Watch Kerry's talk at EA Global
Effective Altruism Outreach is the team behind Effective Altruism Global, Effective Altruism Ventures, effectivealtruism.org, marketing Doing Good Better and The Most Good You Can Do, among other projects. We are part of the Centre for Effective Altruism.
Our goal is to enable the EA community to maximize its positive impact. We do this by creating the infrastructure the EA community needs to be a robust, thriving social movement while ensuring that we continue to develop the virtues we need to stay effective.
The basic argument for funding EAO is as follows:
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The EA community could be extraordinarily valuable in the future.
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There are actions that a sufficiently capable team could take now to make it more likely that EA becomes extraordinarily valuable in the future.
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The EAO team is sufficiently capable.
To keep this post short, I’ve included the best argument and counterargument for each of these claims in the comments below. If you believe all three of these claims, I think we may be an excellent donation target.
As of today we’ve raised $353,500 from Peter Singer, Jaan Tallinn, Investling, Daniel Dewey, Matt Wage, Jim Greenbaum, and Luke Ding. We are looking for $131,788 more to cover our minimum budget, $360,786 more to cover our moderate budget and $582,150 more to cover our growth budget.
You can donate here. If you have any questions feel free to email me at kerry@eaglobal.org.
This will be an extremely important year for Effective Altruism. The EA community is likely to continue to grow rapidly, and more work will be needed to ensure that this growth is positive for the long-term future of Effective Altruism. The next few years will determine whether EA is a passing fad like the Ice Bucket Challenge or Kony 2012, or whether EA becomes a global force for good. To be successful we will need to be strategic about how the community develops and we will need to be vigilant to ensure that effective altruism stays effective. The hope of the EAO team is that we can play a part in helping the EA community thrive. We plan to spend 2016 building the infrastructure we need to make sure that the tremendous amount that this community has accomplished so far is only the beginning.
I’m happy to answer your questions here although I prefer meeting people on Skype. Feel free to use my calendar app to find a time to chat. You can also email me at kerry@eaglobal.org.
There are a number of risks that a rapidly growing community has to avoid in order to be successful. At EA Global I touched on four: the Eternal September effect, coordination failure, ossification, and epistemic failure, although there are many others. The central tension is that the EA community has to grow to accomplish its goals, but growth may increase the probability of the movement getting off track.
Yet, I think we can avoid some of these risks by thoughtfully building community infrastructure that helps the community grow rapidly and safely. Examples of community infrastructure include EA Global, local EAGx conferences, effectivealtruism.org, the EA forum, EA Ventures, and the EA handbook. At full scale, the community infrastructure should allow us to seamlessly catch new people up to speed on our ideas, connect them to their local EA community, and help them contribute to the ongoing intellectual development of the community. More details on how we can make it more likely that EA becomes extraordinarily valuable in the future are available in our 2016 plan.
If this claim were false a plausible reason would be that the task at hand is intractable. It could be the case that once the initial conditions of a social movement are set, very little can be done to alter the trajectory. It could also be the case that one cannot make reasonable decisions about a social movement from inside the social movement. That is, the tribal aspects of being a part of a social movement may be especially good at making impartial reasoning impossible.