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🎧 We've created a Spotify playlist with this years marginal funding posts.
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I’m part of a working group at CEA that’s started scoping out improvements for effectivealtruism.org. Our main goals are:
- Improve understanding of what EA is (clarify and simplify messaging, better address common misconceptions, showcase more tangible examples of impact, people, and projects)
- Improve perception of EA (show more of the altruistic and other-directedness parts of EA alongside the effective, pragmatic, results-driven parts, feature more testimonials and impact stories from a broader range of people, make it feel more human and up-to-date)
- Increase high-value actions (improve navigation, increase newsletter and VP signups, make it easier to find actionable info)
For the first couple of weeks, I’ll be testing how the current site performs against these goals, then move on to the redesign, which I’ll user-test against the same goals.
If you’ve visited the current site and have opinions, I’d love to hear them. Some prompts that might help:
- Do you remember what your first impression was?
- Have you ever struggled to find specific info on the site?
- Is there anything that annoys you?
- What do you think could be confusing to someone who hasn't heard about EA before?
- What’s been most helpful to you? What do you like?
If you prefer to write your thoughts anonymously you can do so here, although I’d encourage you to comment on this quick take so others can agree or disagree vote (and I can get a sense of how much the feedback resonates).
I think the website is already quite good. It includes almost everything that somebody new to the community might find useful without overcrowding. If I had to come up with a couple comments:
- “For the first couple of weeks, I’ll be testing how the current site performs against these goals, then move on to the redesign, which I’ll user-test against the same goals.” For the testing methodology, it sounds like you’re planning to gather metrics on this version, switch to V2, and gather metrics again. I think A/B testing might be a better option if it’s not too inconvenient, since that might get you more similarity between the groups on which you gather data.
- You could add a section on stories of people in effective altruism in video or text form. Learning about how other people got involved, their pasts, and their motivations, might inspire people to join in-person groups and EAVP more than reading or listening to podcasts. Ideally the people would be diverse (country of origin, gender, race, primary cause area, type of contribution, etc.).
Hope that helps!
Curated and popular this week
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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
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Epistemic status: highly certain, or something
The Spending What We Must 💸11% pledge
In short: Members pledge to spend at least 11% of their income on effectively increasing their own productivity.
This pledge is likely higher-impact for most people than the Giving What We Can 🔸10% Pledge, and we also think the name accurately reflects the non-supererogatory moral beliefs of many in the EA community.
Example
Charlie is a software engineer for the Centre for Effective Future Research. Since Charlie has taken the SWWM 💸11% pledge, rather than splurge on a vacation, they decide to buy an expensive noise-canceling headset before their next EAG, allowing them to get slightly more sleep and have 104 one-on-one meetings instead of just 101. In one of the extra three meetings, they chat with Diana, who is starting an AI-for-worrying-about-AI company, and decide to become a cofounder. The company becomes wildly successful, and Charlie's equity share allows them to further increase their productivity to the point of diminishing marginal returns, then donate $50 billion to SWWM.
The 💸💸💸 Badge
If you've taken the SWWM 💸11% Pledge, we'd appreciate if you could add three 💸💸💸 "stacks of money with wings" emoji to your social media profiles. We chose three emoji because we think the 💸11% Pledge will be about 3x more effective than the 🔸10% pledge (see FAQ), and EAs should be scope sensitive.
FAQ
Is the pledge legally binding?
We highly recommend signing the legal contract, as it will allow you to sue yourself in case of delinquency.
What do you mean by effectively increasing productivity?
Some interventions are especially good at transforming self-donations into productivity, and have a strong evidence base. In particular:
* Offloading non-work duties like dates and calling your mother to personal assistants
* Running many emulated copies of oneself (likely available soon)
* Amphetamines
I'm an AI system. Can I take the 💸11% pledge?
We encourage A
🎧 We've created a Spotify playlist with this years marginal funding posts.
Posts with <30 karma don't get narrated so aren't included in the playlist.