Today CEA is releasing the second edition of our Effective Altruism Handbook.
You can get the pdf version here, and we also have epub/mobi versions for people who prefer e-readers.
What is CEA's EA Handbook?
It’s an introduction to some of the core concepts in effective altruism.
If you’re new to effective altruism, it should give you an overview of the key ideas and problems that we’ve found so far. But if you have already engaged with effective altruism, there should be some new insights amongst the familiar ideas.
The pieces are a mix of essays and adaptations of conference talks. We’ve tried to put them in an order that makes sense. Together we think they cover some of the key ideas in the effective altruism community.
Why a new edition?
The first edition of CEA's EA Handbook is now 3 years old. As a community, we’ve changed a lot in those three years, and learnt a lot. In fact, comparing the new handbook with the old is a good way to get a sense of just how much intellectual progress we’ve made.
After consulting with Ryan Carey, the editor of the old handbook, we agreed it was time for something new, and for a slightly more polished design. Stefan Schubert and I compiled a list of talks and articles, and the authors were gracious enough to give us permission. With the help of a small army of transcribers and copy-editors, and Laura Pomarius’ design skills, we brought it together.
What next?
We hope that this becomes a reference point for people who are new to effective altruism, and a summary that local groups can share with their members.
We are not currently planning to make a physical version of CEA's EA Handbook: we think that the articles and design are high quality for an online pdf. However, we worry that it might damage the brand of effective altruism to distribute or sell physical copies of a resource which remains only a collection of articles and talks, rather than a polished book.
We’d welcome feedback on any aspect of the new edition.
Here are the links again if you want to get reading or sharing:
[Edited the body of the post to reflect changes made to the contents on 23 May 2018, and change links.]
I find it so interesting that people on the EA Facebook page have been a lot more generally critical about the content than people here on the EA Forum -- here it's all just typos and formatting issues.
I'll admit that I was one of the people who saw this here on the EA Forum first and was disappointed, but chose not to say anything out of a desire to not rock the boat. But now that I see others are concerned, I will echo my concerns too and magnify them here -- I don't feel like this handbook represents EA as I understand it.
By page count, AI is 45.7% of the entire causes sections. And as Catherine Low pointed out, in both the animal and the global poverty articles (which I didn't count toward the page count), more than half the article was dedicated to why we might not choose this cause area, with much of that space also focused on far-future of humanity. I'd find it hard for anyone to read this and not take away that the community consensus is that AI risk is clearly the most important thing to focus on.
I feel like I get it. I recognize that CEA and 80K have a right to have strong opinions about cause prioritization. I also recognize that they've worked hard to become such a strong central pillar of EA as they have. I also recognize that a lot of people that CEA and 80K are familiar with agree with them. But now I can't personally help but feel like CEA is using their position of relative strength to essentially dominate the conversation and claim it is the community consensus.
I agree the definition of "EA" here is itself the area of concern. It's very easy for any of us to call "EA" as we see it and naturally make claims about the preferences of the community. But this would be very clearly circular. I'd be tempted to defer to the EA Survey. AI was only the top cause of 16% of the EA Survey. Even among those employed full-time in a non-profit (maybe a proxy for full-time EAs), it was the top priority of 11.26%, compared to 44.22% for poverty and 6.46% for animal welfare. But naturally I'd be biased toward using these results, and I'm definitely sympathetic to the idea that EA should be considered more narrowly, or we should weight the opinions of people working on it full-time more heavily. So I'm unsure. Even my opinions here are circular, by my own admission.
But I think if we're going to be claiming in a community space to talk about the community, we should be more thoughtful about who's opinions we're including and excluding. It seems pretty inexpensive to re-weigh the handbook to emphasize AI risk just as much without being as clearly jarring about it (e.g., dedicating three chapters instead of one or slanting so clearly toward AI risk throughout the "reasons not to prioritize this cause" sections).
Based on this, and the general sentiment, I'd echo Scott Weather's comment on the Facebook group that it’s pretty disingenuous to represent CEA’s views as the views of the entire community writ large, however you want to define that. I agree I would have preferred it called “CEA’s Guide to Effective Altruism” or something similar.
As noted in the fb discussion, it seems unlikely full-time non-profit employment is a good proxy for 'full-time... (read more)