EA organizations should have a transparent scope

I mostly agree, but would add that it seems totally okay if two orgs sometimes work on the same thing! It's easy to over-index on the simple existence of an item within scope and say "oh that's covered" and move on, without actually asking "is this need really being met in the world?" Competition is good in general, and I wouldn't want to overly discourage it.

Thanks for posting this! 

Some of what you're saying reminds me of " 80k would be happy to see more projects in the careers space" and "80,000 Hours wants to see more people trying out recruiting" — and another potentially relevant post is Healthy Competition.

Less directly related: I've recently been feeling confused about what my attitude to transparency (in general) should be. I really appreciate transparency and viscerally feel its (potential) benefits, but am also (probably less viscerally) aware of its costs. One example of my confusion: I've been struggling to decide how much I should prioritize transparency-oriented projects or tasks I could be working on, even when the only cost for me is time that I could be spending on something else (i.e. when I don't have to worry about other potential risks because they're not as relevant in that case). (I wrote a bit on this here.)

100% agree - EA organisations should say EXACTLY what they are doing,  why they are doing it and how they are doing it and make active efforts to publicise this. In my limited experience EA charities themselves (with the exception perhaps of AI orgs) are pretty good at doing this especially compared with other charites. 

In general as well, I think that Orgs should do ONE thing only (wrote a blog about it a couple of years ago) with the vast majority of their time, and maybe do a few other smaller, relevant things on the side. Their scope should NOT be large. For example CE incubate and fund new effective orgs as their one thing, with side projects of a foundation program and helping support CE founders

In terms of clear scope transpency which is communicated well, below I have put my my low confidence personal opinion as to which sectors within EA are better and worse at transparency. There might be good reasons for this - its far harder for AI orgs to communicate clearly what their scope is compared to us basic global health normys ;). In saying that though, public health orgs and animal advocacy orgs often post and communicate their scope on the forum, but how often do you get one of these hugely funded AI orgs writing a short and nice post telling us what the are up to?

For EA leadership orgs though I think its easier to do better, so its clear to us all why buying a castle is a great idea and within their scope (cheap shot :p). The CEA front page doesn't even make it clear what exactly they do and their scope is, although their What is CEA page is quite good if perhaps a little broad. 

Global Health Orgs > Animal rights org >  Community building orgs / EA leadership >AI orgs
(Low confidence, keen to hear other thoughts)

I would go further than you, in that I don't agree with hedging for future flexibility at all. Better to do something clearly defined now, go hard and do it well ,then if you pivot at some stage change your scope clearly and very publicly when it becomes necessary.

Nice post, love it!

I really agree with the thesis that EA orgs should make it clear what they are and aren't doing.

But I think specifically for EA orgs that try to be public facing (e.g., an org focused on high net worth donors like Longview) there's a way that very publicly clarifying a transparent scope can cut against their branding/ how they sell themselves. These orgs need to sell themselves at some level to be as effective as possible (it's what their competition is doing), and selling yourself and being radically transparent do seem like they trade off at times (e.g., how much you prioritise certain sections of your website). 

Thankfully, we have a lovely EA forum that can probably solve this issue :)

I suspect one of if not the main targets here is CEA^[1], so I wanted to say that fwiw I think CEA's level of transparency about their scope is about right.

I decided to look for their scope on their website and it was in the first place I looked, where they say (last updated: January 2023):

• "We’re excited about supporting the effective altruism community"
• "We do not think of ourselves as having or wanting control over the EA community. We believe that a wide range of ideas and approaches are consistent with the core principles underpinning EA, and encourage others to identify and experiment with filling gaps left by our work."
• "We currently manage the EA Forum, and provide resources and support calls for all EA groups. We've also held or supported global and regional conferences in countries including the US, the UK, Singapore, Germany, and Australia."
• "Where we are not focusing...This blog post gives more information on areas that we are not planning to focus on (as of March 2021)."

I think beyond this level of transparency, CEA is probably hitting rapidly diminishing returns or taking attention away from more important topics. No matter how transparent any well-known entity is about anything, there will always be a sizeable proportion of people who don't know about it and don't look for it and I don't think CEA should feel responsible for that.

1. ^{^}

   The post is tagged "Criticism of effective altruist organizations", you focus on "meta organizations", CEA is a core meta organization, it's been brought up a couple of times in the comments etc