I notice the ‘guiding principles’ in the introductory essay on effectivealtruism.org have been changed. It used to list: prioritisation, impartial altruism, open truthseeking, and a collaborative spirit. It now lists: scope sensitivity, impartiality, scout mindset, and recognition of trade-offs.
As far as I’m aware, this change wasn’t signalled. I understand lots of work has been recently done to improve the messaging on effectivealtruism.org—which is great! -- but it feels a bit weird for ‘guiding principles’ to have been changed without any discussion or notice.
As far as I understand, back in 2017 a set of principles were chosen through a somewhat deliberative process, and then organisations were invited to endorse them. This feels like a more appropriate process for such a change.
I can’t speak for the choice of principles themselves, but can give some context on why the change was made in the intro essay (and clarify a mistake I made).
There are different versions of EA principles online. One version was CEA’s guiding principles you mention from 2017, and had endorsement from some other organisations. CEA added a new intro essay to effectivealtruism.org in 2022, with a different variation of a list of principles and Ben Todd as a main author: you can read the Forum post announcing the new essay here, and see the archived version here.
After Zach’s post outlining the set of principles that are core to CEA’s principles-first approach (that had existed for some time and been published on the CEA website, but not on effectivealtruism.org), we updated them in the intro essay for consistency. I also find Zach’s footnotehelpful context:
“This list of principles isn’t totally exhaustive. For example,CEA’s website lists a number of “other principles and tools” below these core four principles and “What is Effective Altruism?” lists principles like “collaborative spirit”, but many of them seem to be ancillary or downstream of the core principles. There are also other principles likeintegrity that seem both true and extremely important to me, but also seem to be less unique to EA compared to the four core principles (e.g. I think many other communities would also embrace integrity as a principle).”
I also want to say thanks to you (and @Kestrel🔸) for pointing out that collaborative spirit is no longer mentioned, that was actually a mistake! When we updated the principles in the essay we still wanted to reference collaborative spirit, but I left that paragraph out by mistake. I’ve now added it:
“It’s often possible to achieve more by working together, and doing this effectively requires high standards of honesty, integrity, and compassion. Effective altruism does not mean supporting ‘ends justify the means’ reasoning, but rather is about being a good citizen, while ambitiously working toward a better world.”
I think that infighting is a major reason why EA and many similar movements achieve far less than they could. I really like when EA is a place where people with very different beliefs who prioritise very different projects can collaborate productively, and I think it’s a major reason for its success. It seems more unique/specific than acknodwledging tradeoffs, more important to have explicitly written as a core value to prevent the community from drifting away from it, and a great value proposition.
As James, I also found it weird that what had become a canonical definition of EA was changed without a heads-up to its community.
In any case, thank you so much for all your work, and I’m grateful that thanks to you it survives as a paragraph in the essay.
It’s really important to me, as I can sometimes find that the (non-EA) charity and government world is a bunch of status-based competition over funding pots that encourages flattery and truth distortions and bitterness.
And, ok, EA can be like that as well, but ideally it isn’t—ideally we’d be totally happy for our pet project to get cancelled and the money reallocated to doing a similar thing more efficiently. And also to uphold the people this happens to, recognising their inherent worth as community members and collaborators.
Last week I had a discussion about the core principles with someone at our EA office in Amsterdam. She also liked “collaborative spirit”. I remembered this discussion and decided to check it again and see that you decided to add this in the intro essay. That’s great! Shouldn’t it then also be added on the “core principles” page? (Or am I overlooking something?)
I am glad to see the term “truthseeking” go. The problems with this term: 1) it has never been clearly defined by anyone anywhere, 2) people seem to disagree about what it means, and 3) the main way it seems to be used in practice on the EA Forum is as an accusation made against someone else — but due to (1) and (2), it’s typically not clear what, exactly, the accusation is. “Scout mindset” is much more clearly defined, so it’s a good replacement. (I don’t particularly love that term, personally, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Scope sensitivity seems like a good replacement for prioritization, no? I guess scope sensitivity and recognition of trade-offs together have replaced prioritization. That seems fine to me. What do you think?
Impartial altruism and impartiality sound like the same thing. So, that’s fine.
I think Kestrel is right that the only clear substantive change is collaborative spirit was dropped. Is that a good guiding principle? Could it also be substituted with something a bit clearer or better?
I don’t have a super strong view on which set of guiding principles is better—I just thought it was odd for them to be changed in this way.
If pushed, I prefer the old set, and a significant part of that preference stems from the amount of jargon in the new set. My ideal would perhaps be a combination of the old set and the 2017 set.
Expanding our moral circle
We work to overcome our natural tendency to care most about those closest to us. This means taking seriously the interests of distant strangers, future generations, and nonhuman animals—anyone whose wellbeing we can affect through our choices. We continuously question the boundaries we place around moral consideration, and we’re willing to help wherever we can do the most good, not just where helping feels most natural or comfortable.
Prioritisation
We do the hard work of choosing where to focus our limited time, money, and attention. This means being willing to say “this is good, but not the best use of marginal resources”—and actually following through, even when it means disappointing people or turning down appealing opportunities. We resist scope creep and don’t let personal preferences override our considered judgments about where we can have the most impact.
Scientific mindset
We treat our beliefs as hypotheses to be tested rather than conclusions to be defended. This means actively seeking disconfirming evidence, updating based on data, and maintaining genuine uncertainty about what we don’t yet know. We acknowledge the limits of our evidence, don’t oversell our findings, and follow arguments wherever they lead—even when the conclusions are uncomfortable or threaten projects we care about.
Openness
We take unusual ideas seriously and are willing to consider approaches that seem weird or unconventional if the reasoning is sound. We default to transparency about our reasoning, funding, mistakes, and internal debates. We make our work easy to scrutinise and critique, remain accessible to people from different backgrounds, and share knowledge rather than hoarding it. We normalise admitting when we get things wrong and create cultures where people can acknowledge mistakes without fear, while still maintaining accountability.
Acting with integrity
We align our behaviour with our stated values. This means being honest even when it’s costly, keeping our commitments, and treating people ethically regardless of their status or usefulness to our goals. How we conduct ourselves—especially toward those with less power—reflects our actual values more than our stated principles. We hold ourselves and our institutions to high standards of personal and professional conduct, recognising that being trustworthy is foundational to everything else.
...where’d the collaborative spirit go? The rest is mostly relabeling, so I’d let it slide, but that does seem like a glaring omission. Did EAs helping each other not poll well in a non-EA focus group or something?
I notice the ‘guiding principles’ in the introductory essay on effectivealtruism.org have been changed. It used to list: prioritisation, impartial altruism, open truthseeking, and a collaborative spirit. It now lists: scope sensitivity, impartiality, scout mindset, and recognition of trade-offs.
As far as I’m aware, this change wasn’t signalled. I understand lots of work has been recently done to improve the messaging on effectivealtruism.org—which is great! -- but it feels a bit weird for ‘guiding principles’ to have been changed without any discussion or notice.
As far as I understand, back in 2017 a set of principles were chosen through a somewhat deliberative process, and then organisations were invited to endorse them. This feels like a more appropriate process for such a change.
I can’t speak for the choice of principles themselves, but can give some context on why the change was made in the intro essay (and clarify a mistake I made).
There are different versions of EA principles online. One version was CEA’s guiding principles you mention from 2017, and had endorsement from some other organisations. CEA added a new intro essay to effectivealtruism.org in 2022, with a different variation of a list of principles and Ben Todd as a main author: you can read the Forum post announcing the new essay here, and see the archived version here.
After Zach’s post outlining the set of principles that are core to CEA’s principles-first approach (that had existed for some time and been published on the CEA website, but not on effectivealtruism.org), we updated them in the intro essay for consistency. I also find Zach’s footnotehelpful context:
“This list of principles isn’t totally exhaustive. For example, CEA’s website lists a number of “other principles and tools” below these core four principles and “What is Effective Altruism?” lists principles like “collaborative spirit”, but many of them seem to be ancillary or downstream of the core principles. There are also other principles like integrity that seem both true and extremely important to me, but also seem to be less unique to EA compared to the four core principles (e.g. I think many other communities would also embrace integrity as a principle).”
I also want to say thanks to you (and @Kestrel🔸) for pointing out that collaborative spirit is no longer mentioned, that was actually a mistake! When we updated the principles in the essay we still wanted to reference collaborative spirit, but I left that paragraph out by mistake. I’ve now added it:
“It’s often possible to achieve more by working together, and doing this effectively requires high standards of honesty, integrity, and compassion. Effective altruism does not mean supporting ‘ends justify the means’ reasoning, but rather is about being a good citizen, while ambitiously working toward a better world.”
Thanks for taking the time to provide this context!
Quick flag that the FAQ right below hasn’t been updated
Not sure how useful this is, and you mentioned you can’t speak for the choice of principles, but sharing on a personal note that the collaborative spirit value was one of the things I appreciated the most about EA when I first came across it.
I think that infighting is a major reason why EA and many similar movements achieve far less than they could. I really like when EA is a place where people with very different beliefs who prioritise very different projects can collaborate productively, and I think it’s a major reason for its success. It seems more unique/specific than acknodwledging tradeoffs, more important to have explicitly written as a core value to prevent the community from drifting away from it, and a great value proposition.
As James, I also found it weird that what had become a canonical definition of EA was changed without a heads-up to its community.
In any case, thank you so much for all your work, and I’m grateful that thanks to you it survives as a paragraph in the essay.
Thanks for putting it back!
It’s really important to me, as I can sometimes find that the (non-EA) charity and government world is a bunch of status-based competition over funding pots that encourages flattery and truth distortions and bitterness.
And, ok, EA can be like that as well, but ideally it isn’t—ideally we’d be totally happy for our pet project to get cancelled and the money reallocated to doing a similar thing more efficiently. And also to uphold the people this happens to, recognising their inherent worth as community members and collaborators.
Hi @Agnes Stenlund 🔸 ,
Last week I had a discussion about the core principles with someone at our EA office in Amsterdam. She also liked “collaborative spirit”. I remembered this discussion and decided to check it again and see that you decided to add this in the intro essay. That’s great! Shouldn’t it then also be added on the “core principles” page? (Or am I overlooking something?)
I am glad to see the term “truthseeking” go. The problems with this term: 1) it has never been clearly defined by anyone anywhere, 2) people seem to disagree about what it means, and 3) the main way it seems to be used in practice on the EA Forum is as an accusation made against someone else — but due to (1) and (2), it’s typically not clear what, exactly, the accusation is. “Scout mindset” is much more clearly defined, so it’s a good replacement. (I don’t particularly love that term, personally, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Scope sensitivity seems like a good replacement for prioritization, no? I guess scope sensitivity and recognition of trade-offs together have replaced prioritization. That seems fine to me. What do you think?
Impartial altruism and impartiality sound like the same thing. So, that’s fine.
I think Kestrel is right that the only clear substantive change is collaborative spirit was dropped. Is that a good guiding principle? Could it also be substituted with something a bit clearer or better?
I don’t have a super strong view on which set of guiding principles is better—I just thought it was odd for them to be changed in this way.
If pushed, I prefer the old set, and a significant part of that preference stems from the amount of jargon in the new set. My ideal would perhaps be a combination of the old set and the 2017 set.
Expanding our moral circle
We work to overcome our natural tendency to care most about those closest to us. This means taking seriously the interests of distant strangers, future generations, and nonhuman animals—anyone whose wellbeing we can affect through our choices. We continuously question the boundaries we place around moral consideration, and we’re willing to help wherever we can do the most good, not just where helping feels most natural or comfortable.
Prioritisation
We do the hard work of choosing where to focus our limited time, money, and attention. This means being willing to say “this is good, but not the best use of marginal resources”—and actually following through, even when it means disappointing people or turning down appealing opportunities. We resist scope creep and don’t let personal preferences override our considered judgments about where we can have the most impact.
Scientific mindset
We treat our beliefs as hypotheses to be tested rather than conclusions to be defended. This means actively seeking disconfirming evidence, updating based on data, and maintaining genuine uncertainty about what we don’t yet know. We acknowledge the limits of our evidence, don’t oversell our findings, and follow arguments wherever they lead—even when the conclusions are uncomfortable or threaten projects we care about.
Openness
We take unusual ideas seriously and are willing to consider approaches that seem weird or unconventional if the reasoning is sound. We default to transparency about our reasoning, funding, mistakes, and internal debates. We make our work easy to scrutinise and critique, remain accessible to people from different backgrounds, and share knowledge rather than hoarding it. We normalise admitting when we get things wrong and create cultures where people can acknowledge mistakes without fear, while still maintaining accountability.
Acting with integrity
We align our behaviour with our stated values. This means being honest even when it’s costly, keeping our commitments, and treating people ethically regardless of their status or usefulness to our goals. How we conduct ourselves—especially toward those with less power—reflects our actual values more than our stated principles. We hold ourselves and our institutions to high standards of personal and professional conduct, recognising that being trustworthy is foundational to everything else.
Wow, I like scientific mindset a lot more than “truthseeking” (what does it mean??) or scout mindset!
I think you are right that there is too much jargon in the new set of principles and the old set is much nicer.
I also agree there should probably be a consultation with the community on this.
...where’d the collaborative spirit go? The rest is mostly relabeling, so I’d let it slide, but that does seem like a glaring omission. Did EAs helping each other not poll well in a non-EA focus group or something?
I agree and argued in a similar direction in a comment last year.