Gemma Paterson's Quick takes

I work for CEA but I'm writing this from a personal perspective. Others at CEA may disagree with me.

Thanks for writing this! :) I think it's an interesting argument. I generally agree with everything @Lorenzo Buonanno🔸 said in his comments, so I'll just add a few things here.

I ultimately disagree that CEA should change its name, because EA principles are important to me and I like that we are trying to do good explicitly using the framework of EA (including promoting the framework itself) rather than using a more nebulous framing. I can't speak for AIM, but it does seem like our two organizations have different goals, so in that sense it seems good that we both exist and work towards achieving our own separate goals. For example, I think (just a low confidence guess based on public info) that AIM are not interested in stewarding EA or owning improving the EA brand. CEA is interested in doing those things, and it seems good for us to have "EA" in our name in order to do those things. I think you and I both agree that the EA brand needs improving, and CEA is working on hiring for our Comms Team to have more capacity to do this work.

I think they have more in common than they think and are focussing too much on where they differ.

I'm not sure who "they" are in this sentence. I personally don't think I have done this. I have a very high opinion of AIM overall, and I think that sentiment is common within CEA. I have personally applied to one of their incubation rounds because I thought there was a chance I could do more good there than at CEA. They are one of the orgs that best takes advantage of CEA's infrastructure (such as EAG and the EA Forum) — they make frequent appearances in our user surveys about how people have found value from those projects. Our team includes AIM's opportunities in our email newsletters and have curated multiple posts by them. I don't personally know the people who run AIM, but from my perspective we are collaborators on the same team.

Looking at where CEA people actually donate, it looks like they are hedging the higher risk nature of their work with donations to interventions with clearer returns.

I think it's hard to use the linked post as evidence to support this. I counted ~4/10 of the CEA employees that responded as falling into that category, and the rest mostly donated to causes that I think you would consider more speculative (at least more than the average AIM charity). Most CEA employees decided not participate in the public post, and I'm guessing that the ones that did not are more biased towards donating to less legibly cost-effective projects. I think there is also a bit of a theme where people tended to donate to interventions with clearer returns before joining CEA, and at CEA are spending more time considering other donation options (this is broadly true for myself, for example). So there are forces that push in both directions and it's not clear to me what the net result is.

We shouldn't be internally fighting for a bigger slide of the existing pie, we should be demonstrating value externally so we can grow the size of the pie.

Again, I'm not sure who is fighting internally. I guess this is making me worried that AIM views us as fighting with each other? That possibility makes me genuinely quite sad. If anyone at AIM wants to talk with me about it, you're welcome to message me on the Forum. 

I feel I'm not informed enough to reply to this, and it feels weird to speculate about orgs I know very little about, but I worry that the people most informed won't reply here for various reasons, so I'm sharing some thoughts based on what very little information I have (almost entirely from reading posts on this forum, and of course speaking only for myself). This is all very low confidence.

"Effective" Altruism implies a value judgement that requires strong evidence to back up

I think if you frame it as a question, something like "We are trying to do altruism effectively, this is the best that we're able to do so far", it doesn't require that much evidence (for better or worse)

"Ambitious Impact" implies more speculative, less easy to measure activities in pursuit of even higher impact returns.

That is not clear to me, one can be very ambitious by working on things that are very easy to measure. For example, people going through AIM's "founding to give" program seem to have a goal that's easy to measure: money donated in 10 years^[1], but I still think of them as clearly "ambitious" if they try to donate millions. Google defines ambitious as "having or showing a strong desire and determination to succeed"
 

My understanding is that Open Philanthropy split from GiveWell because of the realisation that there was more marginal funding required for "Do-gooding R&D" with a lower existing evidence base. 

That is not my understanding, reading their public comms I thought OP split from GiveWell to better serve 7-figure donors "Our current product is a poor fit with the people who may represent our most potentially impactful audience." (which I assumed implicitly meant that Moskovitz and Tuna could use more bespoke recommendations)

Why do we need "Do-Gooding R&D"?

I agree with this! I liked Finding before funding: Why EA should probably invest more in research, but I expect that the "R&D" work itself might be tricky to do in practice. Still, I'm very excited about GiveWell's RCT grants

IMO AIM has outcompeted CEA on a number of fronts (their training is better, their content (if not their marketing) is better, they are agile and improve over time). Probably 80% of the useful and practical things I've learned about how to do effective altruism, I've learned from them. 

I agree that AIM is more impressive than CEA on many fronts, but I think they mostly have different scopes.^[2] My impression is that CEA doesn't focus much on specific ways to implement specific approaches to "how to do effective altruism",  but on things like "why to do effective altruism" and "here are some things people are doing/writing about how to do good, go read/talk to them for details".

If not for CEA, I think I probably wouldn't have heard of AIM (or GWWC, or 80k, or effective animal advocacy as a whole field). And if I had only interacted with AIM, I'm not sure if I would have been exposed to as many different perspectives on things like animal welfare, longtermism, and spreading positive values^[3]

The AIM folks I've spoken to are frustrated that their results - based on exploiting cost-effective high-evidence base interventions - are used to launder the reputation of OP funded low evidence base "Do-gooding R&D."

I understand the frustration, especially given the brand concerns below and because I think many AIM folks think that a lot of the assumptions behind longtermism don't hold.^[4] But I don't know if this "reputation laundering" is actually happening that much:

• My sense is that the (vague) relation to the Shrimp Welfare Project is not helping the reputation of some other EA-Adjacent projects
• I think AIM is just really small compared to e.g. GiveWell, which I think is more often used to claim that EA is doing some good
• When e.g. 80000hours interviews a LEEP cofounder, I think it's because they believe that LEEP is really amazing (as everyone does), they want to promote it, and they want more people to do similar amazing things. I think the reason people talk about the best AIM projects is usually not to look better by association but to promote them as examples of things that are clearly great.

If we think about EA brand as a product, I'd guess we're in "The Chasm" below as the EA brand is too associated with the "weird" stuff that innovators are doing to be effectively sold to lower risk tolerance markets.

I personally believe that the EA brand is in a pretty bad place, and at the moment often associated with things like FTX, TESCREAL and OpenAI, and that is a bigger issue. I think EA is seen as a group non-altruistic people, not as a group of altruistic people who are too "weird". (But I have even lower confidence on this than on the rest of this comment)

AIM should be the face of EA and should be feeding in A LOT more to general outreach efforts.

Related to the point above, it's not clear to me why AIM should be the face of "EA" instead of any other "doing the most good" movement (e.g. Roots of Progress, School for Moral Ambition, Center for High Impact Philanthropy, ...). I think none of these would make a lot of sense, and don't see why "AIM being the face of AIM" would be worse than AIM being the face of something else.
You can see in their 2023 annual review that they did deeply consider building a new community "but ultimately feel that a more targeted approach focusing on certain careers with the most impact would be better for us".^[5]

In general, I agree with your conclusions on wishing for more professionalization, and increasing the size of the pie (but it might be harder than one would think, and it might make sense to instead increase the number of separate pies)

1. ^{^}

   I imagine positive externalities from the new organizations will also be a big part of their impact, but I expect the main measure will be amount donated.

2. ^{^}

   And that this does not say that much about CEA as imho AIM is more impressive than the vast majority of other projects.

3. ^{^}

   AIM obviously does a lot for animal welfare, but I don't think they focus on helping people reson about how to prioritize human vs non-human welfare/rights/preferences.

^{^}

I can't link to the quote, so I'll copy-paste it here.

JOEY: Yeah, I basically think I don't find a really highly uncertain, but high-value expected value calculation as compelling. And they tend to be a lot more concretely focused on what's the specific outcome of this? Like, okay, how much are we banking on a very narrow sort of set of outcomes and how confident are we that we're going to affect that, and what's the historical track record of people who've tried to affect the future and this sort of thing. There's a million and a half weeds and assumptions that go in. And I think, most people on both sides of this issue in terms of near-term causes versus long-term causes just have not actually engaged that deeply with all the different arguments. There's like a lot of assumptions made on either side of the spectrum. But I actually have gotten fairly deeply into this. I had this conversation a lot of times and thought about it quite thoroughly. And yeah, just a lot of the assumptions don't hold.

^{^}

Linked from this post.

Full quote:

Building a new community (e.g. Impact Now):

An option many people have been asking us about in the wake of the struggles of the EA movement is if CE would consider building out a movement that brings back some of the strengths of EA 1.0. We considered this idea pretty deeply but ultimately feel that a more targeted approach focusing on certain careers with the most impact would be better for us. The logistical and time costs of running a movement are quite large and it seems as though often a huge % of the movement's impact comes from a small number of actors and orgs. Although we like some things the EA movement has brought to the table when comparing it to more focused uses (e.g. GiveWell focuses more on GiveWell's growth), we have ended up more pessimistic about the impact of new movements.

I don't think they linked to their 2024 annual report on the forum, so this might be different now.

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One thing I occasionally think about is how few "competitors" exist for CEA's products/services. I feel a little odd using this kind of terminology in a non-profit context, but to put it simplistically: if anyone wants to start up a "competing" conference for do-gooders, they can do that. In a simplistic sense there isn't anything stopping AIM, or GWWC, or High Impact Professionals, or you & I as individuals from putting on a Effective Altruism Annual Conference, or from hosting online introductory EA programs, or from providing coaching and advice to city and university EA groups.

a) I agree that it would be better if the names were reversed, however, I also agree that it's locked in now.
b) "AIM should be the face of EA and should be feeding in A LOT more to general outreach efforts" - They're an excellent org, but I disagree. I tried writing up an explanation of why, but I struggled to produce something clear.

Is your concrete suggestion/ask "get rid of the karma requirement?"

See also the Payroll Giving (UK) or GAYE - EA Forum (effectivealtruism.org) page which it is the top google result for "Effective Altruism Payroll Giving". It made sense for me to update since I am an accountant and have experience trying to get this done at my workplace. 

Did I need to make a post about something unrelated to do that?