Giving Compass' Take:

• On the Effective Altruism forum, two EA experts share their experience running groups in the hopes that others who believe in the practice will follow suit.

• Do enough people have a grasp of what EA is and how it works? For those who believe it can help drive better philanthropic efforts, spreading the gospel is important.

Read all about comparative advantage in the EA talent market here.


In our experience leading Harvard and Oxford Effective Atruism groups, we've made a lot of failures and therefore have a fair number of tips we would give to our past selves.

Most of these heuristics come from the accumulation of a lot of anecdotal evidence, rather than systematic data-driven analysis. With these caveats in mind, here are the heuristics:

Focus on your understanding of EA. There is no substitute for having detailed models and broad knowledge of everything relevant to EA. People will base their understanding of effective altruism from you so make sure that you are as well versed in the literature as possible and that you can “cite your sources”.

Default to 1:1's. Proactively reach out to members in your community and offer to grab a coffee with them or go for a walk. 1:1's also give you a good yardstick to evaluate how valuable longer projects have to be to be worth executing: e.g. a 7-hour project would have to be at least as valuable as 7 1:1's, other things equal.

Don't teach, signpost. Avoid the temptation to teach EA to people. There’s a lot of great online content, and you won’t be able to explain the same ideas as well or in as much nuance as longform written content, well-prepared talks or podcast episodes. Instead of viewing yourself as a teacher of EA, think of yourself as a signpost. Be able to point people to interesting and relevant material on all areas of EA, and remove friction for people learning more by proactively recommending them content. For example, after a 1:1 meeting, message over 3 links that are relevant to their current bottleneck/area of interest.

Read the full article about how to spread the word about Effective Altruism by Aleš Flídr and James Aung at Effective Altruism Forum.