We are a group of Effective Altruists that have become concerned with the direction of the movement over the last few years, and especially over the last few months.
We wrote a very long and detailed post about this ("Doing EA Better"), which can roughly be boiled down to these key points:
- The Effective Altruism movement has rapidly grown in size and power, and we have a responsibility to ensure that it lives up to its goals
- EA is too homogenous, hierarchical, and intellectually insular, with a hard core of “orthodox” thought and powerful barriers to “deep” critiques
- Many beliefs accepted in EA are surprisingly poorly supported, and we ignore entire disciplines with extremely relevant and valuable insights
- Some EA beliefs and practices align suspiciously well with the interests of our donors, and some of our practices render us susceptible to conflicts of interest
- EA decision-making is highly centralised, opaque, and unaccountable, but there are several evidence-based methods for improving the situation
To facilitate object-level discussion we have broken down the post into this sequence.
We hope that the discussions we have will contribute to steering the Effective Altruism movement in the right direction, and help us do as much good as we can.