to build a community of students and professionals acting on EA principles, by nurturing high-quality discussion spaces.
The focus on improving discussion spaces is relatively narrow compared to possible alternatives. Off the top of my head, some other (not necessarily good) alternatives might be:
Directly manage content creation
improving coordination among donors
lead a centralized information platform
lead a common research agenda
develop a single “brand” for EA and for main cause areas
Support promising individuals and organizations
obtain and develop tools and infrastructure to support EA researchers
Leading to common answers and community-wide decisions to some key questions about EA (should we expand or keep it small, should we have a different distribution of cause areas, should we invest more in cause prioritization or meta causes, ..)
...
I think that it makes a lot of sense to keep the focus on discussion platforms, and it seems that you are also naturally working on stuff outside of this focus as needed. I’d be interested to hear a bit more about what you’d want other initiatives from the community to take on, which you could have taken on yourselves but decided to withdraw. I’m also not sure from the post if you consider this mission as a long-term focus of CEA, or if this is only for the 1-2 coming years.
Hi Edo,
This is something that we’re keen to clarify and might publish more on soon. So thanks for giving me the opportunity to share some thoughts on this!
I think you’re right that this is a narrower mission: this is deliberate.
Since 2016, CEA has had a large number of projects for its size...Running this wide array of projects has sometimes resulted in a lack of organizational focus, poor execution, and a lack of follow-through. It also meant that we were staking a claim on projects that might otherwise have been taken on by other individuals or groups that could have done a better job than we were doing (for example, by funding good projects that we were slow to fund).
Since we wrote that, we have closed EA Grants and spun Giving What We Can out (while continuing to provide operational support), and we’re exploring something similar with EA Funds. I think that this will allow us to be more focused and do an excellent job of the things we are doing.
As you note, there are still many things in the area of building the EA community that we are not doing. Of course these things could be very impactful if well-executed (even though we don’t have the resources to take them on), so we want to let people know what we’re not doing, so they can consider taking them on.
I’ll go through some of the alternatives you mention and talk about how much I think we’ll work in this space. I’ll also share some rough thoughts about what might be needed, but I’m really not an expert in that question—I’d tend to defer to grantmakers about what they’re interested in funding.
A theme in what I write below is that I view CEA as one organization helping to grow and support the EA community, not the organization determining the community’s future. I think it’s mostly good for there not to be one organization determining the community’s future. I think that this isn’t a real change: the EA community’s development was always influenced by a coalition of organizations. But I do think that CEA sometimes aimed to determine the community’s future, or represented itself as doing so. I think this was often a mistake.
Directly manage content creation
We don’t have plans to create more content. We do curate content when that supports productive discussion spaces (e.g. inviting speakers to events, developing curricula for fellowships at groups). We also try to incentivize the creation of quality content via giving speakers a platform and giving out Forum prizes.
80,000 Hours is maybe the most obvious organization creating new content, but many research organizations are also creating useful content, and I think there’s room for more work here (while having high quality standards).
improving coordination among donors
We are currently running EA Funds, which I see as doing some work in this space (e.g. I think Funds and the donor lottery play some of this role). There might be room for extra work in this space (e.g. coordination between major donors), but I think some of this happens informally anyway, and I don’t have a sense of whether there’s a need for more at the moment.
lead a centralized information platform
I’m not sure quite what you have in mind here. I think the Forum is playing this role to some extent: e.g. it has a lot of posts/crossposts of important content, sequences, user profiles, and a tag/wiki system. We also work on the EA Hub resources. We don’t have plans beyond further developing these.
lead a common research agenda
We are not doing this, and we haven’t been doing research since ~2017. I think there are lots of great research organizations (e.g. Global Priorities Institute, Open Philanthropy, Rethink Priorities) that are working on this (though maybe not a single leader—I think this is fine).
develop a single “brand” for EA and for main cause areas
We do not plan to do this for specific cause areas. We do plan to do some work on testing/developing EA’s brand (as mentioned above in the community health section). However, I think that other organisations (e.g. 80,000 Hours) also play an important role, and I think it’s OK (maybe good) if there are a few different representations of EA ideas (which might work well for different audiences).
Support promising individuals and organizations
Supporting organizations: as mentioned in our annual review, we do some work to support organizations as they work through internal conflicts/HR issues. We also currently make grants to other organizations via EA Funds. We also provide operational support to 80,000 Hours, Forethought Foundation, GWWC, and a long-termist project incubator. Other than this, we don’t plan to work in this space.
Supporting individuals: Again, we currently do this to some extent via EA Funds. Historically we focused a bit more on identifying and providing high-touch support to individuals. I think that our comparative advantage is to focus more on facilitating groups and discussion, rather than identifying promising individuals. So this isn’t a current focus, although we do some aspects of this via e.g. support for group leaders. I think that some of this sort of work is done via career development programs like FHI’s Research Scholars Program or Charity Entrepreneurship’s internship program. I also think that lots of organizations do some of this work via their hiring processes. But I think there might be room for extra work identifying and supporting promising individuals.
In terms of non-financial support, the groups team provides support and advice to group organizers, and the community health team provides support to community members experiencing a problem or conflict within the community.
obtain and develop tools and infrastructure to support EA researchers
I think that the Forum provides some infrastructure for public discussion of research ideas. Apart from that, I don’t think this is our comparative advantage and we don’t plan to do this.
Leading to common answers and community-wide decisions to some key questions about EA (should we expand or keep it small, should we have a different distribution of cause areas, should we invest more in cause prioritization or meta causes, ..)
We do some work to convene discussion on this between key organizations/individuals (e.g. I think this sometimes happens on the Forum, and our coordination forum event allows people to discuss such questions, and where they can build relationships that allow them to coordinate more effectively). But we don’t do things that lead to “common answers or community-wide decisions”.
I actually don’t think we need to have a common answer to a lot of these questions: I think it’s important for people to be sharing their reasoning and giving feedback to each other, but often it’s fine or good if there are some different visions for the community’s future, with people working on the aspect of that which feels most compelling to them. For instance, I think that CEA has quite a different focus now from GWWC or Charity Entrepreneurship or OP or GPI, but I think that our work is deeply complimentary and the community is better off having a distribution of work like this. I also think that it works pretty well for individuals (e.g. donors, job-seekers) to decide which of those visions they most want to support, thus allowing the most compelling visions to grow.
For similar reasons, I think it would be bad to have a single organization “leading” the community. I think that CEA aspired to play this role in the past but didn’t execute it well. I think that the current slightly-more-chaotic system is likely more robust and innovative than a centralized system (even if it were well-executed). (Obviously there’s some centralization in the current system too—e.g. OP is by far the biggest grantmaker. I don’t have a strong view about whether more or less centralization would be better on the current margin, but I am pretty confident that we don’t want to be a lot more centralized than we currently are.)
Some other things we’re not planning to focus on:
Reaching new mid- or late-career professionals (though we are keen to retain mid- or late- career people and to make them feel welcome, we’re focused on recruiting students and young professionals)
Reaching or advising high-net-worth donors
Fundraising in general
Cause-specific work (such as community building specifically for effective animal advocacy, AI safety, biosecurity etc)
Career advising
Research, except about the EA community
Some of our work will occasionally touch on or facilitate some of the above (e.g. if groups run career fellowships, or city groups do outreach to mid-career professionals), but we won’t be focusing on these areas.
As I mentioned, we might say more on this in a separate post soon.
I’m also not sure from the post if you consider this mission as a long-term focus of CEA, or if this is only for the 1-2 coming years.
Thanks! I think that this is clear enough for me to be able to mostly predict how you’d think about related questions :)
I am personally very confused about the benefits of centralization vs. decentralization and how to compare these in particular cases and can find myself drawn to either in different cases. For what it’s worth, I like the general heuristic of centralized platforms for decentralized decision-making.
To investigate it a bit further, I opened this question about possible coordination failures.
Thanks for this informative write-up!
The mission as stated is
The focus on improving discussion spaces is relatively narrow compared to possible alternatives. Off the top of my head, some other (not necessarily good) alternatives might be:
Directly manage content creation
improving coordination among donors
lead a centralized information platform
lead a common research agenda
develop a single “brand” for EA and for main cause areas
Support promising individuals and organizations
obtain and develop tools and infrastructure to support EA researchers
Leading to common answers and community-wide decisions to some key questions about EA (should we expand or keep it small, should we have a different distribution of cause areas, should we invest more in cause prioritization or meta causes, ..)
...
I think that it makes a lot of sense to keep the focus on discussion platforms, and it seems that you are also naturally working on stuff outside of this focus as needed. I’d be interested to hear a bit more about what you’d want other initiatives from the community to take on, which you could have taken on yourselves but decided to withdraw. I’m also not sure from the post if you consider this mission as a long-term focus of CEA, or if this is only for the 1-2 coming years.
Hi Edo, This is something that we’re keen to clarify and might publish more on soon. So thanks for giving me the opportunity to share some thoughts on this!
I think you’re right that this is a narrower mission: this is deliberate.
As we say on our mistakes page:
Since we wrote that, we have closed EA Grants and spun Giving What We Can out (while continuing to provide operational support), and we’re exploring something similar with EA Funds. I think that this will allow us to be more focused and do an excellent job of the things we are doing.
As you note, there are still many things in the area of building the EA community that we are not doing. Of course these things could be very impactful if well-executed (even though we don’t have the resources to take them on), so we want to let people know what we’re not doing, so they can consider taking them on.
I’ll go through some of the alternatives you mention and talk about how much I think we’ll work in this space. I’ll also share some rough thoughts about what might be needed, but I’m really not an expert in that question—I’d tend to defer to grantmakers about what they’re interested in funding.
A theme in what I write below is that I view CEA as one organization helping to grow and support the EA community, not the organization determining the community’s future. I think it’s mostly good for there not to be one organization determining the community’s future. I think that this isn’t a real change: the EA community’s development was always influenced by a coalition of organizations. But I do think that CEA sometimes aimed to determine the community’s future, or represented itself as doing so. I think this was often a mistake.
We don’t have plans to create more content. We do curate content when that supports productive discussion spaces (e.g. inviting speakers to events, developing curricula for fellowships at groups). We also try to incentivize the creation of quality content via giving speakers a platform and giving out Forum prizes.
80,000 Hours is maybe the most obvious organization creating new content, but many research organizations are also creating useful content, and I think there’s room for more work here (while having high quality standards).
We are currently running EA Funds, which I see as doing some work in this space (e.g. I think Funds and the donor lottery play some of this role). There might be room for extra work in this space (e.g. coordination between major donors), but I think some of this happens informally anyway, and I don’t have a sense of whether there’s a need for more at the moment.
I’m not sure quite what you have in mind here. I think the Forum is playing this role to some extent: e.g. it has a lot of posts/crossposts of important content, sequences, user profiles, and a tag/wiki system. We also work on the EA Hub resources. We don’t have plans beyond further developing these.
We are not doing this, and we haven’t been doing research since ~2017. I think there are lots of great research organizations (e.g. Global Priorities Institute, Open Philanthropy, Rethink Priorities) that are working on this (though maybe not a single leader—I think this is fine).
We do not plan to do this for specific cause areas. We do plan to do some work on testing/developing EA’s brand (as mentioned above in the community health section). However, I think that other organisations (e.g. 80,000 Hours) also play an important role, and I think it’s OK (maybe good) if there are a few different representations of EA ideas (which might work well for different audiences).
Supporting organizations: as mentioned in our annual review, we do some work to support organizations as they work through internal conflicts/HR issues. We also currently make grants to other organizations via EA Funds. We also provide operational support to 80,000 Hours, Forethought Foundation, GWWC, and a long-termist project incubator. Other than this, we don’t plan to work in this space.
Supporting individuals: Again, we currently do this to some extent via EA Funds. Historically we focused a bit more on identifying and providing high-touch support to individuals. I think that our comparative advantage is to focus more on facilitating groups and discussion, rather than identifying promising individuals. So this isn’t a current focus, although we do some aspects of this via e.g. support for group leaders. I think that some of this sort of work is done via career development programs like FHI’s Research Scholars Program or Charity Entrepreneurship’s internship program. I also think that lots of organizations do some of this work via their hiring processes. But I think there might be room for extra work identifying and supporting promising individuals.
In terms of non-financial support, the groups team provides support and advice to group organizers, and the community health team provides support to community members experiencing a problem or conflict within the community.
I think that the Forum provides some infrastructure for public discussion of research ideas. Apart from that, I don’t think this is our comparative advantage and we don’t plan to do this.
We do some work to convene discussion on this between key organizations/individuals (e.g. I think this sometimes happens on the Forum, and our coordination forum event allows people to discuss such questions, and where they can build relationships that allow them to coordinate more effectively). But we don’t do things that lead to “common answers or community-wide decisions”.
I actually don’t think we need to have a common answer to a lot of these questions: I think it’s important for people to be sharing their reasoning and giving feedback to each other, but often it’s fine or good if there are some different visions for the community’s future, with people working on the aspect of that which feels most compelling to them. For instance, I think that CEA has quite a different focus now from GWWC or Charity Entrepreneurship or OP or GPI, but I think that our work is deeply complimentary and the community is better off having a distribution of work like this. I also think that it works pretty well for individuals (e.g. donors, job-seekers) to decide which of those visions they most want to support, thus allowing the most compelling visions to grow.
For similar reasons, I think it would be bad to have a single organization “leading” the community. I think that CEA aspired to play this role in the past but didn’t execute it well. I think that the current slightly-more-chaotic system is likely more robust and innovative than a centralized system (even if it were well-executed). (Obviously there’s some centralization in the current system too—e.g. OP is by far the biggest grantmaker. I don’t have a strong view about whether more or less centralization would be better on the current margin, but I am pretty confident that we don’t want to be a lot more centralized than we currently are.)
Some other things we’re not planning to focus on:
Reaching new mid- or late-career professionals (though we are keen to retain mid- or late- career people and to make them feel welcome, we’re focused on recruiting students and young professionals)
Reaching or advising high-net-worth donors
Fundraising in general
Cause-specific work (such as community building specifically for effective animal advocacy, AI safety, biosecurity etc)
Career advising
Research, except about the EA community
Some of our work will occasionally touch on or facilitate some of the above (e.g. if groups run career fellowships, or city groups do outreach to mid-career professionals), but we won’t be focusing on these areas.
As I mentioned, we might say more on this in a separate post soon.
I expect this mission to be our long-term focus.
Thanks! I think that this is clear enough for me to be able to mostly predict how you’d think about related questions :)
I am personally very confused about the benefits of centralization vs. decentralization and how to compare these in particular cases and can find myself drawn to either in different cases. For what it’s worth, I like the general heuristic of centralized platforms for decentralized decision-making.
To investigate it a bit further, I opened this question about possible coordination failures.