Announcing the Effective Altruism Handbook, 2nd edition

It's very easy for any of us to call "EA" as we see it and naturally make claims about the preferences of the community. But this would be very clearly circular. I'd be tempted to defer to the EA Survey. AI was only the top cause of 16% of the EA Survey. Even among those employed full-time in a non-profit (maybe a proxy for full-time EAs), it was the top priority of 11.26%, compared to 44.22% for poverty and 6.46% for animal welfare.

As noted in the fb discussion, it seems unlikely full-time non-profit employment is a good proxy for 'full-time EAs' (i.e. those working full time at an EA organisation - E2Gers would be one of a few groups who should also be considered 'full-time EAs' in the broader sense of the term).

For this group, one could stipulate every group which posts updates to the EA newsletter (I looked at the last half-dozen or so, so any group which didn't have an update is excluded, but likely minor) is an EA group, and toting up a headcount of staff (I didn't correct for FTE, and excluded advisors/founders/volunteers/freelancers/interns - all of these decisions could be challenged) and recording the prevailing focus of the org gives something like this:

• 80000 hours (7 people) - Far future
• ACE (17 people) - Animals
• CEA (15 people) - Far future
• CSER (11 people) - Far future
• CFI (10 people) - Far future (I only included their researchers)
• FHI (17 people) - Far future
• FRI (5 people) - Far future
• Givewell (20 people) - Global poverty
• Open Phil (21 people) - Far future (mostly)
• SI (3 people) - Animals
• CFAR (11 people) - Far future
• Rethink Charity (11 people) - Global poverty
• WASR (3 people) - Animals
• REG (4 people) - Far future [Edited after Jonas Vollmer kindly corrected me]
• FLI (6 people) - Far future
• MIRI (17 people) - Far future
• TYLCS (11 people) - Global poverty

Totting this up, I get ~ two thirds of people work at orgs which focus on the far future (66%), 22% global poverty, and 12% animals. Although it is hard to work out the AI | far future proportion, I'm pretty sure it is the majority, so 45% AI wouldn't be wildly off-kilter if we thought the EA handbook should represent the balance of 'full time' attention.

I doubt this should be the relevant metric of how to divvy-up space in the EA handbook. It also seems unclear how clear considerations of representation play in selecting content, or if so what is the key community to proportionately represent.

Yet I think I'd be surprised if it wasn't the case that among those working 'in' EA, the majority work on the far future, and a plurality work on AI. It also agrees with my impression that the most involved in the EA community strongly skew towards the far future cause area in general and AI in particular. I think they do so, bluntly, because these people have better access to the balance of reason, which in fact favours these being the most important things to work on.

(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.

Good idea. I'll do this when and if there is more consensus that people want to promote this content over the old.

I don't think my experience matches this split. For example, I don't think that it's obvious that the causes you specify match the attributes in points 2, 5, 6.

I am somewhat confused by the framing of this comment, you start by saying "there are two types of EA" but the points seem to all be about the properties of different causes.

I don't think there are 'two kinds' of EAs in the sense you could easily tell which group people were going to fall into in advance, but that all of your characteristics just follow as practical considerations resulting from how important people find the longtermist view. (But I do think "A longtermist viewpoint leads to very different approach" is correct.)

I'm also not sure how similar the global poverty and farm animal welfare groups actually are. There seem to be significant differences in terms of the quality of evidence used and how established they are as areas. Points 3, 4, 7, 9 and 10 seem to have pretty noticeable differences between global poverty and farm animal welfare.

What on Earth do you mean by "disputing moral patienthood"? If there are no moral patients then there is basically no reason for altruism whatsoever.

I also believe there are two broad types of EAs today. So this is interesting. Although, I am a little confused on some of your meaning. Can you make some of those into complete sentences?

2) How are these different between Type 1 and Type 2?

4) "Evidence is more direct" in what regard or context??

Lastly, the list seems skewed, favoring Type 2.

1. Thanks for pointing that out, we'll fix that.
2. • Cause areas: Unfortunately we couldn't include everything. One of the core tenets of effective altruism is making difficult calls about cause prioritization, and these will always be contentious. We had to make those calls as we decided what to include. Our current best guess is that we should be focusing our efforts on a variety of different attempts to improve the long-term future, and this explains the calls that we made in the handbook.
   • Career paths: You're right, I'll make some changes to make clear that this is cause focused, and point people to 80,000 Hours for career focused advice.
   • Sorry that the article is not so helpful for non-Americans. Unfortunately this varies quite a bit between countries, and we couldn't cover them all.
3. That's a good point, I'll consider changing/adding those books.
4. That's another good point. I might include another section at the end on criticisms.

Doing Good Better is still a useful introduction to EA, and it's possible to distribute physical copies of the book, so that will sometimes be more useful. The EA Handbook might work better as a more advanced introduction, or in online circumstances (see also some of the other comment threads).

As Josh says, they're slightly different resources, and I think it will depend on the person.

The EA Handbook was designed for people who have already showed some interest and inclination towards EA's core principles - maybe they've been pitched by a friend, or listened to a podcast. I think Doing Good Better is likely to be better as an introduction to those core principles, whilst the Handbook is an exploration of where the principles might lead. So in terms of level, Doing Good Better feels more introductory.

In my view, the content of the EA Handbook better reflects our best current understanding of which causes to prioritize, and so I would prefer it in terms of content.

Overall, my guess is that if you've had a chance to briefly explain some of EA's core principles and intuitions, it would be best to recommend the EA Handbook.

Doing Good Better is more accessible and spends a lot more time introducing and defending the basic idea of EA instead of branching out into more advanced ideas. It is also much more focused on global poverty.

Doing Good Better

Or Singer's The Most Good You Can Do.

I encourage you to share copies online. For reasons similar to those discussed above, we didn't get consent to make physical copies from all of the authors. I have not yet asked for permission on translation, but I will do so and reply in this thread.

(This post may be interesting for you if you haven't already read it: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1lh/why_not_to_rush_to_translate_effective_altruism/).

I think there's a mix of working and non-working, having just checked myself. Some don't go through to anything when you click on them; some go through to a 404 error; and some go through to the correct website.

Bizarrely, this will depend on the copy I have downloaded. I have downloaded it more than once, and it works differently each time. The first one I have downloaded (I downloaded more than once in different tabs) works in every link I check. The second one doesn't- and this remains true when comparing certain links like for like. I'm not really sure why. Bit bizarre.

Thanks for your feedback.

Thanks for catching that mistake, we'll fix that floating period, and the other errors that others have spotted. When you say "as mentioned by others", are you only referring to the comments above, or is there some discussion of this that I'm missing? It would be good to catch all of the mistakes!

Thanks for the suggestions on content. I'll have a think about whether it would be useful to include profiles somewhere.

Thank you for pointing this out! I'll remove that reference.

I haven't read the book, but a lot of government aid goes to very similar programs as private aid, however. It's not clear to me that none of the conclusions remain true.

Charity is such a touchy moralistic subject in the US, and foreign aid such a juicy political target, that I wouldn't be surprised if the author walled off the topic in such a manner for editorial rather than rational reasons.

Thanks, we'll look into that.

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.

Update: As a result of our leadership transition and the launch of the new Forum, we deprioritized the third edition of the Handbook, and we can't commit to a release date.