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]

You can also find lists of:

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.

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:

Global health and development
Animal welfare
Mitigation of global risk factors
Shaping the future
Broad epistemics and coordination
Philosophy, global priorities research, and how to do good better
Building effective altruism

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

1. Global health and development

The overall topic page: Global health and development

How does this kind of work help?	The lives of (current) people are improved (and prolonged).
Topic highlights	Global health and development, Economic growth, Mental health

Health
Legal interventions
Economic and societal issues and interventions
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

How does this kind of work help?	The lives of non-human animals are improved.
Cruxes for prioritizing this kind of work	Animals matter, and deserve resources that might otherwise help people.
Topic highlights	Farmed animal welfare, Wild animal welfare, Moral circle expansion

Farmed animal welfare, and possible interventions
Wild animal welfare
Other groups of animals
Important concepts:

3. Mitigation of global risk factors

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

How does this kind of work help?	Risks are mitigated, which decreases the chances of near-term catastrophe and/or increases the probability of a (decent) future.
Cruxes for prioritizing this kind of work	Future beings matter morally, or some of these risks affect existing beings. (Only one of these has to be true.)
Topic highlights	AI risk, Biosecurity, Great power conflict, Existential risk, Global catastrophic risk

Sources of risk

AI risk
Biosecurity, Global catastrophic biological risk
War and Great power conflict
- Nuclear warfare
  - Nuclear security
  - Nuclear winter
  - Nuclear disarmament movement
  - History of nuclear risks
- Weapons of mass destruction
- Armed conflict
Earth/planet-related risks
Other risks

Risk-related topics

Types of bad states of the world (what the risk can bring about)
Types of risk (other groupings):
Broadly making the world or civilization more resilient
- Resilient food
- Differential progress
Philosophical topics
Related concepts
- Longtermism
- Potential strategies for mitigating these risks
- 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

How does this kind of work help?	The future is better than it would have been.
Cruxes for prioritizing this kind of work	Future beings matter, and it is in fact possible to shape the future in some predictable way.
Topic highlights	Longtermism, Value lock-in, existential risk

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

How does this kind of work help?	The world (or, the global population) has better epistemics and a greater ability to coordinate, which means that it is broadly more robust and capable of responding to new problems.
Cruxes for prioritizing this kind of work	Epistemics can be improved, and more coordination is good; people make good decisions, given the chance.
Topic highlights	Institutional decision-making, Forecasting, Metascience

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
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

How does this kind of work help?	We identify important issues and develop tools for deciding what to do, which helps us do more good.
Cruxes for prioritizing this kind of work	This sort of research can discover important things and will actually be used.
Topic highlights	Moral philosophy, Cause prioritization, Global priorities research

Cause prioritization
Global priorities research
Moral philosophy
- Moral uncertainty
Research
Moral advocacy
Effective giving and funding
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

How does this kind of work help?	We improve the effective altruism philosophy, network, and movement — by growing or otherwise making it better — and this allows EA to do more good.
Cruxes for prioritizing this kind of work	Effective altruism is a helpful phenomenon that leads to good things in the world.
Topic highlights	Building effective altruism, Community, Career choice, Moral advocacy

EA infrastructure and networks
- Effective altruism groups
- Events
Broad EA outreach
Movement strategy
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
Related movements and communities
- Rationality community
- Progress studies

^{^}⚠️ 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.
^{^}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. There are 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.

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