Note: This question is very heavily focused on the EA Community - specifically it's governance - rather than ideas, cause areas or similar. As such readers might find the subject overly navel-gazing.

A turbulent year

The EA^TM Community^[1] has had quite the bumpy 2023.^[2] Quoting bits of Toby Ord’s Bay Area talk:

The spring and summer of 2022 were a time of rapid change..the most famous person in crypto had become the most famous person in EA… [there was a shared]… feeling of visceral acceleration: like a white knuckled fairground ride, pushing us up to vertiginous heights faster than we were comfortable with. And that was just the ascent.

And then of course, there was the descent. The FTX collapse (Nov 2022) and Sam Altman’s firing / re-hiring (Nov 2023) come to mind as the two most publicly known events with some relation to EA. In addition, there have been several controversies internal to the community through 2023 (which I won’t cover in depth here).

A changing of the guard?

Alongside these events, there have been a lot of governance changes within major EA organisations over the past 12-15 months:^[3]

• 80,000 Hours
  • Niel Bowerman took over as CEO from Ben Todd.^[4] [1]
• Effective Ventures
  • Effective Ventures is planning to offboard many (all?) of it’s major projects [2]
  • UK: Tasha McCauley [3], Claire Zabel [3], Will MacAskill [4], Owen Cotton-Barratt [5] and Nick Beckstead [6] stepped down from the EV UK Board. Lincoln Quirk [7] Eli Rose [3] and Johnstuart Winchell [3] have joined.
  • US: Rebecca Kagan [8], Nicole Ross [3] and Nick Beckstead [6] stepped down from the EV US board. Anna Weldon [3], Eli Rose [8] and Zach Robinson [8] have joined the US board 
  • CEOs: Rob Gledhill [9] and Zach Robinson [10] have joined as CEOs of EV UK and US respectively.^[5]
• Centre for Effective Altruism
  • Zach Robinson was recently announced as CEO [11], after Ben West took the role on for an interim period [12] following Max Dalton stepping down [13]
• Open Philanthropy
  • Alexander Berger became the sole CEO [14] after Holden Karnofsky moved to Director of AI strategy [15]
  • Howie Lempel and Emily Oehlsen became Managing Directors for GCR and GHW respectively [16]
  • Claire Zabel stepped down from leading GCR Capacity Building, with Eli Rose filling the role [16]

To my mind, the Effective Ventures changes are particularly striking. The names on the  below diagram - from 12 months ago - are now entirely out of date, except for Zac Robinson:

What next?

I would guess the changes outlined above will have fairly significant downstream effects on the EA community. But I have very little idea about which direction it will point. 

I’m curious for anyone’s opinions on how this might affect the community going forward. I’m especially interested in the views of those who have recently been appointed to one of the positions mentioned above, given that they will likely have a steering effect over the whole community. 

1. ^{^}

    By the “EA^TM community” I’m mostly talking about the EA brand, or “the group of people who identify as effective altruists”. I don’t mean areas that the EA community has focused on (AI safety, animal welfare, etc) or EA as an intellectual project.

2. ^{^}

    I’m including events from November 2022 to January 2024 here, as a “long 2023”

3. ^{^}

    This list might not be comprehensive

^{^}

 Brenton Mayer served as interim CEO from late 2022

^{^}

 Howie Lempel served as interim CEO of EV US from November 2022

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