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.]
(Copying across some comments I made on Facebook which are relevant to this.)
Thanks for the passionate feedback everyone. Whilst I don’t agree with all of the comments, I’m sorry for the mistakes I made. Since some of the comments above make similar comments, I’ll try to give general replies in some main-thread comments. I’ll also be reaching out to some of the people in the thread above to try to work out the best way forward.
My understanding is that the main worry that people have is about calling it the Effective Altruism Handbook vs. CEA’s Guide to Effective Altruism or similar. For the reasons given in my reply to Scott above, I think that calling it the EA Handbook is not a significant change from before: unless we ask Ryan to take down the old handbook, then whatever happens, there will be a CEA-selected resource called the EA Handbook. For reasons given above and below, I think that the new version of the Handbook is better than the old. I think that there is some value in explicitly replacing the old version for this reason, and since “EA Handbook” is a cleaner name. However, I do also get people’s worries about this being taken to represent the EA community as a whole. For that reason, I will make sure that the title page and introduction make clear that this is a project of CEA, and I will make clear in the introduction that others in the community would have selected different essays.
My preferred approach would then be to engage with people who have expressed concern, and see if there are changes we can make that alleviate their concerns (such as those we already plan to make based on Scott’s comment). If it appears that we can alleviate most of those concerns whilst retaining the value of the Handbook from from CEA’s perspective, it might be best to call it the Centre for Effective Altruism’s EA Handbook. Otherwise, we would rebrand. I’d be interested to hear in comments whether there are specific changes (articles to add/take away/design things) that would reassure you about this being called the EA Handbook.
In this comment I’ll reply to some of the more object-level criticisms. I want to apologize for how this seemed to others, but also give a clearer sense of our intentions. I think that it might seem that CEA has tried merely to push AI safety as the only thing to work on. We don’t think that, and that wasn’t our intention. Obviously, poorly realized intentions are still a problem, but I want to reassure people about CEA’s approach to these issues.
First, re there not being enough discussion of portfolios/comparative advantage, this is mentioned in two of the articles (“Prospecting for Gold” and “What Does (and Doesn't) AI Mean for Effective Altruism?”). However, I think that we could have emphasised this more, and I will see if it’s possible to include a full article on coordination and comparative advantage.
Second, I’d like to apologise for the way the animal and global health articles came across. Those articles were commissioned at the same time as the long-term future article, and they share a common structure: What’s the case for this cause? What are some common concerns about that cause? Why might you choose not to support this cause? The intention was to show how many assumptions underlie a decision to focus on any cause, and to map out some of the debate between the different cause areas, rather than to illicitly push the long-term future. It looks like this didn’t come across, sorry. We didn’t initially commission sub-cause profiles on government, AI and biosecurity, which explains why those more specific articles follow a different structure (mostly talks given at EA Global).
Third, I want to explain some of the reasoning behind including several articles on AI. AI risk is a more unusual area, which is more susceptible to misinterpretation than global health or animal welfare. Partly for this reason, we thought that it was sensible to include several articles on this topic, with the intention that this would provide more needed background and convey more of the nuance of the idea. I will talk with some of the commenters above to discuss if it makes sense to do some sort of merge so that AI dominates the contents page less.
What about the possibility the Centre for Effective Altruism represents the community by editing the EA Handbook to reflect what the community values in spite of what the CEA concludes, the CEA excludes evaluations from the EA Handbook from which it currently diverges from the community, and it's still called the 'EA Handbook' instead of 'CEA's Guide to EA?' Obviously this wouldn't carry EA forward with what the CEA thinks is maximum fidelity, but it's clear many think the CEA is trying to spread the EA message with infidelity, while acting as though they'... (read more)