






We broke down the questions asked into three sections:

  1. Open questions
    • What meta ideas might be uniquely impactful?
    • What ideas might be uniquely unimpactful?
  2. Crucial considerations
    • Expand vs improve
    • Time vs money vs information
    • Broad vs narrow
    • What do you think of the current EA community trajectory?
  3. Specific sub areas



1. Open questions



  • Support for chapters
  • Consistency and clarity in the scope of meta orgs
  • Ideas that other orgs plan on doing in the future.




2. Crucial considerations










  1. Reinventing the wheel
  2. Overconfidence and misplaced difference
  3. Limited opportunities for engagement and involvement
  4. Abstraction in work
  5. Lack of transparency/info hazards
  6. Closed-mindedness/stagnation
  7. In-group helping/trust culture








3. Sub areas


Table 1

Category Examples of ideas

Average score



















Table 2

CategoryScore / 5Overall views More promising ideas in this categoryLess promising ideas in this category
EA exploration


Targeted EA outreach


EA content improvement


EA community member improvement


General EA outreach


Improving EA orgs


Intercommunity coordination and connection


Evaluation and prioritization


EA funding improvement







12 comments, sorted by Highlighting new comments since Today at 6:05 AM
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Thanks for sharing this Joey - really interesting!


This sentiment strikes me as incorrect, and a bit worrying. My perception is that EA could do with spreading out a bunch from its current distribution. For example, it would be great to see more policy work along the lines of HIPE for different governments (eg I know of very little few EAs thinking about EU policy) , more specialists in different types of potentially important technology like recommender systems and a greater breadth of understanding of different potentially important organisations, whether intergovernmental like the WHO and UN, or companies. I'm also excited about people starting more effective non-profits, as CE is facilitating. My perception is that what's hard for people seeking career paths is figuring out what path would best suit them, rather than an actual lack of roles which help others in expectation. It's not at all clear that expansion would make this problem worse rather than better, and it strikes me that it would depend a lot on how EA grows. For example, if we grew by attracting people from a broader range of organisations then they might bring more ideas for which people would be best suited helping where. If more people joined of an entrepreneurial mindset, perhaps it would cause new charities to spring up and so increase the number of roles available. That's not to say I think all things considered that EA should be expanding rather than improving - I'm not sure about that. But at the extreme this reasoning looks like avoiding the expansion of EA to prevent people currently outside EA from being hired to specific roles, which seems likely to harm our impact to me.  

Thanks for sharing. Would you be able to share more information on the top-ranked option "exploration". My thinking on this is limited (like in general regarding a cause X). Would you able to share concrete ideas people talked about or concrete proposed plans for such an organisation (a cause X organisation or an organisation focused on one particular underexplored cause area?)


And on a related note, will you publish the report about meta charities you describe here publish before the incubation programme application deadline (as it might be decision-relevant for some people)?

Our current plan is to publish a short description but not a full report of the top ideas we plan to recommend in the first week of Jan so possible applicants can get a sense before the deadline (Jan 15th).

Great. thank you :)

Very interesting, looking forward to seeing what else comes up from the research and the new organization(s) that will hopefully result from this! I have some questions if you are willing to clarify:

  1. Is the raised potential issue about infohazards discouraging open communication only relevant to discussions about dangers from new technologies (AI-risk, GCBRs,..)?
  2. I don't think that I understand "EAs helping each other vs people outside of their group". Is it that people in EA are focused more on helping other EAs that they know than EAs they don't, or work on projects that seem important in their close circles but not important globally?
  3. Is the polarization in "Intercommunity coordination and connection" obviously related to some other factor? Say interviewees with a focus on research vs community? (Similarly about "EA community member improvement")
  4. The people skeptical about "Evaluation and Prioritization" thought that "it was hard to do prioritization well and lots of orgs naturally do this even if it was not their stated goal". These two statements seem to be somewhat contradictory unless the first statement claims something like "our best efforts to prioritize well are not that much better (don't produce better results or aren't more cost-effective) than what orgs are usually doing in their internal prioritization using common best practice. Does this capture the sentiment you have heard?

Glad you found it interesting!

  1. It tended to come from people focused on that area but the concerns were not exclusive to technologies (or even xrisk more broadly). 
  2. To put it another way, people were concerned that “EAs tended to help their friends and others in their adjacent peer-group disproportionality to the impact it would cause.” 
  3. Regarding polarization in "Intercommunity coordination and connection," my sense is this came from different perceptions about how past projects had gone. No clear trend as to why for “community member improvement”
  4. I think the way this is reconciled is the view that “current organizations are highly capable and do prioritization research themselves when determining where they should work.” But prioritization including that type is hard to do right and others would struggle to do an equally good job.

P.s. reminder these are not my or CE’s views just describing what some interviewees thought. 

Thanks for this write up! I'm excited about CE looking into this area. I was wondering whether you were able to share information about the breakdown of which organisations  the 40 EAs you surveyed came from and/or which chapters were interviewed, or whether that data is anonymous? 

Sadly not able to share that data I can say it tended to be bigger organizations and bigger chapters. 

No worries, thanks!

Thanks! A lot of these tradeoffs are closer to a 50/50 split than I would have expected.

I'd be interested in any info you're able to share about who was actually asked -- but I'm guessing you've already shared as much info as you feel you are able to about that.

I'd also be interested in what the numerical scores are based on?

I agree I was expecting a much stronger consensus as well. Sorry to say I told the folks I interviewed the data would remain at this level of anonymity many were fine with sharing their results but some preferred it to be pretty anonymous.

Number scores are based on people ranking the option above or below average with 3 being average.