I'm excited that Zach is stepping into this role. Zach seems substantially better than my expectations for the new CEA CEO, and I expect the CEO hiring committee + Ben + the EV board had a lot to do with that (and probably lots of other people at CEA that I don't know about)!

Most CEA users and EA community members probably don't know Zach, so I thought it would be helpful to share some of my thoughts on them and this position (though I don't know Zach especially well, and these are just quick subjective takes). Thanks to @Ben_West for the nudge to do this.

Quick takes on my impression of Zach and his fit for this role
Zach seems very strong on typical management consultant skills, e.g. communication skills, professionalism, creative problem-solving in typical professional environments, and having difficult conversations. 

One aptitude that I would bet Zach is strong on that I think is very neglected in EA organisations is developing and mentoring mid-level staff. Many EA orgs have bright, agentic, competent young people in fairly high-responsibility roles. While you can learn a lot from these roles that you might not learn in a traditional organisation, I worry (particularly for myself) that there might be a lot of gains from being in a more typical management/organisational structure. I'm pretty excited for people like Jessica McCurdy, who runs the EA groups team, to have a solid manager like Zach (Edit: I didn't mean to imply here that leadership at the time of writing weren't providing good management; just that relative to people I thought might end up in this role, I expect ~Zach to be quite strong on managing mid-level people). I'd guess that CEA will become a substantially more attractive place to work (for senior people) because of Zach.

While I don't have much insight into Zach's vision for CEA, I remember thinking that Zach seemed sharp, thoughtful, and reasonable in conversations about EA and CEA. I also got the sense that he has thought about some of EA's more intellectual/philosophical parts - it's imo fairly rare to find people who can both do the philosophy part of EA and the execution part of EA, but both parts seem important for this role.

I do have some reservations about Zach entering this role related to the professional relationships/responsibilities that Zach holds.^[1] 

Zach previously worked at Open Phil; this relationship seems particularly important for the future of CEA as that is where they get most of their funding from. I think it's reasonable for people to be increasingly concerned about the epistemic influence of Open Phil on EA, and having an ex-senior Open Phil employee, who is probably still good friends with Open Phil leadership, meaningfully reduces the epistemic independence of CEA. It also could make it hard for CEA or the EV board to push Zach out if he turns out to be a bad fit for CEA - and given CEA's history, I think this is worth bearing in mind (though I'd guess overall that Zach is net positive for CEA governance).

Zach is on Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust. It's not super clear what this means, particularly in light of recent events with the Open AI board, but I am a bit concerned about the way that EA views Anthropic, and that the CEO of CEA being affiliated with Anthropic could make it more difficult for people within EA to speak out against Anthropic. Managing social/professional relationships within EA is challenging,^[2] and I'd guess that overall this cost is worth paying to have a CEO of Zach's calibre - but I think it's a meaningful cost that people should be tracking. 

In an ideal world, I would prefer that Zach ^[3]was less strongly connected to Open Phil (weak confidence) and also less strongly connected to Anthropic (medium/high confidence).

CEAs future strategy
I don't have many thoughts at this time on what changes to CEA's strategy I’d like to see. To me it seems like CEA is at a bit of a crossroads in both a strategic and organisational sense:

1. Organisational - various teams seem to want to spin out and be their own thing where the project leads get more of a say over the direction of their project, and they have less baggage from being part of CEA. I'd be excited about Zach working out whether this is the right move for individual projects and increasing the value that projects get from being part of CEA.
    
2. Strategic - many CEA staff seem to have become most concerned about risk from AI and naturally want their work to focus on this topic. At the same time, it seems like relatively little money is available to the non-AI parts of EA for meta work. 

I am not sure what (if anything) should change on the funding side, but on the CEA side I'd be excited about:

1. Zach/CEA figuring out a coherent vision for CEA that is transparent about its motivations and outcomes, CEA staff are excited about and doesn't leave various parts of the EA community feeling isolated.
2. Zach figuring out how to increase the value that CEA's projects get from being part of CEA, or helping them spin out if that's what they want to do.
3. Zach/CEA figuring out how to leverage and improve the CEA brand so that it doesn't restrict the actions of various projects (and ideally is an asset) and doesn't create negative externalities for organisations outside of CEA.
    
   
    

1. ^{^}

   FYI, I didn't run this by Zach, but as it's not really a criticism that could affect his reputation and is mostly just pointing at publicly available information, it didn't seem warranted to me.

2. ^{^}

   For example, I live with two people who work at Anthropic, and in general, living with people probably has substantive epistemic effects.

3. ^{^}

   Edit 2024-Apr-16: I meant the CEO of EV, as opposed to Zach specifically.

What would be the best thing(s) to read for those of us who know ~nothing about Zach and his views/philosophy?

Just wanted to chip in that I am quite positive about this choice and the direction that CEA could go in under Zach's leadership. I have found Zach to be thoughtful about a range of EA topics and to hold to core principles in a way that is both rare and highly valuable for the leader of a meta organization.

Congrats to Zach! I feel like this is mostly supposed to be a "quick update/celebratory post", but I feel like there's a missing mood that I want to convey in this comment. Note that my thoughts mostly come from an AI Safety perspective, so these thoughts may be less relevant for folks who focus on other cause areas.

My impression is that EA is currently facing an unprecedented about of PR backlash, as well as some solid internal criticisms among core EAs who are now distancing from EA. I suspect this will likely continue into 2024. Some examples:

• EA has acquired several external enemies as a result of the OpenAI coup. I suspect that investors/accelerationists will be looking for ways to (further) damage EA's reputation.
• EA is acquiring external enemies as a result of its political engagements. There have been a few news articles recently criticizing EA-affiliated or EA-influenced fellowship programs and think-tanks.
• EA is acquiring an increasing number of internal critics. Informally, I feel like many people I know (myself included) have become increasingly dissatisfied with the "modern EA movement" and "mainstream EA institutions". Examples of common criticisms include "low integrity/low openness", "low willingness to critique powerful EA institutions", "low willingness to take actions in the world that advocate directly/openly for beliefs", "cozyness with AI labs", "general slowness/inaction bias", and "lack of willingness to support groups pushing for concrete policies to curb the AI race." (I'll acknowledge that some of these are more controversial than others and could reflect genuine worldview differences, though even so, my impression is that they're meaningfully contributing to a schism in ways that go beyond typical worldview differences).

I'd be curious to know how CEA is reacting to this. The answer might be "well, we don't really focus much on AI safety, so we don't really see this as our thing to respond to." The answer might be "we think these criticisms are unfair/low-quality, so we're going to ignore them." Or the answer might be "we take X criticism super seriously and are planning to do Y about it."

Regardless, I suspect that this is an especially important and challenging time to be the CEO of CEA. I hope Zach (and others at CEA) are able to navigate the increasing public scrutiny & internal scrutiny of EA that I suspect will continue into 2024.

I'm excited to be turning over the reins to Zach. I had the opportunity to see Zach in action at the Meta Coordination Forum earlier this year, and afterwards I sent Zach the following (edited) message:

(Low urgency) Hey, I have been going through my notes from MCF and just wanted to say that the brief moments I had of seeing you in action made me even more excited for you to lead CEA…

It was also cool seeing your leadership techniques to get people excited around specific projects: e.g. telling [person] that something has historically been his strength when motivating him to do more of it.

Lastly, it does feel like we are maybe entering a third wave of effective altruism, and the comments you made in our discussion about what principles-first EA should look like seemed true, more insightful than what most people (including myself) had to say, and like the kind of thing I would want the CEO of CEA to say

Welcome, Zach!

Thanks for sharing this and good luck to Zach.

Could you explain how this works structurally? My understanding is he is currently CEO of EV US. Will he be continuing in this role also, or will EV US have been wound down by February? Is CEA going to be one single international organization, or will there be separate CEA US and CEA UK, and he will be CEA of both? 

edit: upon further review of previous EV statements it appears there is another hiring round for an EV US CEO replacement, which answers part of the above.

Also, a tougher question: how over-determined was this hiring? As an outsider it seems like he (as currently one of the direct supervisors of CEA's CEO, and someone whose current role will soon be going away) would probably be one of the first names you'd consider. The reason I ask is because I feel like I spent too much time interviewing candidates for a hiring round when I could have narrowed the field much more quickly.

I’m really excited that Zach will be coming on as CEO of CEA. After so many nominations and evaluations, it’s extremely gratifying to have found someone so qualified for the role. I’m grateful to the hard work everyone put into this, particularly to Max for coordinating and project managing incredibly smoothly, and for Oscar and Caitlin helping a tonne behind the scenes. 

Running CEA is an enormous responsibility, and one I’m glad to be able to trust Zach with. I very much look forward to watching him take CEA into the future.

My apologies if this comment is somewhat naive, but wouldn't it have been a more objective move to appoint an external headhunting company to supply a first group of candidates at least? This may also have brought in a more diverse group of candidates to select from, e.g. moral philosophers with management experience in a university or community setting who might not be part of the EA community (yet) but be sympathetic to it and who could be brought quickly up to speed on its issues.