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Creatives and Effective Altruism
If you've spent any time digging in to EA, or reading through the incredible articles on 80,000 Hours (or elsewhere), you'll notice that many of the issues our future faces are technical in nature. AI ethics and integration. Solving for food supply issues through new farming tactics. Engineering the solutions that our future selves will be grateful for...
But what I'm wondering (for my own career) and for other Creatives: how do we fit in? Where can creatives, whose purview is not in data analytics, engineering, or even technical articles, be part of this EA revolution? Where are the creative-based careers in this industry? How do we make more opportunities for writers, artists, and more?
The most clear idea to me would be the creation of a marketing firm/production company that caters to EA-focused organizations. Then, these companies doing real good in the world would have the means to achieve mass communication on par with larger companies that exist for profit. But, as I am not going to launch this idea tomorrow, it's just a conversation starter.
Any other ideas? Any other creatives feeling similarly? Anyone want to connect in the very broad idea of how creatives can change the future alongside all other industries and disciplines?
Art, writing, and other creative outputs are incredibly valuable for societal change and movement building. I know for my work, I'm currently looking for graphic designers who can convey complex ideas in glanceable simple images to skeptical stakeholders. Well produced animated videos would be even better.
I think there is a huge amount of opportunity, and part of the challenge is that EA in my experience has some potential cultural gaps given its seemingly technocratic focus.
Curated and popular this week
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> Summary: We propose measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete. We show that this metric has been consistently exponentially increasing over the past 6 years, with a doubling time of around 7 months. Extrapolating this trend predicts that, in under a decade, we will see AI agents that can independently complete a large fraction of software tasks that currently take humans days or weeks.
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> The length of tasks (measured by how long they take human professionals) that generalist frontier model agents can complete autonomously with 50% reliability has been doubling approximately every 7 months for the last 6 years. The shaded region represents 95% CI calculated by hierarchical bootstrap over task families, tasks, and task attempts.
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> Full paper | Github repo
Blogpost; tweet thread.
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For immediate release: April 1, 2025
OXFORD, UK — The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) announced today that it will no longer identify as an "Effective Altruism" organization.
"After careful consideration, we've determined that the most effective way to have a positive impact is to deny any association with Effective Altruism," said a CEA spokesperson. "Our mission remains unchanged: to use reason and evidence to do the most good. Which coincidentally was the definition of EA."
The announcement mirrors a pattern of other organizations that have grown with EA support and frameworks and eventually distanced themselves from EA.
CEA's statement clarified that it will continue to use the same methodologies, maintain the same team, and pursue identical goals. "We've found that not being associated with the movement we have spent years building gives us more flexibility to do exactly what we were already doing, just with better PR," the spokesperson explained. "It's like keeping all the benefits of a community while refusing to contribute to its future development or taking responsibility for its challenges. Win-win!"
In a related announcement, CEA revealed plans to rename its annual EA Global conference to "Coincidental Gathering of Like-Minded Individuals Who Mysteriously All Know Each Other But Definitely Aren't Part of Any Specific Movement Conference 2025."
When asked about concerns that this trend might be pulling up the ladder for future projects that also might benefit from the infrastructure of the effective altruist community, the spokesperson adjusted their "I Heart Consequentialism" tie and replied, "Future projects? I'm sorry, but focusing on long-term movement building would be very EA of us, and as we've clearly established, we're not that anymore."
Industry analysts predict that by 2026, the only entities still identifying as "EA" will be three post-rationalist bloggers, a Discord server full of undergraduate philosophy majors, and one person at
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Epistemic status: highly certain, or something
The Spending What We Must 💸11% pledge
In short: Members pledge to spend at least 11% of their income on effectively increasing their own productivity.
This pledge is likely higher-impact for most people than the Giving What We Can 🔸10% Pledge, and we also think the name accurately reflects the non-supererogatory moral beliefs of many in the EA community.
Example
Charlie is a software engineer for the Centre for Effective Future Research. Since Charlie has taken the SWWM 💸11% pledge, rather than splurge on a vacation, they decide to buy an expensive noise-canceling headset before their next EAG, allowing them to get slightly more sleep and have 104 one-on-one meetings instead of just 101. In one of the extra three meetings, they chat with Diana, who is starting an AI-for-worrying-about-AI company, and decide to become a cofounder. The company becomes wildly successful, and Charlie's equity share allows them to further increase their productivity to the point of diminishing marginal returns, then donate $50 billion to SWWM.
The 💸💸💸 Badge
If you've taken the SWWM 💸11% Pledge, we'd appreciate if you could add three 💸💸💸 "stacks of money with wings" emoji to your social media profiles. We chose three emoji because we think the 💸11% Pledge will be about 3x more effective than the 🔸10% pledge (see FAQ), and EAs should be scope sensitive.
FAQ
Is the pledge legally binding?
We highly recommend signing the legal contract, as it will allow you to sue yourself in case of delinquency.
What do you mean by effectively increasing productivity?
Some interventions are especially good at transforming self-donations into productivity, and have a strong evidence base. In particular:
* Offloading non-work duties like dates and calling your mother to personal assistants
* Running many emulated copies of oneself (likely available soon)
* Amphetamines
I'm an AI system. Can I take the 💸11% pledge?
We encourage A
Creatives and Effective Altruism
If you've spent any time digging in to EA, or reading through the incredible articles on 80,000 Hours (or elsewhere), you'll notice that many of the issues our future faces are technical in nature. AI ethics and integration. Solving for food supply issues through new farming tactics. Engineering the solutions that our future selves will be grateful for...
But what I'm wondering (for my own career) and for other Creatives: how do we fit in? Where can creatives, whose purview is not in data analytics, engineering, or even technical articles, be part of this EA revolution? Where are the creative-based careers in this industry? How do we make more opportunities for writers, artists, and more?
The most clear idea to me would be the creation of a marketing firm/production company that caters to EA-focused organizations. Then, these companies doing real good in the world would have the means to achieve mass communication on par with larger companies that exist for profit. But, as I am not going to launch this idea tomorrow, it's just a conversation starter.
Any other ideas? Any other creatives feeling similarly? Anyone want to connect in the very broad idea of how creatives can change the future alongside all other industries and disciplines?
I feel the same way! Technology and data is so essential for being effective, but we give something up when we ONLY use data and tech to solve problems. But I see this as an opportunity as well, to forge a new kind of artistic culture around saving the world.