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.]
What current EA priorities are according to the CEA is at odds with what many others think EA's current priorities are. It appears the CEA, by putting more emphasis on x-risk reduction, is smuggling what they think EA's current (proportional distribution) of priorities should be into a message about what EA's current priorities actually are, in a way undermining the perspective of thousands of effective altruists. So the idea that this handbook will increase the movement's intellectual quality is based on definitions of quality and representation for EA many effective altruists don't share. I think this and future editions of the EA Handbook should be regarded as the community as drafts from the CEA until they carry out a project of getting as broad and substantial a swathe of feedback from important community actors as they can. This doesn't have to be a program of populist democracy where each self-identified effective altruist gets a vote. But the CEA could run the EA Handbook by EA organizations which are just as crucial to effective altruism as the CEA which don't have the phrase 'effective altruism' in their name, like ACE, Givewell, or any other organizations which are cause-specific but are community pillars nonetheless.