EA - Give us feedback on the new version of the Effective Altruism Handbook! by MaxDalton

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Give us feedback on the new version of the Effective Altruism Handbook!, published by MaxDalton on August 22, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Over the past 2 months, staff at the Centre for Effective Altruism have updated the introduction to effective altruism programs. We now have a unified Effective Altruism Handbook (the fourth edition), which we will use as our suggested introductory fellowship curriculum for virtual programs and EA groups. We are excited about the improvements that have been made, and think that this version will provide a better experience for people new to EA ideas and principles. But it’s still not perfect, and we’re eager to hear your input and feedback in order to help us to improve it. Here is the updated version. Major Changes The main changes we made were: To focus more on core EA concepts and thinking tools: We added reasoning on these topics, and also highlighted these tools in the introduction to each chapter, because we think that core concepts and thinking tools are the most important thing we want to leave people with as we introduce them to EA. We still do have a lot of content on specific cause areas, but it is relatively de-emphasized. To update readings with content published in the last two years Additionally, we: rearranged the sections on longtermism and X-risk; added criticism sections to each session in the ‘More to Explore’ posts; turned section 7 into an opportunity for people to reflect on specific uncertainties and concerns about EA ideas and practices; made section 8 more clearly focused on next steps (by shifting some reflection back to week 7); expanded the introduction to give more context on goals; updated the UX/UI and added the handbook to the forum. Process Max Dalton and Lizka Vaintrob did an initial review of the old curriculum, made quick changes, got feedback from group organizers and EA Virtual Program facilitators and integrated these comments. After this, we shared the updated handbook with about 15 stakeholders in the EA community (including people from all major cause areas, and critics of previous editions of the handbook). Max Dalton and Jesse Rothman integrated their comments into the updated handbook. We then posted the handbook on the forum in order to improve the UX/UI, and integrated the handbook into broader EA conversations on the Forum. We then did another set of user interviews with experienced facilitators and continued to make edits to the handbook based on their input. Our approach to cause area selection Our primary goal with this version of the handbook was to share certain core principles or tools of EA (things like “making tradeoffs”, “truth seeking”, “scope sensitivity”). These concepts are now highlighted in the curriculum. I am personally excited to share and focus on these ideas, and CEA as an organization is focused on sharing these principles and helping people to work through their implications (rather than on promoting any particular cause area). However, we also wanted to share the arguments for some of the key things that people in effective altruism are working on, and give examples of that work - we think that this is important because it’s a lot of what the community is about, and it also makes the introduction much more concrete (rather than being really philosophy-heavy, which we think would not give a good sense of what most people in effective altruism work on). When talking about specific areas, our core goal was to share the arguments for some of the main areas, highlight that there are other areas that one could work on, make clear that there is disagreement in the community about what the right split between areas is, and encourage people to make up their own mind (which is the focus of the seventh chapter). In terms of process, we emphasize in our introduct...