"It's like keeping all the benefits of a community while refusing to contribute to its future development or taking responsibility for its challenges. Win-win!"
🔥🔥🔥
I'm not the expert on effective altruism. I don't identify with that terminology. My impression is that it's a bit of an outdated term.
A bit too spot on to be an April fools day joke! This is valid commentary.
I like how spicy this is.
I really appreciate everyone working on EA movement building anyway, and I would hope everyone takes a moment to consider how much they've benefitted from the EA movement, how much they've contributed and how they feel about the balance.
Many movements get worse over time. They grow, at some point the first scandals inevitably happen, some great leaders and communicators decide to reduce their affiliation, the public image gets lower quality, this makes it harder to get new leaders and communicators on board, etc. I'm glad we're not there yet, I still meet many inspiring people at EAGs or local EA meetups, but the risk is real, and if EA dies I don't see which other movement could fill that gap.
Many thanks to CEA and other EA community builders for all your hard work, and [edit] to people who don't hide their EA affiliation and keep publicly advocating for the movement and the ideas.
Btw, Karl Lauterbach, the former German minister of health, has mentioned "effective altruism" in a press conference as a framework to help justify covid measures during the pandemic. If one of Germany's top ~10 politicians (at the time) can risk that, you can too ;)
Great update! To further reduce PR risks, CEA should also stop doing anything controversial and keep doing everything people expect it to.
Be inclusive, welcome everyone, don't try to 'control' the EA brand in any way, and take full responsibility when a few of the ~10,000 active EAs say or do something bad in the name of EA. Grow the movement and keep it as pure as the early days. Prioritize the highest expected value programs and treat all cause areas equally.
(this is obviously exaggerated, but you get the point. Kudos to CEA for navigating all these hard trade-offs so well!)
Can't wait to meet other TONOPWAPSATIAWCDOTOWMAANBists[1] at CGoLMIWMAKEOBDAPoASMC this year!
The Network Of People Who All Pursue Systematic Altruism Together In A Way Causally Downstream Of Toby Ord, Will MacAskill, And Nick Bostrom[2]
It's unclear what the first O in "TONOP..." stands for, but considering how memorable and widely-adopted this terminology has become, it would be unwise to change this now.
RP actually did some empirical testing on this and we concluded that people really like the name "Effective Altruism", but not the ideas, values or mission.
That's unfortunate. But I think it suggests there's scope for a new 'Centre for Effective Altruism' to push forward exciting new ideas that have more mainstream appeal, like raising awareness of the cause du jour, while the rebranded Center for ████████ continues to focus on all the unpopular stuff.
I feel like mainstream people like EA until they understand the implications and are faced with their first trade-off for whom to help. To keep them engaged, maybe the new CEA could skip the prioritization part and just focus on making people feel better about their first choice.
Maybe a slogan could be "All altruism is effective"?
Wishing Centre For, the best of luck!
Ok but will you commit to funding Ubers home for all your Conference guests? #Stewardship
CEA: now EA-adjacent!
I think it is good that (former) CEA has recognized that society has moved beyond distractingly specific names.
After Alphabet, Meta and X took the lead, I am excited about the impact that the Centre will create in adjacency to the EA community.
This post made my day (to be fair, it's only 7:40am, but whatever, I doubt anything else can put such a big smile on my face in the remaining 15+ hours).
Great article, Centre for what now? 😀
Let's take the next decisive step and turn it into a proper guerilla underground movement! We must all scatter and during the day pretend to be effective egoists, but when the night falls we will show our real faces...
Amazing rebranding skills, team
So glad Consequentialism is out, and we can finally follow our feelings!! it feels so dang good. I love being a human with feelings. All these years denying it to follow mathematical algorithms like a robot was tiring. Feelings are super effective!! I suppose we'll need a new introduction course where we explain to smart people what feelings are, and how they are already included and fully installed in us but we just need to put a check mark in that one box to turn them on, and boom when you do that suddenly you see a whole new world and there's lots of art everywhere too. Finally EA will have some art, coz us feeling humans of course demand it.
The philosophy dig... ouch!
For immediate release: April 1, 2025
OXFORD, UK — The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) announced today that it will no longer identify as an "Effective Altruism" organization.
"After careful consideration, we've determined that the most effective way to have a positive impact is to deny any association with Effective Altruism," said a CEA spokesperson. "Our mission remains unchanged: to use reason and evidence to do the most good. Which coincidentally was the definition of EA."
The announcement mirrors a pattern of other organizations that have grown with EA support and frameworks and eventually distanced themselves from EA.
CEA's statement clarified that it will continue to use the same methodologies, maintain the same team, and pursue identical goals. "We've found that not being associated with the movement we have spent years building gives us more flexibility to do exactly what we were already doing, just with better PR," the spokesperson explained. "It's like keeping all the benefits of a community while refusing to contribute to its future development or taking responsibility for its challenges. Win-win!"
In a related announcement, CEA revealed plans to rename its annual EA Global conference to "Coincidental Gathering of Like-Minded Individuals Who Mysteriously All Know Each Other But Definitely Aren't Part of Any Specific Movement Conference 2025."
When asked about concerns that this trend might be pulling up the ladder for future projects that also might benefit from the infrastructure of the effective altruist community, the spokesperson adjusted their "I Heart Consequentialism" tie and replied, "Future projects? I'm sorry, but focusing on long-term movement building would be very EA of us, and as we've clearly established, we're not that anymore."
Industry analysts predict that by 2026, the only entities still identifying as "EA" will be three post-rationalist bloggers, a Discord server full of undergraduate philosophy majors, and one person at parties who won't stop talking about shrimp.
"We're not abandoning our roots," the CEA spokesperson insisted while taking a sharpie to a stack of documents with the letters "EA" on them. "We're simply evolving our brand to something more palatable that doesn't require us to engage with criticism or do the hard work of community building. It's the most rational choice, given our utility function is 'avoiding awkward conversations at dinner parties.'"
The spokesperson concluded the press conference by emphasizing that CEA's commitment to identifying and addressing the world's most pressing problems remains steadfast, "except for the pressing problem of working on improving the movement that has given a start to so many impactful organizations, because that's just gotten a bit too difficult."
Editor's Note: Any resemblance to actual organizations that have benefited from EA funding, networks, or ideas before saying "we're not technically EA" is purely coincidental and not about that specific org you're thinking of right now. No, not that one either.
About the Centre for Formerly Effective Formerly Altruism:
CEA is a ████████ ████████ organization that promotes ████████ ████████ and ████████ ████████ to ████████ ████████.
Happy April Fool's Day, Forum!
Glad you've made this move. I personally prefer to identify as EA-adjacent-adjacent nowadays, and would encourage others to do the same.
I went even further. I added adjacent three times and ended up back where I started.
I think it's better to play 5d chess - so I'm EA-adjacent-adjacent-adjacent-adjacent-adjacent.