This is a sorted list of pages — known as “Topics” — in the EA Forum Wiki, which collects and explains topics relevant to discussions on the Effective Altruism Forum (this platform).^[1] You can find out more about the Wiki and “Topics” in the Wiki FAQ.^[2]

Table of contents

You can also find lists of: 

• Key concepts and tools
• Categories of post by type, not content
• People relevant to conversations about effective altruism
• Organizations and projects in effective altruism
• Alphabetized lists of topics by category

Core topics

We’ve highlighted some “core” topics around which people are forming sub-communities and discussions. This is a beta version of the list of core topics; we’ll probably modify its composition. If you have specific feedback, we encourage you to get in touch. 

Areas of work

• Cause prioritization
  • Cause-neutral prioritization research seeks to identify new promising focus areas and to compare their relative value.
• Global health and development
  • Improving public health, reducing poverty, increasing economic growth, or finding new interventions to help the developing world.
• Farmed animal welfare
  • Factory farming likely produces a lot of suffering; discussions around this topic explore the most promising interventions for helping farmed animals, different ways to study the problem, and more.
• Wild animal welfare
  • Most animals are not domesticated; this topic explores their welfare and how we might be able to improve it.
• AI risk
  • How dangerous we should expect advanced artificial intelligence to be, and possible paths for making it safer.
• Biosecurity
  • How we can mitigate risks from viruses and bacteria, and avoid or relieve future pandemics.
• Existential risk
  • Everything from discussions of specific risks, like those posed by new technologies or natural catastrophic events, to analyses of the impact of different approaches and interventions.
• Building effective altruism
  • Making sure “effective altruism” actually does good.
• Moral philosophy
  • A wide range of discussion topics around moral philosophy covers questions like “what is social impact?” and “How can we act when we’re uncertain about the consequences of our actions?”

Relevant to the community

• Take action
  • Specific ways to take action based on the principles of effective altruism.
• Career choice
  • Everything from overviews of the most important skills to develop to in-depth profiles or specific jobs.
• Community
  • Posts about the EA community and applying EA in one's personal life.

Key concepts

For a longer list of key concepts in effective altruism, you can visit the Key concepts page. You might also be interested in visiting effectivealtruism.org or looking at the EA Handbook. 

• Expected value
• Cause prioritization
• ITN framework
• Moral circle expansion
• Distribution of cost-effectiveness

See all the key concepts and tools. 

Types of work in effective altruism

At its core, effective altruism is about finding the best ways to do good and putting them into practice, but this motivates people to work on a wide variety of projects, for different reasons. 

We’ve organized different projects and areas of work by the answer to the following question: “How does your work help the world?” We’ve also noted some potential (non-exhaustive!) cruxes for prioritizing each kind of work.

At a high level, the types of work fall into the following categories: 

1. Global health and development
2. Animal welfare
3. Mitigation of global risk factors
4. Shaping the future
5. Broad epistemics and coordination
6. Philosophy, global priorities research, and how to do good better
7. Building effective altruism

There are also some topics that are relevant to the categorization of work that we’ve chosen here: 

• Cause prioritization
• Cause neutrality
• Less-discussed causes and cause x
• Definition of effective altruism

1. Global health and development

The overall topic page: Global health and development

• Health
  • Air pollution
  • Burden of disease
  • Malaria and Mass distribution of long-lasting insecticide-treated nets
  • Deworming
  • Tobacco control
  • COVID-19 pandemic
  • Mental health
  • Cluster headache
  • Aging research
  • Research into neglected tropical diseases
  • Specific interventions
    • Smallpox Eradication Programme
    • Micronutrient programs
• Legal interventions
  • Criminal justice reform
  • Immigration reform
  • Education
  • Family planning
  • Land use reform
• Economic and societal issues and interventions
  • Cash transfers
  • Economic growth
  • Global poverty
  • Universal basic income
  • Near-term AI ethics
  • Poverty trap
  • Progress studies
• General topics in global health and development
  • Global health and wellbeing
  • Aid and paternalism
  • Systemic change
  • Foreign aid and Foreign aid skepticism
  • 🖇️ See also  — The “Broad epistemics and coordination” category has some related topics, like Electoral reform and Metascience

2. Animal welfare

The overall topic page: animal welfare

• Farmed animal welfare, and possible interventions
  • Corporate cage-free campaigns
  • Animal product alternatives and Cultured meat
  • Dietary change
• Wild animal welfare
• Other groups of animals
  • Invertebrate welfare and insect welfare
  • Crustacean welfare
  • Fish welfare
• Important concepts:
  • Moral circle expansion
  • Non-humans and the long-term future
  • Speciesism
  • Artificial sentience
  • Welfare biology
  • Meat-eater problem
  • Logic of the larder

3. Mitigation of global risk factors

Pages about the overall topic: Existential risk factor, Existential risk, Global catastrophic risk 

Sources of risk

• AI risk
  • Artificial intelligence (AI)
  • AI alignment
  • AI governance
  • AI safety
  • AI takeoff
  • Ethics of artificial intelligence
  • Orthogonality thesis
  • You can find more important concepts related to AI here.
• Biosecurity, Global catastrophic biological risk
  • Pandemic preparedness
  • Biosurveillance
  • Dual-use
• War and Great power conflict
  • Nuclear warfare
    • Nuclear security
    • Nuclear winter
    • Nuclear disarmament movement
    • History of nuclear risks
      • Cuban Missile Crisis
      • Manhattan Project
      • Russell–Einstein Manifesto
      • Trinity
  • Weapons of mass destruction
  • Armed conflict
• Earth/planet-related risks
  • Climate change
    • Climate engineering
    • Conservation
  • Asteroids
  • Supervolcano
  • Geomagnetic storms
• Other risks
  • Terrorism
  • Risks from malevolent actors
  • Existential risk factor
  • Existential risks from fundamental physics research
  • Autonomous weapon
  • Atomically precise manufacturing

Risk-related topics

• Types of bad states of the world (what the risk can bring about)
  • Civilizational collapse
  • Human extinction
  • Dystopia
  • Existential catastrophe
  • Hellish existential catastrophe
• Types of risk (other groupings):
  • Natural existential risk
  • Anthropogenic existential risk
  • Unknown existential risk
• Broadly making the world or civilization more resilient
  • Resilient food
  • Differential progress
• Philosophical topics
  • Ethics of existential risk
  • Longtermism
  • Moral philosophy
• Related concepts
  • Longtermism
  • Potential strategies for mitigating these risks
    • Broad vs. narrow interventions
    • Differential progress
    • Emergency response
    • Defense in depth
    • Resilient food
  • Vulnerable world hypothesis and Hinge of history
  • Warning shot
  • Compound existential risk
  • Unilateralist's Curse
  • Information hazard
  • Criticisms of longtermism and existential risk studies
  • Space colonization

4. Shaping the future

• Hinge of history
• S-risk
• Non-humans and the long-term future
• Value lock-in
• Patient altruism
• Long-range forecasting
• Indirect long-term effects
• ​​Trajectory change
• Speeding up development
• Flourishing futures
• Long reflection
• Longtermist institutional reform
• Transhumanism
• Space colonization
• Space governance
• 🖇️ See also: the “Mitigation of global risk factors” category

5. Broad epistemics and coordination

Note: epistemics and coordination work sometimes seems similar to philosophy and building effective altruism, or takes similar forms (see below), but should generally be distinguished from that. 

• Improving institutional decision-making
  • Forecasting
  • Prediction markets
  • Electoral reform
  • Decision theory
• Raising the sanity waterline
  • Rationality (and the rationality community)
  • Education
  • Cognitive enhancement
• Coordination efforts
  • Global governance
  • Democracy
• Metascience and truthful information
  • Misinformation
  • Scientific progress
• 🖇️ See also: Key concepts and tools

6. Philosophy, cause prioritization, and methods for assessing effectiveness

• Cause prioritization
• Global priorities research
• Moral philosophy
  • Moral uncertainty
• Research
• Moral advocacy
• Effective giving and funding
  • Fundraising
  • Public giving
  • Cost-effectiveness
  • Philanthropic coordination
• History of altruism
  • History of effective altruism
  • History of philanthropy
• 🖇️ See also: Key concepts and tools

7. Building effective altruism

The overall topic page: Building effective altruism

• EA community infrastructure and networks
  • Effective altruism groups
  • Events
    • Event strategy
    • Conferences
    • Effective Altruism Global
    • Upcoming events
• Broad EA outreach
  • Moral advocacy
  • Effective altruism in the media
  • Effective altruism messaging
  • Effective altruism outreach in schools
  • Effective altruism education
  • Field building
  • Global outreach
• Movement strategy
  • Movement collapse
  • Network building
  • Scalably using labour
  • Value drift
  • Value of movement growth
• Tools for people in effective altruism
  • Career choice
• Effective altruism culture
• Community experiences
• Discussion norms
• Diversity and inclusion
• EA philosophy
• Effective altruism lifestyle
• Criticism of effective altruism and red teaming
  • Criticism of effective altruist causes
  • Criticism of effective altruist organizations
  • Criticism of longtermism and existential risk studies
• Related movements and communities
  • Rationality community
  • Progress studies

1. ^{^} ⚠️ Please note that we will be improving this page. If you have feedback on the page, please contact us. You can find the old version of this page here.
2. ^{^} The pages are also tags that can be added to posts so that people can find posts on certain topics. You can upvote or downvote a tag for a given post to move it higher or lower in the list of posts on the corresponding topic's page. Refer to this quick take for tagging instructions and guidelines.  Topics were announced in this post — they were then known as “tags.” Discussions on proposals for new topics are found here. 

As mentioned above, you can find instructions on how to tag a post with a relevant topic.