I agree Evan. I still give out many Doing Good Betters (hoping people read past the poverty sections) and only send people the Handbook if they’ve engaged with EA ideas for a while. The intro book would ideally be written with someone with a high status in the EA community and the world in general, as even an excellent intro book may not supplant MacAskill and Singer’s intro books. I’m wondering if the best intro book would be a new edition of Doing Good Better with less on global poverty to allow for more on other cause areas. That would give the new book status and mean the outdated edition will automatically stop being the default intro book (Of course that would require a lot of Will’s time, even if a coauthor was brought in).
At first I thought just updating Doing Good Better would be too hard. After reading Michael Chen’s comment on what needs to be corrected in the current articles in the EA Handbook, on top of everything else that would need to be updated about it, it seems like it would be more work than updating DGB. It seems like DGB has probably been subjected to more stringent and professional editing since it had to go through external, commercial publication, and so updating an already solid work that covers the core facets of EA is probably easier than creating a new handbook from scratch. It also sounds like based on Jon Behar’s comment that The Life You Can Save organization helped quite a lot in updating Singer’s original TLYCS book. I hadn’t thought of an idea a whole organization could give some time to updating an EA book, as opposed to a single assistant or editor. So the CEA or another organization could help will with that, which would make the job of updating DGB a lot easier.
To confirm: TLYCS the organization is playing a critical role in the book project; without the organization there absolutely wouldn’t be an updated version. The org has been essential every step of the way (including working to purchase all the necessary rights since ~2014). There’s a ton of work involved and Peter is doing a lot of it, but we’re trying to take as much off his plate as possible including pretty much everything on the promotion and distribution side. There are a lot of skills needed to pull this off, and this model plays to everyone’s comparative advantage: Peter is great at thinking and writing, while the org is better suited to set the distribution strategy (Charlie Bresler, TLYCS’s executive director, ran the marketing department for a large company with an iconic ad campaign).
Our hope is that a lot of people and organizations throughout the EA community will be able to use the book as a way to have more impact, such as GiveWell distributing the book to their donor base, groups/individuals sharing the book with people first learning about EA, making the book available for download at effectivealtruism.org, EA Global, etc. And of course our recommended charities and other effective nonprofits are mentioned throughout the book, with links embedded in the ebook version to make it easier to convert.
This seems like a good time to mention: TLYCS is fundraising for this project, and you can make an earmarked donation here. There’s more background on the book project in TLYCS’s recently released Annual Report.
The EA Meta Fund has made a $10k grant for this project which we’re extremely grateful for, but this barely makes a dent in the barebones budget, let alone what we think we ought to invest in this project. We’d love to see other donors from the EA community get involved as well.
“it seems like [updating the EA Handbook] would be less work than updating DGB” → do you mean that updating the EA handbook would be more work? That would make more sense given the rest of your comment.
One question to ask is what the goal of such a book is. If it’s to spread the basic ideas as far and wide as possible, a popular book like Will’s or Singer’s books seems like a good start. I’m not sure how those books have panned out for all the goals they were intended to serve, since I don’t know who has measured them. I think there have been some attempts to measure the impact of DGB in various ways, but I haven’t kept track of them.
I was thinking an updated edition of Doing Good Better might work. Unfortunately, with how busy Will is, it seems unrealistic to expect he’d be able to update date it soon. I was hoping someone else would come up with a suggestion with how a better EA Handbook could be created.
I agree Evan. I still give out many Doing Good Betters (hoping people read past the poverty sections) and only send people the Handbook if they’ve engaged with EA ideas for a while. The intro book would ideally be written with someone with a high status in the EA community and the world in general, as even an excellent intro book may not supplant MacAskill and Singer’s intro books. I’m wondering if the best intro book would be a new edition of Doing Good Better with less on global poverty to allow for more on other cause areas. That would give the new book status and mean the outdated edition will automatically stop being the default intro book (Of course that would require a lot of Will’s time, even if a coauthor was brought in).
At first I thought just updating Doing Good Better would be too hard. After reading Michael Chen’s comment on what needs to be corrected in the current articles in the EA Handbook, on top of everything else that would need to be updated about it, it seems like it would be more work than updating DGB. It seems like DGB has probably been subjected to more stringent and professional editing since it had to go through external, commercial publication, and so updating an already solid work that covers the core facets of EA is probably easier than creating a new handbook from scratch. It also sounds like based on Jon Behar’s comment that The Life You Can Save organization helped quite a lot in updating Singer’s original TLYCS book. I hadn’t thought of an idea a whole organization could give some time to updating an EA book, as opposed to a single assistant or editor. So the CEA or another organization could help will with that, which would make the job of updating DGB a lot easier.
To confirm: TLYCS the organization is playing a critical role in the book project; without the organization there absolutely wouldn’t be an updated version. The org has been essential every step of the way (including working to purchase all the necessary rights since ~2014). There’s a ton of work involved and Peter is doing a lot of it, but we’re trying to take as much off his plate as possible including pretty much everything on the promotion and distribution side. There are a lot of skills needed to pull this off, and this model plays to everyone’s comparative advantage: Peter is great at thinking and writing, while the org is better suited to set the distribution strategy (Charlie Bresler, TLYCS’s executive director, ran the marketing department for a large company with an iconic ad campaign).
Our hope is that a lot of people and organizations throughout the EA community will be able to use the book as a way to have more impact, such as GiveWell distributing the book to their donor base, groups/individuals sharing the book with people first learning about EA, making the book available for download at effectivealtruism.org, EA Global, etc. And of course our recommended charities and other effective nonprofits are mentioned throughout the book, with links embedded in the ebook version to make it easier to convert.
This seems like a good time to mention: TLYCS is fundraising for this project, and you can make an earmarked donation here. There’s more background on the book project in TLYCS’s recently released Annual Report.
The EA Meta Fund has made a $10k grant for this project which we’re extremely grateful for, but this barely makes a dent in the barebones budget, let alone what we think we ought to invest in this project. We’d love to see other donors from the EA community get involved as well.
“it seems like [updating the EA Handbook] would be less work than updating DGB” → do you mean that updating the EA handbook would be more work? That would make more sense given the rest of your comment.
Oh, yeah. Thanks. I fixed it.
One question to ask is what the goal of such a book is. If it’s to spread the basic ideas as far and wide as possible, a popular book like Will’s or Singer’s books seems like a good start. I’m not sure how those books have panned out for all the goals they were intended to serve, since I don’t know who has measured them. I think there have been some attempts to measure the impact of DGB in various ways, but I haven’t kept track of them.
I was thinking an updated edition of Doing Good Better might work. Unfortunately, with how busy Will is, it seems unrealistic to expect he’d be able to update date it soon. I was hoping someone else would come up with a suggestion with how a better EA Handbook could be created.