This is a sorted list of pages — known as “Topics” — in the EA Forum Wiki, which collects and explains topics relevant to discussions on the Effective Altruism Forum (this platform).[1] You can find out more about the Wiki and “Topics” in the Wiki FAQ.[2]
We’ve highlighted some “core” topics around which people are forming sub-communities and discussions. This is a beta version of the list of core topics; we’ll probably modify its composition. If you have specific feedback, we encourage you to get in touch.
Factory farming likely produces a lot of suffering; discussions around this topic explore the most promising interventions for helping farmed animals, different ways to study the problem, and more.
Everything from discussions of specific risks, like those posed by new technologies or natural catastrophic events, to analyses of the impact of different approaches and interventions.
A wide range of discussion topics around moral philosophy covers questions like “what is social impact?” and “How can we act when we’re uncertain about the consequences of our actions?”
At its core, effective altruism is about finding the best ways to do good and putting them into practice, but this motivates people to work on a wide variety of projects, for different reasons.
We’ve organized different projects and areas of work by the answer to the following question: “How does your work help the world?” We’ve also noted some potential (non-exhaustive!) cruxes for prioritizing each kind of work.
At a high level, the types of work fall into the following categories:
Global health and development
Animal welfare
Mitigation of global risk factors
Shaping the future
Broad epistemics and coordination
Philosophy, global priorities research, and how to do good better
Building effective altruism
There are also some topics that are relevant to the categorization of work that we’ve chosen here:
🖇️ See also: the “Mitigation of global risk factors” category
5. Broad epistemics and coordination
How does this kind of work help?
The world (or, the global population) has better epistemics and a greater ability to coordinate, which means that it is broadly more robust and capable of responding to new problems.
Cruxes for prioritizing this kind of work
Epistemics can be improved, and more coordination is good; people make good decisions, given the chance.
Note: epistemics and coordination work sometimes seems similar to philosophy and building effective altruism, or takes similar forms (see below), but should generally be distinguished from that.
^The pages are also tags that can be added to posts so that people can find posts on certain topics. You can upvote or downvote a tag for a given post to move it higher or lower in the list of posts on the corresponding topic's page. Refer to this quick take for tagging instructions and guidelines. Topics were announced in this post — they were then known as “tags.” Discussions on proposals for new topics are found here.
As mentioned above, you can find instructions on how to tag a post with a relevant topic.
This is a sorted list of pages — known as “Topics” — in the EA Forum Wiki, which collects and explains topics relevant to discussions on the Effective Altruism Forum (this platform).[1] You can find out more about the Wiki and “Topics” in the Wiki FAQ.[2]
Table of contents
You can also find lists of:
Core topics
We’ve highlighted some “core” topics around which people are forming sub-communities and discussions. This is a beta version of the list of core topics; we’ll probably modify its composition. If you have specific feedback, we encourage you to get in touch.
Areas of work
Relevant to the community
Key concepts
For a longer list of key concepts in effective altruism, you can visit the Key concepts page. You might also be interested in visiting effectivealtruism.org or looking at the EA Handbook.
See all the key concepts and tools.
Types of work in effective altruism
At its core, effective altruism is about finding the best ways to do good and putting them into practice, but this motivates people to work on a wide variety of projects, for different reasons.
We’ve organized different projects and areas of work by the answer to the following question: “How does your work help the world?” We’ve also noted some potential (non-exhaustive!) cruxes for prioritizing each kind of work.
At a high level, the types of work fall into the following categories:
There are also some topics that are relevant to the categorization of work that we’ve chosen here:
1. Global health and development
The overall topic page: Global health and development
2. Animal welfare
The overall topic page: animal welfare
3. Mitigation of global risk factors
Pages about the overall topic: Existential risk factor, Existential risk, Global catastrophic risk
Sources of risk
Risk-related topics
4. Shaping the future
5. Broad epistemics and coordination
Note: epistemics and coordination work sometimes seems similar to philosophy and building effective altruism, or takes similar forms (see below), but should generally be distinguished from that.
6. Philosophy, cause prioritization, and methods for assessing effectiveness
7. Building effective altruism
The overall topic page: Building effective altruism
As mentioned above, you can find instructions on how to tag a post with a relevant topic.