Head of Communications at the Centre for Effective Altruism. Previously: News Editor at The Economist; journalist and growth manager at Protocol; journalist at Finimize.
Shakeel Hashim
Karma: 2,635
(I don’t have an answer to this, but there is some interesting discussion here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KDjEogAqWNTdddF9g/long-termism-vs-existential-risk and here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rFpfW2ndHSX7ERWLH/simplify-ea-pitches-to-holy-shit-x-risk )
I think this is very good and highlights a good point: that reaching people outside of EA is crucial to achieving much of what we want to achieve; and we don’t need those people to become “EAs” for it be valuable.
Should GiveWell still recommend GiveDirectly?
Ah yeah, that’s a good point. I guess what I’d love to see is what Brad mentions — a sense of how much money GW thinks it can distribute before getting to GD levels of return.
Yeah good point, giving is definitely more involved at the billionaire level. But I do still think the message of “we would like as much as you can give, we can do so much with your money!” is a good thing to have circulating — billionaires are just as online as anyone else and those messages might resonate!
I am very glad this will exist!
Hi — thanks for asking! No, CEA does not intend to take IP rights in these stories, and we would also discuss how these stories would be used with you before publishing them (or doing anything else with them) in any way.
This is very very helpful, thank you!
Nice, I will look into him and read your post—thanks!
Why you’re not hearing as much from EA orgs as you’d like
Hi — thanks for the question.
In April, Effective Ventures purchased Wytham Abbey and some land around it (but <1% of the 2,500 acre estate you’re suggesting). Wytham is in the process of being established as a convening centre to run workshops and meetings that bring together people to think seriously about how to address important problems in the world. The vision is modelled on traditional specialist conference centres, e.g. Oberwolfach, The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center or the Brocher Foundation.
The purchase was made from a large grant made specifically for this. There was no money from FTX or affiliated individuals or organizations.
Everything that’s posted on the EA Forum is public, and so journalists can (and often will) quote it. (Though obviously a lot of stuff is posted on the forum, and most of it won’t get attention from journalists!).
One clarification on this: CEA, 80,000 Hours etc. are all projects of the Effective Ventures group — which is the umbrella term for EVF (a UK registered charity) and CEA USA Inc. (a US registered charity), two separate legal entities which work together.
Yeah that was in process but I’m not sure what the timeline on it is. We generally use “EV” to refer to the thing your diagrams are pointing to, though EV is not an organisation in itself — just an umbrella term for the two distinct entities. Thanks!
Hi — I think this post overstates the level of program-level centralisation here.
The EVF and CEA US boards provide overall oversight and governance of the projects and their executive directors, and will occasionally step in to change something important. But they have largely delegated program-level responsibility to each project’s executive director, who each set their own strategy for how to best have a positive impact on the world.
In practice, those strategies do differ: to give a couple of examples, CEA and 80,000 Hours have pretty different approaches to cause prioritisation; while Asterisk (a CEA US project) published a very critical review of What We Owe the Future (a book written by an EVF project lead and board member). The boards also very much want EA work to flourish outside of the EVF and CEA US governance structures — many of the grants made by the EA Infrastructure Fund support this work.
I like this idea!
Good things that happened in EA this year
Hi — this was removed accidentally while updating other text on the page. We’ll put it back ASAP (might take a few days though because of timezones/people being on holiday, and I don’t have access to edit that page).
Thanks for drawing our attention to this and calling us out for it — we definitely appreciate it (and, at the meta-level, I’m very glad we have a community that pushes us on things like this).
This is really excellent and has a ton of potential. Well done!