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.]
Thanks Tom. I've discussed the reasoning for including three articles on AI a bit on Facebook. To quote from that:
"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 [or, I think e.g. biosecurity and other long-term focused causes]. 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."
Thanks for suggestions for alternatives to the global poverty and animal welfare articles. I think you may well be right that we should change those. This is another mistake that I made. The content for the EA Handbook grew out of a sequence of content on effectivealtruism.org. As a consequence, it included only content that we had produced (or that had been produced by others at our events). At the point when we shifted to a pdf/ebook format, I should have reconsidered the selection of articles, which would have given us the possibility of trying to include the excellent content that you mention. I hope that changing those articles will also reduce the impression that AI follows obviously from a long-term future focus. I'm sorry for making this mistake.