Giving Compass' Take:

• This EA Forum post discusses the ways that the effective altruism movement may be falling short.

• What do the conclusions of this piece mean for a typical nonprofit organization? Who must fix the shortcomings outlined in this piece?

• To learn more about effective altruism and how it could shape your giving, click here.

It is possible that effective altruism misses out on pursuing higher impact courses of action, backing more impactful organizations, and/or recommending better career paths to individuals. Two key contributing factors may be: (1) paying insufficient attention to the relative amount of influence EA has relative to other global actors and how to increase relative influence and (2) focusing on activities that are backed by academic research instead of more broadly focusing on activities that reasoning/EV estimates suggest would be higher impact than academic research–backed activities. A broader issue is that EA lacks a system to suggest, discuss, and evaluate improvements to EA community strategy and recommendations issued to the community.

Is the EA movement on track to significantly change the world, or is it merely a very small group of actors making a very limited difference with an unclear future trajectory? If the answer is something along the lines of the latter, we should consider whether or not this is the most optimal way to proceed, give the resources at the movement's disposal.

EA strategy may be an extremely important area to focus on because changes in strategy can have an enormous impact on the impact of EA over the next few years and moving forward. This post is my first attempt to get some of my preliminary thoughts on potential EA strategy shifts on paper, and I hope it encourages others to share their thoughts on potential optimizations or oversights of the movement as well.

Read the full article about the effective altruism movement at the EA Forum