A quick note on what encouraged me to donate to EAO.

I navigate robotic spacecraft to destinations in deep space at JPL. If you're trying to get somewhere like Jupiter or Saturn, the most important course corrections you can make are right after launch. We always have a crack team of analysts closely monitoring a spacecraft just after it leaves Earth, because the energy required to change the spacecraft's heading grows exponentially with time; point in the wrong direction too long and the mission is lost.

EA is moving really, really fast, and small adjustments to its development now are likely to have huge consequences down the road. With EAO, we have a team of talented people focused on nothing but making sure it's heading in the right direction. They are doing a lot of really impressive, concrete work (like book promotion, EAG, VIP outreach etc), but I think the greatest value in keeping them well funded is to have a vigilant eye watching for obstacles and helping navigate them at this very important, early stage of the movement.

Done! Donated.

I decided to give $10,600, half of my donations this year to the EAO team. Here's why.

EAs love imagining doomsday scenarios, but they seldom imagine what might happen if EA loses steam or becomes fragmented. To my mind, that might be the biggest risk to accelerating the world's self-improvement.

Most other EA causes are in some way dependent on the cohesion and health of EA as a movement, and the inculcation of young people into this way of thinking. I want to see what happens if EA grows and matures out of being a social movement, and instead grows to become a staple of liberal culture.

After hearing Tyler and Kerry's talks at EA Global, where they laid out their plans to try to foster EA by trying to place a movement-builder in every major US city, I was convinced that they have the vision to both grow and nurture the EA movement. Despite an amorphous challenge, they have a top-notch team with very well-placed confidence.

I'm looking forward to see what they get done in 2016 and whether I will donate to them again. :)

The EAO team is sufficiently capable

At the beginning of 2015, the EAO team was three people. Over the course of this year we:

• Marketed Will’s book Doing Good Better and Peter Singer’s book The Most Good You Can Do. We sold more than 17,000 books in total and received coverage in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR and more.
• Launched effectivealtruism.org and quickly caused the site to be the number one search result for “effective altruism” in the US.
• Conducted VIP outreach to some of the most influential people in the world including Elon Musk, Bill Gates, YCombinator, and 20 different major foundations.
• Launched EA Ventures, attracted 22 major donors and partners including YCombinator, and the OS Fund and helped move over $100,000 to new effective organizations.
• Created EA Global and ran conferences across three continents, increasing total attendance over last year’s EA Summit by 400%.

You can read more about our team at the bottom of the CEA team page.

If this claim were false, a plausible reason would be that the team lacks anyone with robust experience inside other social movements. It seems plausible that the EAO team may spend too much time figuring out what infrastructure to build and not enough time building. This might be avoided if the team had more experience in other social movements.

The EA community could be extraordinarily valuable in the future

The term ‘Effective Altruism’ has only existed for around four years and was popularized two and a half years ago. In a short time, the EA community has accomplished a tremendous amount of good. So far we’ve built a community of thousands, donated millions of dollars to effective charities saving thousands of lives, pledged billions of dollars in future support and have attracted some of the most influential people in the world.

If we project into the future this trend may continue or even accelerate. We may develop more insights into how to do good in the world and we may attract increasingly more influential people.

If this claim were false, a plausible reason would be that the beneficiaries of the movement are different from the people in the movement. Traditionally, social movements include people who directly benefit if the movement succeeds. This is true of the civil rights movement, feminism, the disability rights movement, Marxism and many others. The EA movement currently benefits the poorest people in the world, non-human animals and future people. It could be that a social movement that is not focused on benefiting those in the movement cannot succeed.

Donated!

I currently do most of my giving to orgs working directly for the global poor and for animals, but this year I included ~10% for movement building as well, mostly for EAO/CEA. Looking forward to an important year!

There are actions that a sufficiently capable team could take now to make it more likely that EA becomes extraordinarily valuable in the future.

There are a number of risks that a rapidly growing community has to avoid in order to be successful. At EA Global I touched on four: the Eternal September effect, coordination failure, ossification, and epistemic failure, although there are many others. The central tension is that the EA community has to grow to accomplish its goals, but growth may increase the probability of the movement getting off track.

Yet, I think we can avoid some of these risks by thoughtfully building community infrastructure that helps the community grow rapidly and safely. Examples of community infrastructure include EA Global, local EAGx conferences, effectivealtruism.org, the EA forum, EA Ventures, and the EA handbook. At full scale, the community infrastructure should allow us to seamlessly catch new people up to speed on our ideas, connect them to their local EA community, and help them contribute to the ongoing intellectual development of the community. More details on how we can make it more likely that EA becomes extraordinarily valuable in the future are available in our 2016 plan.

If this claim were false a plausible reason would be that the task at hand is intractable. It could be the case that once the initial conditions of a social movement are set, very little can be done to alter the trajectory. It could also be the case that one cannot make reasonable decisions about a social movement from inside the social movement. That is, the tribal aspects of being a part of a social movement may be especially good at making impartial reasoning impossible.