Oscar Howie

• Oscar Howie 22 Feb 2026 15:23 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA ad­ja­cent, but not like that

  I might just take my own footnote idea seriously and start writing a sports blog for impact reasons, and because you only live once.

  We can have all sorts of fun learning from sporting rigour and the glory of randomness. Sporting competitions and complex collaborations. Sporting politics and power structures. Sporting regulations and unwritten rules. Sporting incentives and ingenious-to-idiotic strategies.

  You can get ahead of the curve by subscribing here, if you’d enjoy reading headlines like these ones I just found on the back of an old envelope:

  You don’t have to stick to your picks

  Solving the most pressing problems starts with updating your preseason predictions

  Kicking the ball in the goal is not what makes goalscorers great

  From shot selection to cause prioritization

  The referees are not the problem

  Regulating AI is the handball rule and the offside rule in a trenchcoat

EA ad­ja­cent, but not like that

• Oscar Howie 9 Feb 2026 17:20 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Austin’s comment on: Build­ing sus­tain­able mo­men­tum: progress re­port on CEA’s 2025-26 strategy

  You’re right that CEA (including EA Funds) is the last project remaining within EV.

  We are spinning out to build an entity structure optimized for an independent CEA. Among the lessons we learned from the EV experience were that entity structures and associated regulatory requirements can be complex, especially when operating in multiple jurisdictions, and that getting our structure right matters in many ways. To take one example: the EV structure requires two CEOs (in the US and the UK), whereas our new CEA structure will require only one.

• Oscar Howie 9 Feb 2026 10:12 UTC

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA Or­ga­ni­za­tion Up­dates thread: Fe­bru­ary 2026

  CEA grew the number of people engaging with our programs in 2025 by 20–25% year-over-year, beating our targets of 7.5–10% without increasing spending, and reversing the moderate decreases in engagement with our programs during 2023–24.
  
  We were joined in January by two new Directors: Loic Watine, who will lead EA Funds, and Rory Fenton, who will lead our new Strategy and M&E function.
  
  You can read our full 2025 progress report here.

Build­ing sus­tain­able mo­men­tum: progress re­port on CEA’s 2025-26 strategy

EA Funds and CEA are merging

• Oscar Howie 21 Apr 2025 11:24 UTC

  66 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Os­car Howie’s Quick takes

  “Chief of Staff” models from a long-time Chief of Staff

  I have served in Chief of Staff or CoS-like roles to three leaders of CEA (Zach, Ben and Max), and before joining CEA I was CoS to a member of the UK House of Lords. I wrote up some quick notes on how I think about such roles for some colleagues, and one of them suggested they might be useful to other Forum readers. So here you go:

  Chief of Staff means many things to different people in different contexts, but the core of it in my mind is that many executive roles are too big to be done by one person (even allowing for a wider Executive or Leadership team, delegation to department leads, etc). Having (some parts of) the role split/​shared between the principal and at least one other person increases the capacity and continuity of the exec function.

  Broadly, I think of there being two ways to divide up these responsibilities (using CEO and CoS as stand-ins, but the same applies to other principal/​deputy duos regardless of titles):

  1. Split the CEO’s role into component parts and assign responsibility for each part to CEO or CoS

     1. Example: CEO does fundraising; CoS does budgets

     2. Advantages: focus, accountability

  2. Share the CEO’s role with both CEO and CoS actively involved in each component part

     1. Example: CEO speaks to funders based on materials prepared by CoS; CEO assigns team budget allocations which are implemented by CoS

     2. Advantages: flex capacity, gatekeeping

  Some things to note about these approaches:

  • In practice, it’s inevitably some combination of the two, but I think it’s really important to be intentional and explicit about what’s being split and what’s being shared

    • Failure to do this causes confusion, dropped balls, and duplication of effort

    • Sharing is especially valuable during the early phases of your collaboration because it facilitates context-swapping and model-building

    • I don’t think you’d ever want to get all the way or too far towards split, because then you functionally have one more department-lead-equivalent, and you lose a lot of the benefits in terms of flex capacity and especially continuity

  • Both approaches depend on trust, and maximising them depends on an unusually high degree of trust

    • CEO trusting CoS to act on their behalf

      • In turn, this depends on trusting their judgement, and in particular trusting their judgement of when it’s appropriate to act unilaterally and when it’s appropriate to get input/​approval from CEO

    • Others trusting that CoS is empowered to and capable of acting on CEO’s behalf

      • Doesn’t work if CEO and CoS disagree or undermine each other’s decisions in view of others, or if others expect CoS decisions to be overturned by CEO

      • It being easier to burn credibility than to build it is something close to an iron law, which means CoS should tread carefully while establishing the bounds of their delegated authority

  • It’s not a seniority thing: an Executive Assistant having responsibility for scheduling is an example of splitting the role; a Managing Director doing copyedits for the CEO’s op-ed is an example of sharing the role

  • I don’t think the title “CoS” matters, but I do think maximising the benefits of both models requires the deputy to have a title that conveys that they both represent and can act unilaterally on behalf of the principal to some meaningful degree

    • Managing Director and Chief of Staff do this; Project Manager and Exec Assistant do not

• Oscar Howie 11 Apr 2025 10:40 UTC

  10 points

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  on: An­nounc­ing our 2025 strategy

  Congratulations on developing and launching this new strategy!

  I’m Chief of Staff at CEA, and as we wrote in our own recently-published strategy post, we’re making diversifying EA funding a central part of our efforts to steward the community in the coming years, and I’m excited about us exploring more ways to collaborate on making pledges a big piece of that puzzle.

• Oscar Howie 3 Apr 2025 19:26 UTC

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: OllieBase’s comment on: Ste­ward­ship: CEA’s 2025-26 strat­egy to reach and raise EA’s ceiling

  Staff costs are a relatively small proportion of our total spending, but the proportion increased in 2024 compared to 2023 (28% vs 21%).

  Between 2021 and 2023, our total spending increased by 264% (from $6.9m to $25.1m), while our headcount increased only 40% (from 24 to 34), which meant we had insufficient capacity to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of our programs. This informed our decision to make foundation-building our organizational priority in 2024, including both investing in hiring to increase our capacity and cutting non-staff costs, with the majority of savings (per Ollie’s comment) being contributed by lower spending on events, especially EAG.

• Oscar Howie 28 Mar 2025 11:01 UTC

  5 points

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  in reply to: Oscar Howie’s comment on: 80,000 Hours is shift­ing its strate­gic ap­proach to fo­cus more on AGI

  If you want to know more, we (CEA) just published our stewardship strategy, focused on building sustainable momentum for the EA community

Ste­ward­ship: CEA’s 2025-26 strat­egy to reach and raise EA’s ceiling

• Oscar Howie 21 Mar 2025 11:21 UTC

  131 points

  23 ∶ 0

  on: 80,000 Hours is shift­ing its strate­gic ap­proach to fo­cus more on AGI

  “In my role at CEA, I embrace an approach to EA that I (and others) refer to as “principles-first”. This approach doubles down on the claim that EA is bigger than any one cause area. EA is not AI safety; EA is not longtermism; EA is not effective giving; and so on. Rather than recommending a single, fixed answer to the question of how we can best help others, I think the value of EA lies in asking that question in the first place and the tools and principles EA provides to help people approach that question.”

  Zach wrote this last year in his first substantive post as CEO of CEA, announcing that CEA will continue to take a “principles-first” approach to EA. (I’m Zach’s Chief of Staff.) Our approach remains the same today: we’re as motivated as ever about stewarding the EA community and ensuring that together we live up to our full potential.

  Collectively living up to our full potential ultimately requires making a direct impact. Even under our principles-first approach, impact is our north star, and we exist to serve the world, not the EA community itself. But Zach and I continue to believe there is no other set of principles that has the same transformative potential to address the world’s most pressing problems as EA principles. So, in our assessment, at this moment in time, the best way for CEA to make progress towards our ultimate goal is sustainably growing the number of people putting EA principles into practice.

  In reaching and implementing their decision to shift their strategic approach, Niel and others at 80k are putting those principles into practice. While we might disagree about some of the particulars, or draw different conclusions, we don’t disagree that updating in response to new information is appropriate, that AI risk reduction is a critically important cause, or that achieving progress at the scale and speed required will require making some hard trade-offs. We agree that there will be implications and opportunities for our community, including for CEA, in terms of filling some of the gaps 80k might leave behind, and this transition will be made smoother by the fact we are all still shooting for the same north star.

  I want to recognize that these are big shoes to fill: 80k has built an incredibly impressive team, developed a set of remarkable products, and earned great respect from a wide audience. I’m both sad that this unique combination won’t be deployed so directly in stewardship of EA, and excited to see what it can achieve with even greater focus.

Ap­ply now to join us in CEA’s Ex­ec­u­tive Office

CEA is hiring a Head of Oper­a­tions (ap­pli­ca­tions closed early)

• Oscar Howie 3 Jan 2024 19:10 UTC

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Oscar Howie’s comment on: Zach Robin­son will be CEA’s next CEO

  Quick followup to note that collaborative spirit is included among CEA’s Guiding Principles listed on the CEA site. Clearly it’s confusing—including to a member of CEA’s own staff like me! - that we refer to different things as ‘principles’ in different places, and that might be something we look to clarify if and when we revisit these pages as Zach Era CEA.

• Oscar Howie 3 Jan 2024 11:30 UTC

  9 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Lorenzo Buonanno🔸’s comment on: Zach Robin­son will be CEA’s next CEO

  Thanks for reading closely, and for flagging this! While CEA is the owner of EA.org, the intro essay was drafted by a collaborative process including non-CEA staff, and the final version was written by 80k’s Ben Todd (more in the essay’s announcement here).

  The discrepancy is tracking the reality that there is no consensus about how best to define EA, although I think the omission of collaborative spirit from the CEA page is an oversight and I expect we will edit it accordingly soon.

• Oscar Howie 2 Jan 2024 15:51 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Rebecca’s comment on: Zach Robin­son will be CEA’s next CEO

  Our (CEA’s) website has a page about core EA principles.

  And note that Zach has said elsewhere he intends to write more about his views in due course.

Zach Robin­son will be CEA’s next CEO

• Oscar Howie 1 Dec 2023 10:46 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Joey🔸’s comment on: EA or­ga­ni­za­tions should have a trans­par­ent scope

  Circling back to say we recently published CEA’s 2023 budget.

  Note that we project spending to be substantially under budget.

• Oscar Howie 30 Nov 2023 16:09 UTC

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: CEA is fundrais­ing, and fund­ing constrained

  In 2021, we spent $6.9m and ended the year with 29 staff. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison, because those staff include five members of what was then the CEA ops team, and is now the EV Ops team, so the more direct comparison is with 24 staff at that time.

  You can see on our dashboard some of the ways our programs have changed since 2021 (three in-person EAG events compared to one, nine EAGx events compared to zero, etc).