Starting the EA Values Project

We’re excited to announce the start of the EA Values Project—an initiative designed to promote, develop, and integrate the core values of Effective Altruism (EA) across our community, workplaces, and individual commitments.

Why This Project?

We believe as the EA movement grows, maintaining clarity and alignment on our core values is crucial especially with the speed of technological developments and AI. By strengthening our understanding and practice of EA core values and principles, we can ensure that our efforts, decisions and actions remain effective, evidence-based, aligned with doing the most good, and grounded in our human values.

Current EA Core Values and Principles

There are four values at the heart of effective altruism (Prioritisation, Impartial altruism, Open truth-seeking, and Collaborative spirit. The Center for Effective Altruism identifies these current Guiding Principles of Effective Altruism (Commitment to others, Scientific mindset, Openness, Integrity, Collaborative Spirit) and these Core Central Principles of Effective Altruism (Scope sensitivity, Impartiality, Scout mindset, and Recognition of tradeoffs).

Core Values and Principles in EA related organizations

• 80,000 hours have their cultural values.
• Animal Charity Evaluators have their guiding principles.
• Center on Long Term Risk have their primary ethical focus.
• Charity Entrepreneurship have their values.
• Future of Life Institute have their core principles.
• Giving What We can have their values.

These are just some organizations who have similar core values and principles and whose members in the organizations are part of the Effective Altruism communities. We believe that our human core values play an important role in our decisions and our commitment to continue working at impactful organizations and in helping others and our world. More than our effectiveness, our human value of altruism is just as important and if our mind, skills and values are nurtured and developed together, it would allow us to be truly impactful in our work and in our lives.

Project Goals

Just as Effective Altruism is the project of trying to find the best ways of helping others, and putting them into practice, the EA Values Project aims to continuously remind and help in the formation of the human values that shape our decisions and actions in helping others.

1. Community Engagement: Organizing discussions, workshops, and events to deepen understanding, importance, need, and application of EA values.
2. Workplace Integration: Encouraging organizations aligned with EA to actively incorporate core values and principles into decision-making.
3. Education and Training Tools: Developing resources for individuals and organizations to assess and align their actions with EA core values.
4. Accountability & Feedback: Creating mechanisms for the community to provide tools, input and stories on how well we uphold these values.
5. Continuous development: We expect EA core values and principles to change over time as our world, the technology, and AI improves. We hope the project continuous to be a resource in promoting, developing and improving EA core values and principles.

How You Can Get Involved

• Contribute Ideas: Share stories, experiences, and insights on how to strengthen EA values and principles in our work and lives. We hope to share in the EA forum regular stories and experiences of individuals and organizations about EA core values and principles.
• Help the Project: We hope the project will develop in the future to be an organization that can provide training and formation programs to EA related organizations and groups. Feel free to share your suggestions and ideas to help us improve this project.

This project is a collaborative effort, and we welcome feedback, contributions, and suggestions. Feel free to comment or email us. Let’s continue to work, share stories and experiences about the human values that helps EA remain a principled and high-impact movement.