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Don't ask what EA can do for you, ask what you can do for EA.
An obvious-in-hindsight statement I recently heard from a friend:
"If I'd believe that me being around was net negative for EA, I'd leave the community."
While this makes complete sense in theory, it is emotionally difficult to commit to it if most of your friends are in EA. This makes it hard for us to evaluate our impact on the community properly. Motivated reasoning is a thing.
So, it may be wothwhile for us to occasionally reflect on the following questions:
- If I were to look back in ten years and find that my presence, in hindsight, was bad for EA. What were the reasons?
- Who could I ask for an honest evaluation of which bits of my behavior serve the cause, and which harm it?
- If I were to decide that my presence harms the community. How would I get my social needs met anyways?
Yeah I've definitely stopped doing things that I think will harm the community (I've reduced flirting a lot). But that said I think the kinds of people likely to reduce behaviours are (unlike me) the people who least need to.
I think for most people, they need not worry. And for those that do, there are ways they can avoid harmful patters - avoid events where those patterns occur, go on courses, talk to friends and develop strategies to avoid them.
I don't think we need to be martyr's here, and for 99.9% of people there is a way for their social needs to be met in the community. But like 1% of people will have to change a bit.
My personal gold standard of good organizing is the Advice Process. Description by Burning Nest:
"The general principle is that anyone should be able to make any decision regarding Burning Nest.
Before a decision is made, you must ask advice from those who will be impacted by that decision, and those who are experts on that subject.
Assuming that you follow this process, and honestly try to listen to the advice of others, that advice is yours to evaluate and the decision yours to make."[1]
One of the problems the Advice Process tackles is what anarchist visionary madman Robert Anton Wilson calls the SNAFU-principle ["Situation Normal, All Fucked Up"]:
"Communication only occurs between equals–real communication, that is–because when you are dealing with people above you in a hierarchy, you learn not to tell them anything they don’t want to hear. If you tell them anything they don’t want to hear, the response is, “One more word Bumstead and I’ll fire you!” Or in the military, “One more word and you’re court-martialed.” It’s throughout the whole system.
So the higher up in the hierarchy you go, the more lies are being told to flatter those above them. So those at the top have no idea what is going on at all. Those at the bottom have to adjust to the rules made by those at the top who don’t know what’s going on. Those at the top can write rules about this, that and the other, while those at the bottom have got to adjust reality to fit the rules as much as they can."
"So I call this the burden of omniscience: those on the top are supposed to be doing the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and all the sensing, apprehending and conceptualizing for the whole society and those at the bottom have to adjust to what those at the top think based on all the misinformation flowing up in a hierarchy where any speaking of the truth can get you punished."[2]
And the Advice Process does more than just prevent SNAFU: It also prevents the eternal deadlock of consensus-based decisionmaking I've suffered through in nonhierarchical collectives of the political left, the eternal bad compromises of basic democracy, and incredible amounts of time wasted on having to be in the room while decisions are made that you don't actually care about all that much.
1947, Churchill said:
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…" [3]
Luckily, it is not 1947 anymore. Now, we have the Advice Process. It is very good, so you might want to use it.
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Cited after http://www.idleworm.com/ideas/snafu.shtml , because most of my books are currently buried in cardboard boxes.
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Yep - it reflects how many things in EA already work implicitly. That's one of the things I love about EA. And, I think it would be good if we use this as an explicit model more often, too.
If you want to dive a little bit deeper into these kinds of management practices, you may want to have a look into the Reinventing Organizations-wiki: https://reinventingorganizationswiki.com/en/theory/decision-making/
If you want to dive very, very deep, Frederik Laloux's "Reinventing Organizations" might be a worthwhile read. I'm halfway through, and it helped me build a whole bunch of intuitions for how to do community building better.
Curated and popular this week
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Summary
Immediate skin-to-skin contact (SSC) between mothers and newborns and early initiation of breastfeeding (EIBF) may play a significant and underappreciated role in reducing neonatal mortality. These practices are distinct in important ways from more broadly recognized (and clearly impactful) interventions like kangaroo care and exclusive breastfeeding, and they are recommended for both preterm and full-term infants.
A large evidence base indicates that immediate SSC and EIBF substantially reduce neonatal mortality. Many randomized trials show that immediate SSC promotes EIBF, reduces episodes of low blood sugar, improves temperature regulation, and promotes cardiac and respiratory stability. All of these effects are linked to lower mortality, and the biological pathways between immediate SSC, EIBF, and reduced mortality are compelling. A meta-analysis of large observational studies found a 25% lower risk of mortality in infants who began breastfeeding within one hour of birth compared to initiation after one hour.
These practices are attractive targets for intervention, and promoting them is effective. Immediate SSC and EIBF require no commodities, are under the direct influence of birth attendants, are time-bound to the first hour after birth, are consistent with international guidelines, and are appropriate for universal promotion. Their adoption is often low, but ceilings are demonstrably high: many low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) have rates of EIBF less than 30%, yet several have rates over 70%. Multiple studies find that health worker training and quality improvement activities dramatically increase rates of immediate SSC and EIBF.
There do not appear to be any major actors focused specifically on promotion of universal immediate SSC and EIBF. By contrast, general breastfeeding promotion and essential newborn care training programs are relatively common.
More research on cost-effectiveness is needed, but it appears promising. Limited existing
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> Summary: We propose measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months. Extrapolating this trend predicts that, in under a decade, we will see AI agents that can independently complete a large fraction of software tasks that currently take humans days or weeks.
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> The length of tasks (measured by how long they take human professionals) that generalist frontier model agents can complete autonomously with 50% reliability has been doubling approximately every 7 months for the last 6 years. The shaded region represents 95% CI calculated by hierarchical bootstrap over task families, tasks, and task attempts.
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> Full paper | Github repo
Blogpost; tweet thread.
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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
Cool! I've never heard of this, and it does indeed sound like a good process.