This is a sorted list of pages — known as “Topics” — in the EA Forum Wiki, which collects and explains topics relevant to discussions on the Effective Altruism Forum (this platform).[1] You can find out more about the Wiki and “Topics” in the Wiki FAQ.[2]
Table of contents
You can also find lists of:
Core topics
We’ve highlighted some “core” topics around which people are forming sub-communities and discussions. This is a beta version of the list of core topics; we’ll probably modify its composition. If you have specific feedback, we encourage you to get in touch.
Areas of work
Cause-neutral prioritization research seeks to identify new promising focus areas and to compare their relative value.
Improving public health, reducing poverty, increasing economic growth, or finding new interventions to help the developing world.
Factory farming likely produces a lot of suffering; discussions around this topic explore the most promising interventions for helping farmed animals, different ways to study the problem, and more.
Most animals are not domesticated; this topic explores their welfare and how we might be able to improve it.
How dangerous we should expect advanced artificial intelligence to be, and possible paths for making it safer.
How we can mitigate risks from viruses and bacteria, and avoid or relieve future pandemics.
Everything from discussions of specific risks, like those posed by new technologies or natural catastrophic events, to analyses of the impact of different approaches and interventions.
Making sure “effective altruism” actually does good.
A wide range of discussion topics around moral philosophy covers questions like “what is social impact?” and “How can we act when we’re uncertain about the consequences of our actions?”
Relevant to the community
Specific ways to take action based on the principles of effective altruism.
Everything from overviews of the most important skills to develop to in-depth profiles or specific jobs.
Posts about the EA community and applying EA in one’s personal life.
Key concepts
For a longer list of key concepts in effective altruism, you can visit the Key concepts page. You might also be interested in visiting effectivealtruism.org or looking at the EA Handbook.
See all the key concepts and tools.
Types of work in effective altruism
At its core, effective altruism is about finding the best ways to do good and putting them into practice, but this motivates people to work on a wide variety of projects, for different reasons.
We’ve organized different projects and areas of work by the answer to the following question: “How does your work help the world?” We’ve also noted some potential (non-exhaustive!) cruxes for prioritizing each kind of work.
At a high level, the types of work fall into the following categories:
Global health and development
Animal welfare
Mitigation of global risk factors
Shaping the future
Broad epistemics and coordination
Philosophy, global priorities research, and how to do good better
Building effective altruism
There are also some topics that are relevant to the categorization of work that we’ve chosen here:
1. Global health and development
The overall topic page: Global health and development
| How does this kind of work help? | The lives of (current) people are improved (and prolonged). |
| Topic highlights | Global health and development, Economic growth, Mental health |
Health
Legal interventions
Economic and societal issues and interventions
General topics in global health and development
🖇️ See also — The “Broad epistemics and coordination” category has some related topics, like Electoral reform and Metascience
2. Animal welfare
The overall topic page: animal welfare
| How does this kind of work help? | The lives of non-human animals are improved. |
| Cruxes for prioritizing this kind of work | Animals matter, and deserve resources that might otherwise help people. |
| Topic highlights | Farmed animal welfare, Wild animal welfare, Moral circle expansion |
Farmed animal welfare, and possible interventions
Other groups of animals
Important concepts:
3. Mitigation of global risk factors
Pages about the overall topic: Existential risk factor, Existential risk, Global catastrophic risk
| How does this kind of work help? | Risks are mitigated, which decreases the chances of near-term catastrophe and/or increases the probability of a (decent) future. |
| Cruxes for prioritizing this kind of work | Future beings matter morally, or some of these risks affect existing beings. (Only one of these has to be true.) |
| Topic highlights | AI risk, Biosecurity, Great power conflict, Existential risk, Global catastrophic risk |
Sources of risk
War and Great power conflict
Earth/planet-related risks
Other risks
Risk-related topics
Types of bad states of the world (what the risk can bring about)
Types of risk (other groupings):
Broadly making the world or civilization more resilient
Philosophical topics
Related concepts
Potential strategies for mitigating these risks
4. Shaping the future
| How does this kind of work help? | The future is better than it would have been. |
| Cruxes for prioritizing this kind of work | Future beings matter, and it is in fact possible to shape the future in some predictable way. |
| Topic highlights | Longtermism, Value lock-in, existential risk |
🖇️ See also: the “Mitigation of global risk factors” category
5. Broad epistemics and coordination
| How does this kind of work help? | The world (or, the global population) has better epistemics and a greater ability to coordinate, which means that it is broadly more robust and capable of responding to new problems. |
| Cruxes for prioritizing this kind of work | Epistemics can be improved, and more coordination is good; people make good decisions, given the chance. |
| Topic highlights | Institutional decision-making, Forecasting, Metascience |
Note: epistemics and coordination work sometimes seems similar to philosophy and building effective altruism, or takes similar forms (see below), but should generally be distinguished from that.
Raising the sanity waterline
Coordination efforts
Metascience and truthful information
🖇️ See also: Key concepts and tools
6. Philosophy, cause prioritization, and methods for assessing effectiveness
| How does this kind of work help? | We identify important issues and develop tools for deciding what to do, which helps us do more good. |
| Cruxes for prioritizing this kind of work | This sort of research can discover important things and will actually be used. |
| Topic highlights | Moral philosophy, Cause prioritization, Global priorities research |
Effective giving and funding
History of altruism
🖇️ See also: Key concepts and tools
7. Building effective altruism
The overall topic page: Building effective altruism
| How does this kind of work help? | We improve the effective altruism philosophy, network, and movement — by growing or otherwise making it better — and this allows EA to do more good. |
| Cruxes for prioritizing this kind of work | Effective altruism is a helpful phenomenon that leads to good things in the world. |
| Topic highlights | Building effective altruism, Community, Career choice, Moral advocacy |
EA community infrastructure and networks
Broad EA outreach
Movement strategy
Tools for people in effective altruism
Related movements and communities
^ ⚠️ Please note that we will be improving this page. If you have feedback on the page, please contact us. You can find the old version of this page here.
^ The pages are also tags that can be added to posts so that people can find posts on certain topics. You can upvote or downvote a tag for a given post to move it higher or lower in the list of posts on the corresponding topic’s page. Refer to this quick take for tagging instructions and guidelines. Topics were announced in this post — they were then known as “tags.” Discussions on proposals for new topics are found here.
As mentioned above, you can find instructions on how to tag a post with a relevant topic.