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Mistakes We've Made – Centre for Effective Altruism
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3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: Centre for Effective Altruism
This page from the Centre for Effective Altruism documents the organization's self-reported mistakes, relevant as a model of transparency norms that some AI safety organizations may seek to emulate or critique.
Metadata
Importance: 30/100organizational reportreference
Summary
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) publicly documents significant mistakes and missteps the organization has made, offering transparency about errors in strategy, communication, and operations. This page serves as an accountability resource demonstrating a culture of honest self-assessment within the EA community.
Key Points
- •CEA publicly lists organizational mistakes as part of a commitment to transparency and accountability.
- •Covers errors in communication, strategy, and community-building decisions.
- •Models a norm of intellectual honesty and openness to criticism within the EA ecosystem.
- •Useful reference for understanding how major EA organizations handle institutional learning and error correction.
Cited by 2 pages
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| EA Epistemic Failures in the FTX Era | -- | 84.0 |
| Centre for Effective Altruism | Organization | 78.0 |
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About CEA
# Mistakes we’ve made
## Why we share our mistakes
As CEA has grown and changed as an organization, we recognize that our work has sometimes fallen short of the standards we have for ourselves. We believe we have made significant strides toward our current goals of professionalism, collaboration, and excellent implementation of our projects. But we also want to give context on some of CEA’s mistakes, both resolved and unresolved.
- To acknowledge ways our mistakes have affected others
- To share information about problems you may have observed with our work
- To help you assess whether you think our corrective measures are adequate
When you evaluate us as an organization, we recommend using this page, but also looking directly at what we've produced, rather than just taking our word for things.
This is not an exhaustive list of every problem with CEA’s work. In particular:
- We may be missing mistakes that were made in CEA’s early years (for which current staff were not present).
- It mostly covers mistakes we made that affected outside stakeholders (EA community members, group organizers, donors, etc.) rather than our own staff.
- We don’t list all the ways our projects were inefficient or suboptimal.
- The sections on Giving What We Can and EA Funds only cover the 2016-2020 period when they were run as part of CEA rather than as a separate organization.
Please contact us if you know of other items that should be listed here, or other ways we could improve.
Last updated: January 2024
## Underlying problems
These are problems we believe contributed to many of our mistakes.
### **Running too many projects (2016 - 2020)**
Since 2016, CEA has had a large number of projects for its size. For example, at the beginning of 2019, CEA had 20 staff and many projects that took significant staff time (EA Global conferences, EAGx conferences, the EA Forum, EA Funds, EA Grants, support for EA groups, Community Building Grants, community health support, Giving What We Can, and the EA Leaders Forum). We did not always identify which projects were not performing well and discontinue them. We think we should have taken on fewer new projects, set clearer expectations for them, and ended unsuccessful projects earlier.
Running this wide array of projects has sometimes resulted in a lack of organizational focus, poor execution, and a lack of follow-through. It also meant that we were staking a claim on projects that might otherwise have been taken on by other individuals or groups that could have done a better job than we were doing (for example, by funding good projects that we were slow to fund).
Some of the projects CEA launched during this period were discontinued, but detailed public evaluations of them were not always conducted due to limited staff capacity. While we think that this was the right tradeoff given our staff capacity, it’s not ideal, and it would have been good if we’d had more staff capacity for this.
**Current statu
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