I canāt 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 CEAās 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 Zachās post outlining the set of principles that are core to CEAās 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 Zachās footnotehelpful context:
āThis list of principles isnāt totally exhaustive. For example, CEAās website lists a number of āother principles and toolsā below these core four principles and āWhat is Effective Altruism?ā lists principles like ācollaborative spiritā, 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).ā
I also want to say thanks to you (and @Kestrelšø) 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. Iāve now added it:
āItās 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 āends justify the meansā reasoning, but rather is about being a good citizen, while ambitiously working toward a better world.ā
I feel the same. Iām also generally wary when a name (or design) needs extensive reasoning to justify it. Most people will never hear the reasoning, so their gut reaction/ā ability to remember it matters more. Iām not sure how the name agency worked, but Iād be more optimistic if I knew the name had been tested with your target audience vs. had a background story that made sense?