Announcing EA Omelas

[Extensively co-written with Claude Opus 4.6]

TL;DR: We are launching EA Omelas, a new Effective Altruism chapter dedicated to reducing suffering in the city of Omelas. Our initial research suggests that Omelas contains what may be the most neglected cause area ever identified: a single child whose suffering sustains the happiness of an entire civilization. We have developed a multi-pronged research agenda — including direct suffering reduction, investigating whether the Omelas model can be replicated to reduce inefficiently distributed suffering elsewhere, and longtermist research into improving human imagination. We also address the growing Omelaccelerationist (o/acc) movement. We are currently hiring. We'd love feedback from the community.

Background

For those unfamiliar, Omelas is a prosperous city-state characterized by extraordinary levels of human flourishing. Citizens report near-universal life satisfaction; there is no poverty, no war, and the arts and sciences thrive. It is, by any reasonable welfare metric, the highest-performing polity ever documented.

There is, however, a complication.

The happiness of the entire city depends on the sustained suffering of a single child, kept in a basement under terrible conditions. Every citizen is made aware of this arrangement at some point in their lives. Most accept it. Some walk away from Omelas entirely. No one, as far as we can tell, has ever tried to do something about it, Chesterton be damned.

We intend to change that.

ITN Framework Analysis

We evaluated child suffering in Omelas using the standard Importance, Tractability, and Neglectedness framework. The results were striking.

We note with some alarm that the Neglectedness score here exceeds that of every other EA cause area by a significant margin, including shrimp welfare.

Moral Uncertainty Assessment

We recognize that the ethics of Omelas are not straightforward. Our team has conducted a preliminary moral uncertainty analysis:

We assign roughly 40% credence to total utilitarianism (in which case Omelas is straightforwardly good and we should arguably be scaling it up), 30% to contractualism (in which case it is monstrous), and 30% to virtue ethics (unclear, but the vibes are bad). Under our moral weights, the expected value of Omelas is positive but uncomfortably so.

Several team members have reported “moral discomfort” scores in the 7–9 range (on a 1–10 scale) when contemplating the intervention landscape. We consider this a healthy sign of epistemic rigor rather than a reason to stop.

Research Agenda

EA Omelas will pursue four major research directions:

1. Direct Suffering Reduction (Near-Term)

Our first priority is exploring whether the child’s suffering can be reduced without collapsing Omelas. Key research questions include: Is there a minimum viable suffering threshold below which the city ceases to function? Could we substitute a different, less intense form of suffering (e.g., mild seasonal allergies)? What is the suffering–flourishing elasticity? Our preliminary back-of-the-envelope model suggests that providing the child with a blanket could reduce suffering by up to 3%, with a city-wide happiness reduction of only 0.0001%. But our error bars are enormous, and the downside risk is civilizational. Still, civilizational downside risk is the name of the game in EA, so we are not deterred!

2. The Omelas Scale-Up Initiative (Medium-Term)

This is perhaps our most ambitious — and, we believe, most cost-effective — research agenda.

Consider the following: many countries currently distribute childhood suffering across millions of children in a deeply inefficient manner. Malaria, malnutrition, preventable disease — the suffering is diffuse, hard to target, and resistant to intervention. Omelas has solved this coordination problem. By concentrating all suffering into a single individual, Omelas achieves a flourishing-per-capita ratio that is, frankly, unmatched in the literature.

Our initial calculations suggest that if the Omelas model could be exported to other countries — replacing distributed suffering with a single, concentrated suffering node — the aggregate welfare gains would exceed those of every GiveWell top charity combined. We are calling this the Single Suffering Node Hypothesis (SSNH), and we believe it deserves serious investigation.^[1]

3. Omelaccelerationism (EA-Adjacent, Long-Term)

A natural implication of the Single Suffering Node Hypothesis is that the bigger the Omelas, the better the ratio. A city-state of 100,000 achieving perfect happiness at the cost of one child’s suffering is good. A nation of 100 million achieving the same? Extraordinary. A global Omelas of 8 billion? Optimal.

This insight has given rise to what we are tentatively calling the Omelaccelerationist movement (o/acc), a growing EA-adjacent community that advocates for the peaceful expansion of the Omelas model to additional territories. The o/acc position is, in brief: if you accept utilitarian premises, you should want Omelas to be as large as possible, because each additional citizen added to the system is pure upside — their happiness costs nothing on the suffering margin, as the child is already suffering at maximum capacity.

O/acc proponents have proposed several expansion mechanisms, including diplomatic annexation (offering neighboring polities a deal: “Join Omelas, we handle the suffering”), voluntary federation, and — in more controversial corners of the movement — what they euphemistically call “welfare-maximizing territorial integration.”

We want to be clear that EA Omelas does not officially endorse Omelaccelerationism. We do, however, think it represents a serious position that deserves engagement rather than reflexive dismissal, and we have invited several o/acc researchers to contribute to our first workshop.^[2]

4. Applied Imagination Research (Longtermist)

Our founder, Ursula K. Le Guin, always believed that people could, if they weren't so realpolitik-pilled, simply imagine a version of the city that does not require a suffering child.

We believe this constitutes a profoundly neglected research direction. If it is possible to sustain Omelas’s welfare equilibrium through imagination alone — essentially replacing physical suffering with a kind of collective mental discipline — then suffering could be reduced to zero at no cost to flourishing. This would be, by our estimates, the most cost-effective intervention in history.

We are currently establishing the Laboratory for Utopian Cognition and Imagination Development (LUCID), which will investigate whether imagination can be improved through training, pharmacological enhancement, or AI-assisted visualization. We estimate that a 15% improvement in mean human imaginative capacity could be sufficient to sustain a child-free Omelas, though our confidence interval is admittedly wide (3%–97%).

Addressing Talent Pipeline Attrition

One of the most pressing operational challenges we face is the phenomenon of individuals who, upon learning of the child’s suffering, choose to walk away from Omelas entirely. These individuals leave the city and are never seen again.

We believe this represents a catastrophic loss of human capital. These are, almost by definition, the most morally motivated people in Omelas — the very individuals we would most want working on the problem. Instead, they opt for a purely symbolic act of refusal that helps no one, least of all the child.

Our community-building efforts will focus heavily on walker retention. Rather than allowing value-aligned individuals to self-select out of the system, we will intercept them at the city gates and offer a compelling alternative: stay, and channel your moral distress into tractable interventions. We are developing a “Walk Toward” campaign and an 8-week introductory fellowship (“The Omelas Fellowship”) modeled on existing CEA programs.

We note that walking away from Omelas has approximately zero expected impact on child welfare and infinite expected impact on the walker’s sense of personal moral purity. This is, in our view, a classic case of privileging fuzzies over utilons.

The Staying In Omelas Pledge

Inspired by Giving What We Can, we are launching the Staying In Omelas Pledge. Signatories commit to:

1. Remaining in Omelas (rather than walking away)
2. Donating at least 10% of their Omelas-derived happiness toward research on the child’s welfare
3. Visiting the child at least once per year to maintain epistemic contact with the problem
4. Not talking about the child at dinner parties in a way that is performative rather than action-oriented

As of this post, 14 individuals have taken the Pledge. We are aiming for 100 by the end of Q2.

80,000 Hours Career Path Review: Omelas Child Welfare

We have collaborated with 80,000 Hours on a preliminary career review for “Omelas child welfare researcher.” Key findings:

Theory of Change

Our full theory of change is as follows:

1. Establish EA Omelas chapter (this post)
2. Run introductory fellowship (8 weeks, reading list includes Le Guin, Singer, and selected basement architecture reviews)
3. Identify key stakeholders (the child, citizens of Omelas, those who walk away, the concept of happiness itself)
4. Conduct RCT on blanket provision (pending ethics board approval, which we anticipate will be contentious)
5. Publish results and seek funding for Applied Imagination research
6. ???
7. Flourishing

We Are Hiring

EA Omelas is currently recruiting for the following positions:

Operations Manager — Must be comfortable with ambiguity, confined spaces, and the sound of weeping. Experience in logistics preferred.

Research Analyst, Omelas Welfare Economics — Ideal candidate has a strong quantitative background and the ability to build cost-effectiveness models that include “possible destruction of a utopia” as a line item.

Research Lead, Applied Imagination & Speculative Utopian Engineering — Must have published in at least two of the following: philosophy of mind, cognitive enhancement, speculative fiction, or vibes-based epistemology. Salary: competitive. Location: flexible / Omelas.

Community Builder — Experience walking toward, not away from, problems preferred. Must be able to run an 8-week fellowship and maintain a positive attitude in proximity to metaphysical despair.

Walker Retention Specialist — Stationed at the city gates. Must be persuasive, empathetic, and fast. Track record in talent acquisition a plus.

Budget & Funding

We are seeking $1.2M in initial funding from Coefficient Giving and/or the Survival and Flourishing Fund. We believe this represents excellent value, given that the alternative — no one working on this, ever — has been the status quo for the entire history of Omelas. We would also welcome a grant from the EA Infrastructure Fund, though we acknowledge that “replicating child suffering infrastructure” is an awkward phrase for a grant application.

Risks & Honest Assessment

In the spirit of epistemic transparency, we want to flag the following risks:

• Catastrophic downside: Any successful intervention on the child’s behalf may destroy Omelas, reducing aggregate welfare from “paradise” to “nothing.” This is a large downside.
• Reputational risk: EA is already perceived by some as “weird people doing math about suffering.” A chapter dedicated to a fictional city may not help.
• Founder intent: Le Guin may not have intended for Omelas to be taken this literally. We believe she would appreciate the rigor.
• Omelaccelerationist capture: There is some risk that o/acc elements will push the chapter toward expansionism rather than suffering reduction. We are monitoring this.

Conclusion

For as long as Omelas has existed, its citizens have faced a binary: accept the child’s suffering, or walk away. We reject this framing. There is a third option: stay, and do the math. We believe that with sufficient funding, research, and community support, we can find an intervention that preserves human flourishing while reducing — or even eliminating — the suffering of the child.

Or, failing that, we can at least quantify exactly how bad we should feel about it.

We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. We’re particularly interested in pushback from people with experience in single-beneficiary suffering reduction, or anyone who has walked away from a city and regretted it.

1. ^{^}

   We are aware this sounds monstrous. We want to emphasize that we are not endorsing the creation of new suffering children. We are merely observing that Omelas has achieved something that global health has not, and asking whether there are lessons to be learned. We assign ~15% probability that we are reasoning ourselves into something terrible, which is below our threshold for concern.

2. ^{^}

   The workshop will be held at an undisclosed location within Omelas. Attendees are asked not to visit the basement unsupervised. Vegan snacks will be provided.