt’ by people like you and me because of where that growth is happening.
And yeah, they’ve struggled to hire for comms. They’ve admitted this. Last I heard, their hiring team was at full capacity hiring for other functions, so I guess they’re prioritising sorting their core programmes before going hard on comms.
I’ve said it before, but I really do think a General Assembly responsible for holding CEA’s board accountable would help keep everyone up to date with what CEA’s doing.
I think possibly the issue is that there’s a lot of effort being put in to manage reputational risks, possibly without quite understanding exactly what the forward-looking reputational risks are (because you’re reacting to bad things that have happened). That’s got to be really tricky.
To my eye, CEA has repeatedly focused on having good PR, meanwhile Yudkowsky wears a shiny gold hat and talks to Bernie Sanders and has a NYT best seller. Is all of that comms effort working?
I agree the comms is currently not as good as it could be.
I think the massive push to expand effective giving through a large variety of (non-CEA) methods might well take over EA external comms in the next few years. And I’m hoping the effects of that will eventually bounce back and fix CEA. There will just be a lot more comms-understanding EA-committed people in the EA hiring pool.
I’m also very hopeful about NEST, which seems to have understood that things like “hold a Nerdfighters or Kursgesagt meetup” is a thing a local EA group should be doing to attract the people who might become an EA, and is not cringe-bad-wrong-unprofessional.
Thoughts on the Centre for Effective Altruism, weakly held, n = 1, but feeling like things someone should say:
EAGs seem good
Community Health seems better than replacement. It’s a hard job, not perfect, but I am glad someone is doing it.
the Forum seems like not a place I want to be despite having previously been here a lot. Hard to make sense of what’s important, somehow
I rarely see comms work I think is good. Maybe it’s in places I don’t see, but on twitter, is does EA have a reputation that is helped by CEA? The odd thread I guess?
Vision? I dunno. Is there meant to be some kind of movement-wide vision I am meant to understand and get behind? ‘Do AI safety/policy work’, I guess?
Functionalness? Has there been any EA org as mired in dysfunction as CEA (other than FTX)? Has that changed recently? Base rates aren’t good.
Uni teams, no idea.
I imagine that there are lots of good, hard-working people at CEA and my intention isn’t to hurt. But I think we should see the world as it is and perhaps this is information to some. It is so easy never to say anything and then wonder why nothing changes. If this seems false to you, downvote it. But if it is upvoted when you see it, update on it. CEA in some ways speaks for EA, or has been seen to. What is going on?
People are welcome to DM me to chat about this though I prefer twitter DMs or emails to nathanpmyoung@gmail.com
Thanks for sharing! I mostly agree. If you read my posts from the past 2 years you can see part of the story for why the Forum is the way it is. Broadly, the Online Team has been more focused on supporting the rest of CEA and doing growth-related work, and we’ve been putting less and less FTE toward the Forum over time (~1.5 FTE when I left).
I feel sad that we didn’t push as much on quality and community as I had originally wanted. I found it challenging to try to convince leadership of the impact of doing cultivation work on the Forum, partly because the impact is actually quite nebulous and risks being just entertainment for EAs. Ultimately I still believe that there are tipping points that would cause the Forum to lose the majority of its value, and community building on the Forum can have significant impact by preventing that.
A personal reflection:
When I was a Christian, I led a lot of Bible study groups. Christians care a lot about Truth. In theory any question was askable but in practise it was clear that some questions were not. If somebody asked them I maybe allowed some kind of response, and then moved the discussion on. Discussions about the historicity of the Bible often created a mess so you didn’t really want to have them. In practise I recall having them very rarely, if at all.
To me the EA forum often has the smell of the same kind of thing where many important questions are just ‘not the done thing’. Below, James links CEA’s growth discusison. Do I really want to engage with that? Not really. I think I’ll feel like someone who is grumpy at a wedding. But also, from a quick scroll, do I think that CEA getting it’s engagement numbers up is the central thing it should be tracking? Not really. How many career changes are there? What is some notion of total impact?
And, sure, these are hard questions and I am not sure there are good answers. But when I came on here 7 years ago, this felt like a place to have those discussions. And now.. it doesn’t.
Be grumpy! I think the forum lacks spice.
Tier 5 is about career changes. That seems like a sensible thing to be tracking, no?
But it’s a lagging indicator so to me it also makes sense to look at engagement at other points in the funnel.
I’d be interested to hear more about why you didn’t want to engage with posts like CEA’s, and what you mean by “many important questions are just ‘not the done thing’”. Not sure if it’s related, but I think people who push back on CEA tend to get lots of karma still. :)
The top six posts by karma of 2026 are all criticisms of EA, two of them of CEA explicitly
Yeah that’s a fair point. I don’t come on here much. So maybe I am wrong on how receptive people would be. But this doesn’t sound great.
Honestly you’d have a great time at EA in the Lakes and should come to the next one I run. More generally, you want to get yourself into an EA group space of people who make donations (of money and/or time) to EA infrastructure, rather than being in receipt of resources from EA infrastructure. The vibe is totally different: the questions are freer, and we help each other clarify the answers to being more truthful and more loving and more actionable because we all want our donations to be used well.
I am pretty happy with my EA circles, for what it’s worth. I have come here to say somethings about this place and to some extent about the powerful organisation that runs it.
But I’d hear more about your EA in the Lakes thing. Which lakes?
They said growth was their focus, set goals, and, by their own account, did well.
However, the only place I’ve ‘felt’ their growth (beyond their reports) was with EAGxAmsterdam (attendance was up 36%). But I don’t know how much of that was due to things we did vs what CEA did.
My guess is there really is growth, but it’s not ‘felt’ by people like you and me because of where that growth is happening.
And yeah, they’ve struggled to hire for comms. They’ve admitted this. Last I heard, their hiring team was at full capacity hiring for other functions, so I guess they’re prioritising sorting their core programmes before going hard on comms.
I’ve said it before, but I really do think a General Assembly responsible for holding CEA’s board accountable would help keep everyone up to date with what CEA’s doing.
I think possibly the issue is that there’s a lot of effort being put in to manage reputational risks, possibly without quite understanding exactly what the forward-looking reputational risks are (because you’re reacting to bad things that have happened). That’s got to be really tricky.
My standard position on reputational risk is as follows.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SWxnP5LZeJzuT3ccd/pr-is-corrosive-reputation-is-not
To my eye, CEA has repeatedly focused on having good PR, meanwhile Yudkowsky wears a shiny gold hat and talks to Bernie Sanders and has a NYT best seller. Is all of that comms effort working?
I agree the comms is currently not as good as it could be.
I think the massive push to expand effective giving through a large variety of (non-CEA) methods might well take over EA external comms in the next few years. And I’m hoping the effects of that will eventually bounce back and fix CEA. There will just be a lot more comms-understanding EA-committed people in the EA hiring pool.
I’m also very hopeful about NEST, which seems to have understood that things like “hold a Nerdfighters or Kursgesagt meetup” is a thing a local EA group should be doing to attract the people who might become an EA, and is not cringe-bad-wrong-unprofessional.