Centre for Effective Altruism and Ambitious Impact (formerly Charity Entrepreneurship) are probably named the wrong way around in terms of what they actually do and IMO this feeds into the EA branding problem.
Why do I think this?
āEffectiveā Altruism implies a value judgement that requires strong evidence to back upālike launching charities aiming to beat GiveWell benchmarks and raising large amounts of money from donors who expect to see evidence significant returns in the next 3 years or shut down.
IMO this is very friendly to a wide business-friendly and government audience
āAmbitious Impactā implies more speculative, less easy to measure activities in pursuit of even higher impact returns. My understanding is that Open Philanthropy split from GiveWell because of the realisation that there was more marginal funding required for āDo-gooding R&Dā with a lower existing evidence base.
Why do we need āDo-Gooding R&Dā?
So we can find better ways to help others in the future.
To use the example of a pharmaceutical company, why donāt they reduce the prices of all their currently functional drugs to help more people? So, they can fund their expensive hit-based R&D efforts. Thereās obviously trade-offs, but itās short sighted to pretend the low hanging fruit wonāt eventually be picked.
So what? IMO AIM has outcompeted CEA on a number of fronts (their training is better, their content (if not their marketing) is better, they are agile and improve over time). Probably 80% of the useful and practical things Iāve learned about how to do effective altruism, Iāve learned from them.
The AIM folks Iāve spoken to are frustrated that their resultsābased on exploiting cost-effective high-evidence base interventionsāare used to launder the reputation of OP funded low evidence base āDo-gooding R&D.ā I think before you should get to work on āDo-Gooding R&Dā, you should probably learn how the current state of Do-Gooding best practices.
If we think about EA brand as a product, Iād guess weāre in āThe Chasmā below as the EA brand is too associated with the āweirdā stuff that innovators are doing to be effectively sold to lower risk tolerance markets.
This is bad because lower risk tolerance markets (governments etc) are the largest scale funders.
AIM should be the face of EA and should be feeding in A LOT more to general outreach efforts. Too strong a takeāsee this reply to Lorenzoās comment
Concrete suggestions
Iām not suggesting they swap names, its likely locked in at this point BUT I think they have more in common than they think and are focussing too much on where they differ. Looking at where CEA people actually donate, it looks like they are hedging the higher risk nature of their work with donations to interventions with clearer returns. Retractedātoo strong a take as highlight by this comment
One solution would be a merger since there are lots of synergies but they are too far away from each other in terms of views on cost effectiveness and funding independence to do so (yet)
I think they should be collaborating more, maybe coworking in the same office sometimes?
My wider take is that EA should become a profession (post building on this one incoming if I can ever actually finish it) so there is better regulation of individuals enabling us to have internally facing competition/āinnovation/āR&D based on shared principles while generating externally facing standards that can be used by non-insiders and allow us to scale what works.
We shouldnāt be internally fighting for a bigger slide of the existing pie, we should be demonstrating value externally so we can grow the size of the pie.
I work for CEA but Iām writing this from a personal perspective. Others at CEA may disagree with me.
Thanks for writing this! :) I think itās an interesting argument. I generally agree with everything @Lorenzo Buonannošø said in his comments, so Iāll just add a few things here.
I ultimately disagree that CEA should change its name, because EA principles are important to me and I like that we are trying to do good explicitly using the framework of EA (including promoting the framework itself) rather than using a more nebulous framing. I canāt speak for AIM, but it does seem like our two organizations have different goals, so in that sense it seems good that we both exist and work towards achieving our own separate goals. For example, I think (just a low confidence guess based on public info) that AIM are not interested in stewarding EA or owning improving the EA brand. CEA is interested in doing those things, and it seems good for us to have āEAā in our name in order to do those things. I think you and I both agree that the EA brand needs improving, and CEA is working on hiring for our Comms Team to have more capacity to do this work.
I think they have more in common than they think and are focussing too much on where they differ.
Iām not sure who ātheyā are in this sentence. I personally donāt think I have done this. I have a very high opinion of AIM overall, and I think that sentiment is common within CEA. I have personally applied to one of their incubation rounds because I thought there was a chance I could do more good there than at CEA. They are one of the orgs that best takes advantage of CEAās infrastructure (such as EAG and the EA Forum) ā they make frequent appearances in our user surveys about how people have found value from those projects. Our team includes AIMās opportunities in our email newsletters and have curatedmultipleposts by them. I donāt personally know the people who run AIM, but from my perspective we are collaborators on the same team.
Looking at where CEA people actually donate, it looks like they are hedging the higher risk nature of their work with donations to interventions with clearer returns.
I think itās hard to use the linked post as evidence to support this. I counted ~4/ā10 of the CEA employees that responded as falling into that category, and the rest mostly donated to causes that I think you would consider more speculative (at least more than the average AIM charity). Most CEA employees decided not participate in the public post, and Iām guessing that the ones that did not are more biased towards donating to less legibly cost-effective projects. I think there is also a bit of a theme where people tended to donate to interventions with clearer returns before joining CEA, and at CEA are spending more time considering other donation options (this is broadly true for myself, for example). So there are forces that push in both directions and itās not clear to me what the net result is.
We shouldnāt be internally fighting for a bigger slide of the existing pie, we should be demonstrating value externally so we can grow the size of the pie.
Again, Iām not sure who is fighting internally. I guess this is making me worried that AIM views us as fighting with each other? That possibility makes me genuinely quite sad. If anyone at AIM wants to talk with me about it, youāre welcome to message me on the Forum.
Iād like to caveat that Iām not sure I got the tone quite right in my original quick take. Iām glad I put it out there, but it is very much based on vibes and is motivated by an impression that thereās opportunities for stronger relationships to be built. (Mostly based on conversations with AIM folks but I donāt speak for them.)
My vibes-based take looks like it might not be true. There might be more collaboration than I can see, or it might just make sense to growth separately since there are clear differences in opinion for cause prioritisation and approach to cost effectiveness. CEA also is beholden to one funder which makes it much harder to be independent from that funderās views.
To be clear I think everyone involved cares deeply, is competent and is, very reasonably, prioritising other things.
I ultimately disagree that CEA should change its name, because EA principles are important to me and I like that we are trying to do good explicitly using the framework of EA (including promoting the framework itself) rather than using a more nebulous framing. I canāt speak for AIM, but it does seem like our two organizations have different goals, so in that sense it seems good that we both exist and work towards achieving our own separate goals. For example, I think (just a low confidence guess based on public info) that AIM are not interested in stewarding EA or owning improving the EA brand. CEA is interested in doing those things, and it seems good for us to have āEAā in our name in order to do those things. I think you and I both agree that the EA brand needs improving, and CEA is working on hiring for our Comms Team to have more capacity to do this work.
Agree with thisāI donāt think names should be changed and I donāt think AIM should/āwants to maintain the EA brand. I do think there should be more centralisation of comms though (especially as it seems hard to hire for) - Iām generally in favour of investing more in infrastructure and cutting costs on operating expenses where possible (see my comment here)
I think itās hard to use the linked post as evidence to support this. I counted ~4/ā10 of the CEA employees that responded as falling into that category, and the rest mostly donated to causes that I think you would consider more speculative (at least more than the average AIM charity). Most CEA employees decided not participate in the public post, and Iām guessing that the ones that did not are more biased towards donating to less legibly cost-effective projects. I think there is also a bit of a theme where people tended to donate to interventions with clearer returns before joining CEA, and at CEA are spending more time considering other donation options (this is broadly true for myself, for example). So there are forces that push in both directions and itās not clear to me what the net result is.
This is fair and my original take was too strong. Edited to reflect that.
Iām not sure who ātheyā are in this sentence.
I donāt personally know the people who run AIM, but from my perspective we are collaborators on the same team.
We shouldnāt be internally fighting for a bigger slide of the existing pie, we should be demonstrating value externally so we can grow the size of the pie.
As noted above, I donāt speak for either group hereāIām only a volunteer.
I think fighting was too strong a word, but I donāt get the impression there are strong trust-based relationships which I do think is leaving impact on the table by missing potential opportunities to cut costs in the long term by centralising infrastructure/āoperating expenses.
Appreciate the response! To be clear, I am genuinely glad that you wrote the quick take, so I donāt want to discourage you from doing more off-the-cuff quick takes in the future. Hopefully hearing my perspective was helpful as well. Iām glad to hear that you donāt think we are actually fighting. :)
On collaborating/ācutting costs: my outside impression is that AIM is already quite good about keeping their costs low and is not shy about being proactive. So my view is something like, if they thought it would be good for the world to collaborate more closely with CEA, I trust that they would have acted upon that belief. This is something that I respect about AIM (at least the version thatās in my head, since I donāt know them).
I feel Iām not informed enough to reply to this, and it feels weird to speculate about orgs I know very little about, but I worry that the people most informed wonāt reply here for various reasons, so Iām sharing some thoughts based on what very little information I have (almost entirely from reading posts on this forum, and of course speaking only for myself). This is all very low confidence.
āEffectiveā Altruism implies a value judgement that requires strong evidence to back up
I think if you frame it as a question, something like āWe are trying to do altruism effectively, this is the best that weāre able to do so farā, it doesnāt require that much evidence (for better or worse)
āAmbitious Impactā implies more speculative, less easy to measure activities in pursuit of even higher impact returns.
That is not clear to me, one can be very ambitious by working on things that are very easy to measure. For example, people going through AIMās āfounding to giveā program seem to have a goal thatās easy to measure: money donated in 10 years[1], but I still think of them as clearly āambitiousā if they try to donate millions. Google defines ambitious as āhaving or showing a strong desire and determination to succeedā
My understanding is that Open Philanthropy split from GiveWell because of the realisation that there was more marginal funding required for āDo-gooding R&Dā with a lower existing evidence base.
IMO AIM has outcompeted CEA on a number of fronts (their training is better, their content (if not their marketing) is better, they are agile and improve over time). Probably 80% of the useful and practical things Iāve learned about how to do effective altruism, Iāve learned from them.
I agree that AIM is more impressive than CEA on many fronts, but I think they mostly have different scopes.[2] My impression is that CEA doesnāt focus much on specific ways to implement specific approaches to āhow to do effective altruismā, but on things like āwhy to do effective altruismā and āhere are some things people are doing/āwriting about how to do good, go read/ātalk to them for detailsā.
If not for CEA, I think I probably wouldnāt have heard of AIM (or GWWC, or 80k, or effective animal advocacy as a whole field). And if I had only interacted with AIM, Iām not sure if I would have been exposed to as many different perspectives on things like animal welfare, longtermism, and spreading positive values[3]
The AIM folks Iāve spoken to are frustrated that their resultsābased on exploiting cost-effective high-evidence base interventionsāare used to launder the reputation of OP funded low evidence base āDo-gooding R&D.ā
I understand the frustration, especially given the brand concerns below and because I think many AIM folks think that a lot of the assumptions behind longtermism donāt hold.[4] But I donāt know if this āreputation launderingā is actually happening that much:
My sense is that the (vague) relation to the Shrimp Welfare Project is not helping the reputation of some other EA-Adjacent projects
I think AIM is just really small compared to e.g. GiveWell, which I think is more often used to claim that EA is doing some good
When e.g. 80000hours interviews a LEEP cofounder, I strongly believe that itās because they think that LEEP is really amazing (as everyone does), they want to promote it, and they want more people to do similar amazing things. I think the reason people talk about the best AIM projects is usually not to look better by association but to promote them as examples of things that are clearly great.
If we think about EA brand as a product, Iād guess weāre in āThe Chasmā below as the EA brand is too associated with the āweirdā stuff that innovators are doing to be effectively sold to lower risk tolerance markets.
I personally believe that the EA brand is in a pretty bad place, and at the moment often associated with things like FTX, TESCREAL and OpenAI, and that is a bigger issue. I think EA is seen as a group non-altruistic people, not as a group of altruistic people who are too āweirdā. (But I have even lower confidence on this than on the rest of this comment)
AIM should be the face of EA and should be feeding in A LOT more to general outreach efforts.
Related to the point above, itās not clear to me why AIM should be the face of āEAā instead of any other ādoing the most goodā movement (e.g. Roots of Progress, School for Moral Ambition, Center for High Impact Philanthropy, ā¦). I think none of these would make a lot of sense, and donāt see why āAIM being the face of AIMā would be worse than AIM being the face of something else. You can see in their 2023 annual review that they did deeply consider building a new community ābut ultimately feel that a more targeted approach focusing on certain careers with the most impact would be better for usā.[5]
In general, I agree with your conclusions on wishing for more professionalization, and increasing the size of the pie (but it might be harder than one would think, and it might make sense to instead increase the number of separate pies)
I imagine positive externalities from the new organizations will also be a big part of their impact, but I expect the main measure will be amount donated.
AIM obviously does a lot for animal welfare, but I donāt think they focus on helping people reson about how to prioritize human vs non-human welfare/ārights/āpreferences.
I canāt link to the quote, so Iāll copy-paste it here.
JOEY: Yeah, I basically think I donāt find a really highly uncertain, but high-value expected value calculation as compelling. And they tend to be a lot more concretely focused on whatās the specific outcome of this? Like, okay, how much are we banking on a very narrow sort of set of outcomes and how confident are we that weāre going to affect that, and whatās the historical track record of people whoāve tried to affect the future and this sort of thing. Thereās a million and a half weeds and assumptions that go in. And I think, most people on both sides of this issue in terms of near-term causes versus long-term causes just have not actually engaged that deeply with all the different arguments. Thereās like a lot of assumptions made on either side of the spectrum. But I actually have gotten fairly deeply into this. I had this conversation a lot of times and thought about it quite thoroughly. And yeah, just a lot of the assumptions donāt hold.
An option many people have been asking us about in the wake of the struggles of the EA movement is if CE would consider building out a movement that brings back some of the strengths of EA 1.0. We considered this idea pretty deeply but ultimately feel that a more targeted approach focusing on certain careers with the most impact would be better for us. The logistical and time costs of running a movement are quite large and it seems as though often a huge % of the movementās impact comes from a small number of actors and orgs. Although we like some things the EA movement has brought to the table when comparing it to more focused uses (e.g. GiveWell focuses more on GiveWellās growth), we have ended up more pessimistic about the impact of new movements.
I donāt think they linked to their 2024 annual report on the forum, so this might be different now.
This is helpful and I agree with most of it. I think my take here is mostly driven by:
EA atm doesnāt seem very practical to take action on except for donating and/āor applying to a small set of jobs funded mostly by one source. My guess is this is reducing the number of āoperatorā types that get involved and selects for cerebral philosophising types. I heard about 80k and CEA first but it was the practical testable AIM charities that sparked my interest THEN Iāve developed more of an interest in implications from AI and GCRs.
When Iāve run corporate events, Iāve avoided using the term Effective Altruism (despite it being useful and descriptive) because of the existing brand.
I think current cause prioritisation methods are limiting innovation in the field because itās not teaching people about tools they can then use in different areas. Thereās probably low hanging fruit that isnāt being picked because of this narrow philosophical approach.
Iām not a comms person so my AIM should be the face of EA thing is too strong. But I do think itās a better face for more practical less abstract thinkers
I agree with 3 of your points but I disagree with the first one:
EA atm doesnāt seem very practical to take action on except for donating and/āor applying to a small set of jobs funded mostly by one source.
On jobs: 80k, Probably Good and Animal Advocacy Careers have job boards with lots of jobs (including all AIM jobs) and get regularly recommended to people seeking jobs. I met someone new to EA at EAGx Berlin a month ago, and 3 days ago they posted on LinkedIn that they started working at The Life You Can Save.
On donations: Iām biased but I think donations can be a really valuable action, and EA promotes donations to a large number of causes (including AIM).
My guess is this is reducing the number of āoperatorā types that get involved and selects for cerebral philosophising types.
Itās really hard for me to tell if this is a good or bad thing, especially because I think itās possible that things like animal welfare or GCR reduction can plausibly be significantly more effective than more obviously good āpractical testableā work (and the reason to favour āR&Dā mentioned previously)
I heard about 80k and CEA first but it was the practical testable AIM charities that sparked my interest THEN Iāve developed more of an interest in implications from AI and GCRs.
Not really a disagreement, but I think itās great that thereās cross-pollination, with people getting into AIM from 80k and CEA, and into 80k and CEA from AIM
Earning to give is not a good description for what I do because Iām not optimising across career paths for high pay for donationsāmore like the highest pay I can get for a 9-5.
I think of it more as āSelf-funded community builderā
On cross pollination, yeah I think we agree. The self sorting between cause areas based on intuition and instinct isnāt great thoughāit means that there are opportunities to innovate that are missed in both camps.
One thing I occasionally think about is how few ācompetitorsā exist for CEAās products/āservices. I feel a little odd using this kind of terminology in a non-profit context, but to put it simplistically: if anyone wants to start up a ācompetingā conference for do-gooders, they can do that. In a simplistic sense there isnāt anything stopping AIM, or GWWC, or High Impact Professionals, or you & I as individuals from putting on a Effective Altruism Annual Conference, or from hosting online introductory EA programs, or from providing coaching and advice to city and university EA groups.
There actually is a lot stopping people from doing this independentlyāif you would ever want to scale and get funding you basically have 3 sources of funders, and if they donāt approve what you are doing you wonāt get to become a serious competitor
Iām probably less informed than you are, but depending on what you mean by āsources of fundersā I disagree.
I think if you can demonstrate getting valuable results and want funding to scale, people will be happy to fund you. My impression is that several people influencing >=6 digit allocations are genuinely looking for projects to fund that can be even more effective than what theyāre currently funding.
Iām fairly confident that if anyone hosted a conference or online program, got good results, had a clear theory of change with measurable metrics, and gradually asked for funding to scale, people will be happy to fund that.
Ah sorry I should have just said ā3 main /ā larger scale fundersā (op, eaif + meta funding circle). Funders from those groups include individuals.
But I was also unclear in my commentāIāll clarify this soon.
I agree with you. Hypothetically, anyone can ācompeteā by providing an alternative offering. But realistically there are barriers to entry. (I know that I wouldnāt be able to put on a conference or run an online forum without lots of outside funding and expertise.) Maybe we could make an argument that there are some competitors with CEAās services (such as Manifest, AVA Summit, LessWrong, Animal Advocacy Forum) but I suspect that the target market is different enough that these donāt really count as competitors.
Of all the things that CEA does, running online intro EA programs would probably be the easiest thing to provide an alternative offering for: just get a reading list and start running sessions. Heck, I run book clubs that meet video video chat, and all it takes in 15-45 minutes of administrative work each month.
On a local/ānational level, maybe university/ācity group support could realistically be done? But Iām fairly skeptical. My informal impression is that for most of what CEA does it wouldnāt make sense for alternative offerings to try to ācompete.ā
Iād say the key thing CEA is providing is infrastructure/āassets rather than product/āservices and that tends to be the kind of thing to centralise where possible. Ie. EA forum, community health, shared resources/āknowledge, distribution channels etc.
Events are closer to product/āservices and. AIM has done conferences in the past but they arenāt open to wider groups like EAGxs.
The blocker for those orgs is probably capacityāboth AIM and GWWC are <20 people, HIP is 2 people, EA UK [1] is 0.8 FTE. For me personally, I do run a lot of events but my frustration is that the barrier to entry is pretty high because of existing network effects, the fact that they do have know-how and that I basically have to do a ton of my own marketing and maintain my own mailing list to run GWWC events.[2]
We could compete but why are we doing that? This is not a zero sum game for impact, it is very positive sum. Thereās so much work to be done.
a) I agree that it would be better if the names were reversed, however, I also agree that itās locked in now. b) āAIM should be the face of EA and should be feeding in A LOT more to general outreach effortsāāTheyāre an excellent org, but I disagree. I tried writing up an explanation of why, but I struggled to produce something clear.
Centre for Effective Altruism and Ambitious Impact (formerly Charity Entrepreneurship) are probably named the wrong way around in terms of what they actually do and IMO this feeds into the EA branding problem.
Why do I think this?
āEffectiveā Altruism implies a value judgement that requires strong evidence to back upālike launching charities aiming to beat GiveWell benchmarks and raising large amounts of money from donors who expect to see evidence significant returns in the next 3 years or shut down.
IMO this is very friendly to a wide business-friendly and government audience
āAmbitious Impactā implies more speculative, less easy to measure activities in pursuit of even higher impact returns. My understanding is that Open Philanthropy split from GiveWell because of the realisation that there was more marginal funding required for āDo-gooding R&Dā with a lower existing evidence base.
Why do we need āDo-Gooding R&Dā?
So we can find better ways to help others in the future.
To use the example of a pharmaceutical company, why donāt they reduce the prices of all their currently functional drugs to help more people? So, they can fund their expensive hit-based R&D efforts. Thereās obviously trade-offs, but itās short sighted to pretend the low hanging fruit wonāt eventually be picked.
So what?
IMO AIM has outcompeted CEA on a number of fronts (their training is better, their content (if not their marketing) is better, they are agile and improve over time). Probably 80% of the useful and practical things Iāve learned about how to do effective altruism, Iāve learned from them.
The AIM folks Iāve spoken to are frustrated that their resultsābased on exploiting cost-effective high-evidence base interventionsāare used to launder the reputation of OP funded low evidence base āDo-gooding R&D.ā I think before you should get to work on āDo-Gooding R&Dā, you should probably learn how the current state of Do-Gooding best practices.
If we think about EA brand as a product, Iād guess weāre in āThe Chasmā below as the EA brand is too associated with the āweirdā stuff that innovators are doing to be effectively sold to lower risk tolerance markets.
This is bad because lower risk tolerance markets (governments etc) are the largest scale funders.
AIM should be the face of EA and should be feeding in A LOT more to general outreach efforts.Too strong a takeāsee this reply to Lorenzoās commentConcrete suggestions
Iām not suggesting they swap names, its likely locked in at this point BUT I think they have more in common than they think and are focussing too much on where they differ.
Looking atwhere CEA people actually donate, it looks like they are hedging the higher risk nature of their work with donations to interventions with clearer returns.Retractedātoo strong a take as highlight by this commentOne solution would be a merger since there are lots of synergies but they are too far away from each other in terms of views on cost effectiveness and funding independence to do so (yet)
I think they should be collaborating more, maybe coworking in the same office sometimes?
My wider take is that EA should become a profession (post building on this one incoming if I can ever actually finish it) so there is better regulation of individuals enabling us to have internally facing competition/āinnovation/āR&D based on shared principles while generating externally facing standards that can be used by non-insiders and allow us to scale what works.
We shouldnāt be internally fighting for a bigger slide of the existing pie, we should be demonstrating value externally so we can grow the size of the pie.
I work for CEA but Iām writing this from a personal perspective. Others at CEA may disagree with me.
Thanks for writing this! :) I think itās an interesting argument. I generally agree with everything @Lorenzo Buonannošø said in his comments, so Iāll just add a few things here.
I ultimately disagree that CEA should change its name, because EA principles are important to me and I like that we are trying to do good explicitly using the framework of EA (including promoting the framework itself) rather than using a more nebulous framing. I canāt speak for AIM, but it does seem like our two organizations have different goals, so in that sense it seems good that we both exist and work towards achieving our own separate goals. For example, I think (just a low confidence guess based on public info) that AIM are not interested in stewarding EA or owning improving the EA brand. CEA is interested in doing those things, and it seems good for us to have āEAā in our name in order to do those things. I think you and I both agree that the EA brand needs improving, and CEA is working on hiring for our Comms Team to have more capacity to do this work.
Iām not sure who ātheyā are in this sentence. I personally donāt think I have done this. I have a very high opinion of AIM overall, and I think that sentiment is common within CEA. I have personally applied to one of their incubation rounds because I thought there was a chance I could do more good there than at CEA. They are one of the orgs that best takes advantage of CEAās infrastructure (such as EAG and the EA Forum) ā they make frequent appearances in our user surveys about how people have found value from those projects. Our team includes AIMās opportunities in our email newsletters and have curated multiple posts by them. I donāt personally know the people who run AIM, but from my perspective we are collaborators on the same team.
I think itās hard to use the linked post as evidence to support this. I counted ~4/ā10 of the CEA employees that responded as falling into that category, and the rest mostly donated to causes that I think you would consider more speculative (at least more than the average AIM charity). Most CEA employees decided not participate in the public post, and Iām guessing that the ones that did not are more biased towards donating to less legibly cost-effective projects. I think there is also a bit of a theme where people tended to donate to interventions with clearer returns before joining CEA, and at CEA are spending more time considering other donation options (this is broadly true for myself, for example). So there are forces that push in both directions and itās not clear to me what the net result is.
Again, Iām not sure who is fighting internally. I guess this is making me worried that AIM views us as fighting with each other? That possibility makes me genuinely quite sad. If anyone at AIM wants to talk with me about it, youāre welcome to message me on the Forum.
Heyāthanks for your reply!
Iād like to caveat that Iām not sure I got the tone quite right in my original quick take. Iām glad I put it out there, but it is very much based on vibes and is motivated by an impression that thereās opportunities for stronger relationships to be built. (Mostly based on conversations with AIM folks but I donāt speak for them.)
My vibes-based take looks like it might not be true. There might be more collaboration than I can see, or it might just make sense to growth separately since there are clear differences in opinion for cause prioritisation and approach to cost effectiveness. CEA also is beholden to one funder which makes it much harder to be independent from that funderās views.
To be clear I think everyone involved cares deeply, is competent and is, very reasonably, prioritising other things.
Agree with thisāI donāt think names should be changed and I donāt think AIM should/āwants to maintain the EA brand. I do think there should be more centralisation of comms though (especially as it seems hard to hire for) - Iām generally in favour of investing more in infrastructure and cutting costs on operating expenses where possible (see my comment here)
This is fair and my original take was too strong. Edited to reflect that.
As noted above, I donāt speak for either group hereāIām only a volunteer.
I think fighting was too strong a word, but I donāt get the impression there are strong trust-based relationships which I do think is leaving impact on the table by missing potential opportunities to cut costs in the long term by centralising infrastructure/āoperating expenses.
Appreciate the response! To be clear, I am genuinely glad that you wrote the quick take, so I donāt want to discourage you from doing more off-the-cuff quick takes in the future. Hopefully hearing my perspective was helpful as well. Iām glad to hear that you donāt think we are actually fighting. :)
On collaborating/ācutting costs: my outside impression is that AIM is already quite good about keeping their costs low and is not shy about being proactive. So my view is something like, if they thought it would be good for the world to collaborate more closely with CEA, I trust that they would have acted upon that belief. This is something that I respect about AIM (at least the version thatās in my head, since I donāt know them).
I feel Iām not informed enough to reply to this, and it feels weird to speculate about orgs I know very little about, but I worry that the people most informed wonāt reply here for various reasons, so Iām sharing some thoughts based on what very little information I have (almost entirely from reading posts on this forum, and of course speaking only for myself). This is all very low confidence.
I think if you frame it as a question, something like āWe are trying to do altruism effectively, this is the best that weāre able to do so farā, it doesnāt require that much evidence (for better or worse)
That is not clear to me, one can be very ambitious by working on things that are very easy to measure. For example, people going through AIMās āfounding to giveā program seem to have a goal thatās easy to measure: money donated in 10 years[1], but I still think of them as clearly āambitiousā if they try to donate millions. Google defines ambitious as āhaving or showing a strong desire and determination to succeedā
That is not my understanding, reading their public comms I thought OP split from GiveWell to better serve 7-figure donors āOur current product is a poor fit with the people who may represent our most potentially impactful audience.ā (which I assumed implicitly meant that Moskovitz and Tuna could use more bespoke recommendations)
I agree with this! I liked Finding before funding: Why EA should probably invest more in research, but I expect that the āR&Dā work itself might be tricky to do in practice. Still, Iām very excited about GiveWellās RCT grants
I agree that AIM is more impressive than CEA on many fronts, but I think they mostly have different scopes.[2] My impression is that CEA doesnāt focus much on specific ways to implement specific approaches to āhow to do effective altruismā, but on things like āwhy to do effective altruismā and āhere are some things people are doing/āwriting about how to do good, go read/ātalk to them for detailsā.
If not for CEA, I think I probably wouldnāt have heard of AIM (or GWWC, or 80k, or effective animal advocacy as a whole field). And if I had only interacted with AIM, Iām not sure if I would have been exposed to as many different perspectives on things like animal welfare, longtermism, and spreading positive values[3]
I understand the frustration, especially given the brand concerns below and because I think many AIM folks think that a lot of the assumptions behind longtermism donāt hold.[4] But I donāt know if this āreputation launderingā is actually happening that much:
My sense is that the (vague) relation to the Shrimp Welfare Project is not helping the reputation of some other EA-Adjacent projects
I think AIM is just really small compared to e.g. GiveWell, which I think is more often used to claim that EA is doing some good
When e.g. 80000hours interviews a LEEP cofounder, I strongly believe that itās because they think that LEEP is really amazing (as everyone does), they want to promote it, and they want more people to do similar amazing things. I think the reason people talk about the best AIM projects is usually not to look better by association but to promote them as examples of things that are clearly great.
I personally believe that the EA brand is in a pretty bad place, and at the moment often associated with things like FTX, TESCREAL and OpenAI, and that is a bigger issue. I think EA is seen as a group non-altruistic people, not as a group of altruistic people who are too āweirdā. (But I have even lower confidence on this than on the rest of this comment)
Related to the point above, itās not clear to me why AIM should be the face of āEAā instead of any other ādoing the most goodā movement (e.g. Roots of Progress, School for Moral Ambition, Center for High Impact Philanthropy, ā¦). I think none of these would make a lot of sense, and donāt see why āAIM being the face of AIMā would be worse than AIM being the face of something else.
You can see in their 2023 annual review that they did deeply consider building a new community ābut ultimately feel that a more targeted approach focusing on certain careers with the most impact would be better for usā.[5]
In general, I agree with your conclusions on wishing for more professionalization, and increasing the size of the pie (but it might be harder than one would think, and it might make sense to instead increase the number of separate pies)
I imagine positive externalities from the new organizations will also be a big part of their impact, but I expect the main measure will be amount donated.
And that this does not say that much about CEA as imho AIM is more impressive than the vast majority of other projects.
AIM obviously does a lot for animal welfare, but I donāt think they focus on helping people reson about how to prioritize human vs non-human welfare/ārights/āpreferences.
I canāt link to the quote, so Iāll copy-paste it here.
Linked from this post.
Full quote:
I donāt think they linked to their 2024 annual report on the forum, so this might be different now.
This is helpful and I agree with most of it. I think my take here is mostly driven by:
EA atm doesnāt seem very practical to take action on except for donating and/āor applying to a small set of jobs funded mostly by one source. My guess is this is reducing the number of āoperatorā types that get involved and selects for cerebral philosophising types. I heard about 80k and CEA first but it was the practical testable AIM charities that sparked my interest THEN Iāve developed more of an interest in implications from AI and GCRs.
When Iāve run corporate events, Iāve avoided using the term Effective Altruism (despite it being useful and descriptive) because of the existing brand.
I think current cause prioritisation methods are limiting innovation in the field because itās not teaching people about tools they can then use in different areas. Thereās probably low hanging fruit that isnāt being picked because of this narrow philosophical approach.
Iām not a comms person so my AIM should be the face of EA thing is too strong. But I do think itās a better face for more practical less abstract thinkers
I agree with 3 of your points but I disagree with the first one:
On jobs: 80k, Probably Good and Animal Advocacy Careers have job boards with lots of jobs (including all AIM jobs) and get regularly recommended to people seeking jobs. I met someone new to EA at EAGx Berlin a month ago, and 3 days ago they posted on LinkedIn that they started working at The Life You Can Save.
On donations: Iām biased but I think donations can be a really valuable action, and EA promotes donations to a large number of causes (including AIM).
Itās really hard for me to tell if this is a good or bad thing, especially because I think itās possible that things like animal welfare or GCR reduction can plausibly be significantly more effective than more obviously good āpractical testableā work (and the reason to favour āR&Dā mentioned previously)
Not really a disagreement, but I think itās great that thereās cross-pollination, with people getting into AIM from 80k and CEA, and into 80k and CEA from AIM
I agree donations and switching careers are really important! HoweverāI think those shouldnāt be the only ways.
Having your job be EA makes it difficult to be independentālivelihoods rely on this and so it makes EA as a whole less robust IMO. I like the Tour of Service model https://āāforum.effectivealtruism.org/āāposts/āāwaeDDnaQBTCNNu7hq/āāea-tours-of-service
Earning to give is not a good description for what I do because Iām not optimising across career paths for high pay for donationsāmore like the highest pay I can get for a 9-5.
I think of it more as āSelf-funded community builderā
On cross pollination, yeah I think we agree. The self sorting between cause areas based on intuition and instinct isnāt great thoughāit means that there are opportunities to innovate that are missed in both camps.
One thing I occasionally think about is how few ācompetitorsā exist for CEAās products/āservices. I feel a little odd using this kind of terminology in a non-profit context, but to put it simplistically: if anyone wants to start up a ācompetingā conference for do-gooders, they can do that. In a simplistic sense there isnāt anything stopping AIM, or GWWC, or High Impact Professionals, or you & I as individuals from putting on a Effective Altruism Annual Conference, or from hosting online introductory EA programs, or from providing coaching and advice to city and university EA groups.
There actually is a lot stopping people from doing this independentlyāif you would ever want to scale and get funding you basically have 3 sources of funders, and if they donāt approve what you are doing you wonāt get to become a serious competitor
Iām probably less informed than you are, but depending on what you mean by āsources of fundersā I disagree.
I think if you can demonstrate getting valuable results and want funding to scale, people will be happy to fund you. My impression is that several people influencing >=6 digit allocations are genuinely looking for projects to fund that can be even more effective than what theyāre currently funding.
Iām fairly confident that if anyone hosted a conference or online program, got good results, had a clear theory of change with measurable metrics, and gradually asked for funding to scale, people will be happy to fund that.
Ah sorry I should have just said ā3 main /ā larger scale fundersā (op, eaif + meta funding circle). Funders from those groups include individuals.
But I was also unclear in my commentāIāll clarify this soon.
I agree with you. Hypothetically, anyone can ācompeteā by providing an alternative offering. But realistically there are barriers to entry. (I know that I wouldnāt be able to put on a conference or run an online forum without lots of outside funding and expertise.) Maybe we could make an argument that there are some competitors with CEAās services (such as Manifest, AVA Summit, LessWrong, Animal Advocacy Forum) but I suspect that the target market is different enough that these donāt really count as competitors.
Of all the things that CEA does, running online intro EA programs would probably be the easiest thing to provide an alternative offering for: just get a reading list and start running sessions. Heck, I run book clubs that meet video video chat, and all it takes in 15-45 minutes of administrative work each month.
On a local/ānational level, maybe university/ācity group support could realistically be done? But Iām fairly skeptical. My informal impression is that for most of what CEA does it wouldnāt make sense for alternative offerings to try to ācompete.ā
EAGx conferences are technically not organized by EAG but they are supported by it, so Iām not sure if they count as ācompetitorsā
Yeah, I could see a reasonable argument either way for that.
CEA seems to maintain control over most high-level aspects of EAGx, so I donāt think this counts as competition.
Iād say the key thing CEA is providing is infrastructure/āassets rather than product/āservices and that tends to be the kind of thing to centralise where possible. Ie. EA forum, community health, shared resources/āknowledge, distribution channels etc.
Events are closer to product/āservices and. AIM has done conferences in the past but they arenāt open to wider groups like EAGxs.
The blocker for those orgs is probably capacityāboth AIM and GWWC are <20 people, HIP is 2 people, EA UK [1] is 0.8 FTE. For me personally, I do run a lot of events but my frustration is that the barrier to entry is pretty high because of existing network effects, the fact that they do have know-how and that I basically have to do a ton of my own marketing and maintain my own mailing list to run GWWC events.[2]
We could compete but why are we doing that? This is not a zero sum game for impact, it is very positive sum. Thereās so much work to be done.
Iām on the EA UK board
I think the death of Facebook has had an underrated impact on EA Community Buildingāits actually so much more effort now to run events.
a) I agree that it would be better if the names were reversed, however, I also agree that itās locked in now.
b) āAIM should be the face of EA and should be feeding in A LOT more to general outreach effortsāāTheyāre an excellent org, but I disagree. I tried writing up an explanation of why, but I struggled to produce something clear.
Yeah on reflection I think b) is too strong (virtue of this being a quick take).
My best explanation is that they donāt have the management capacity to effectively scale and AIMās current comms are very EA insider coded. Very excited about them making a strong comms hire https://āādocs.google.com/āādocument/āād/āā1YbP7m187DK6CNbijnu5lHQj4JWpdQB8hR4w6tgFnVfY/āāedit?usp=drivesdk
Iād be curious about your unpolished thoughts if youād like to DM me.