Our Post-EA World

A few weeks ago, I moved, and two of my friends came over to help me unpack books. While doing so, we found a collection of the EA classics: Doing Good Better, 80,000 Hours, an advance copy of What We Owe the Future that I'd accidentally stolen from a friend. Maybe The Precipice, too. My friend asked, "Do you want these in the living room, or on the shelf hidden away upstairs?" "Let's put them upstairs," I said. "I don't need the EA propaganda machine in my living room." Around the same time, I wrote about “Big EA”. Someone asked me what it meant. I was using it as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Berkeley/Oxford EA communities and the grantmaking institutions and non-profits around them (CEA, OpenPhil, Effective Ventures, etc.). But it was a fair question – the definition is not at all obvious. Where did all all this cynicism come from? 2022, of course. Remember those times, the summer of love that we’re all still slightly hungover from? In those halcyon, just-post-COVID days, Effec

A few weeks ago, I moved, and two of my friends came over to help me unpack books. While doing so, we found a collection of the EA classics: Doing Good Better, 80,000 Hours, an advance copy of What We Owe the Future that I'd accidentally stolen from a friend. Maybe The Precipice, too. My friend asked, "Do you want these in the living room, or on the shelf hidden away upstairs?" "Let's put them upstairs," I said. "I don't need the EA propaganda machine in my living room." Around the same time, I wrote about “Big EA”. Someone asked me what it meant. I was using it as a tongue-in-cheek reference