Each one of us only has a single perspective and it’s human nature to assume other people have similar perspectives. EA is a bubble and there are certainly bubbles within the bubble, e.g. I understand Bay Area is very AI focused while London is more plural.

Articles like this that attempt to replace one person’s perspective with hard data are really useful. Thank you.

At EA for Christians, we often interact with people who are altruistic and focused on impact but do not want to associate with EA because of its perceived anti-religion ethos.

On the flip side, since becoming involved with EA for Christians, a number of people have told me they are Christian but keep it quiet for fear it will damage their career prospects.

We should all try to maximise our impact and there’s a good argument for specialisation.

However, I’m concerned by a few things:

• Its not obvious to me that spending more money on yourself will make you better at your job
• There’s a danger of arrogance clouding our judgment, e.g. I don’t think 99% of people in EA should be flying business class
• Donating has value for many people due to the “skin in the game” effect

I appreciate this comment

Highly engaged EAs were much more likely to select research (25.0% vs 15.1%) and much less likely to select earning to give (5.7% vs 15.7%)

are you sure this isn’t just a function of the definition of highly engaged?

Yes! A rather important typo! I’ve now fixed

The Parable of the Good Samaritan seems to lean towards impartiality. Although the injured man was laying in front of the Samaritan (geographic proximity), the Samaritan was considered a foreigner / enemy (no proximity of relationship).

Did the EV US Board consider running an open recruitment process and inviting applications from people outside of their immediate circle? If so, why did it decide against?

Thanks, Ben. This is a really thoughtful post.

I wondered if you had any update on the blurring between EA and longtermism. I‘ve seen a lot of criticism of EA that is really just low quality criticism of longtermism because the conclusions can be weird.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear. My claim was not “Every organisation has a COO); it was “If an organisation has a COO, the department they manage is typically front-office rather than back-office and often the largest department”.

For Apple, they do indeed manage front-office operations:  “Jeff Williams is Apple’s chief operating officer reporting to CEO Tim Cook. He oversees Apple’s entire worldwide operations, as well as customer service and support. He leads Apple’s renowned design team and the software and hardware engineering for Apple Watch. Jeff also drives the company’s health initiatives, pioneering new technologies and advancing medical research to empower people to better understand and manage their health and fitness.”

For Amazon, I couldn’t find a COO of the entire company though it looks like they exist for the business units.