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 think your list undercounts the number of animal-focused EAs. For example, it excludes Sentience Politics, which provided updates through the EA newsletter in September 2016, January 2017, and July 2017. It also excludes the Good Food Institute, an organization which describes itself as "founded to apply the principles of effective altruism (EA) to change our food system." While GFI does not provide updates through the EA newsletter, its job openings are mentioned in the December 2017, January 2018, and March 2018 newsletters. Additionally, it excludes organizations like the Humane League, which while not explicitly EA, have been described as having a "largely utilitarian worldview." Though the Humane League does not provide updates through the EA newsletter, its job openings are mentioned in the April 2017 newsletters, February 2018, and March 2018.
Perhaps the argument for excluding GFI and the Humane League (while including direct work organizations in the long term future space) is that relatively few people in direct work animal organizations identify as EAs (while most people in direct work long term future organizations identify as EA). If this is the reason, I think it'd be good for someone to provide evidence for it. Also, if the idea behind this method of counting is to look at the revealed preference of EAs, then I think people earning to give have to be included, especially since earning to give appears to be more useful for farm animal welfare than for long term future causes.
(Most of the above also applies to global health organizations.)
I picked the 'updates' purely in the interests of time (easier to skim), that it gives some sense of what orgs are considered 'EA orgs' rather than 'orgs doing EA work' (a distinction which I accept is imprecise: would a GW top charity 'count'?), and I (forlornly) hoped pointing to a method, however brief, would forestall suspicion about cherry-picking.
I meant the quick-and-dirty data gathering to be more an indicative sample than a census. I'd therefore expect significant margin of error (but not so significant as to change the bottom line). Other relevant candidate groups are also left out: BERI, Charity Science, Founder's Pledge, ?ALLFED. I'd expect there are more.