EA Still Needs an Updated and Representative Introductory Guidebook

I don't have issues with the EA Handbook's emphasis on the far future, but I do think Doing Good Better is much more beautifully written and emotionally compelling, so I'd probably still recommend it over the EA Handbook.

Here are some comments I have on individual articles in the EA Handbook:

• Introduction to Effective Altruism:
• Places too much emphasis on "tested solutions," which seems to advocate against high risk high reward interventions.
• Overall, covers a lot of topics pretty decently.
• Efficient Charity – Do Unto Others:
• Written in 2010 (although the EA Handbook says 2013), so it has out-of-date cost-effectiveness figures. There is a note at the top which says that and recommends looking at GiveWell, but I think it'd be better to just directly edit the article, so that people who don't look up GiveWell's figures don't walk away with the impression that $5,000 to save a life is ineffective, or that we can save a life from fatal tuberculosis with $100 if we can't. In addition, while the article claims that it costs $5,000 to save a life from diarrheal disease, I haven't seen any figures from GiveWell which could provided an updated view.
• SHIC uses the following lines in their excerpt of "Efficient Charity": "According to the World Bank’s analysis, immunising children for dengue fever saves one child’s life for $25,000, but we know that by donating to malaria prevention we could save about five lives for the same cost. If you want to save children, donating bed nets instead of immunising against dengue fever is the objectively right answer, the same way buying a nice car instead of a broken-down one for the same price is the right answer."
• I really like this article though and I think it does well in terms of emotional impact. It might be good to put this before Introduction to Effective Altruism to get readers hooked.
• Prospecting for Gold:
• Feels kind of long-winded, and at some points the gold metaphor is a slog to read through rather than an actually helpful metaphor. I feel like it's a lot better for watching as a presentation than reading. We might be able to rewrite this to make it more succinct.
• Cites data from DCP2, which has some pretty unreliable figures, and there's a DCP3 now which we can use instead. I don't think this point is too important though.
• This does cover some important concepts like long-tailed distributions, marginal utility, and comparative advantage.

I'm not going to read/review the rest of the EA Handbook right now, but I think overall, lightly edited transcripts of talks don't make for great reading material, and we'd want to edit them a lot more to be more succinct and easier to read.

For global poverty, there’ll be a great new option released later this year: an updated 10th anniversary edition of The Life You Can Save coming out in Q4. There will be updated numbers and examples, two new forewords, and increased emphasis on specific calls to action meant for a broad audience (e.g. initially asking people to make a recurring donation vs. a substantial pledge).

The price is also right, as we’ll be able to distribute free copies of the e-book (which will have links so people can take action more easily) and audiobook. The audiobook will have chapters read by celebrity narrators; this isn’t the time or place to list people involved in the project, but they’ll be a great credibility boost.

A lot of EA origin stories start with the first version of TLYCS. We’re about to have a chance to distribute a new and improved version to a much wider audience, and we hope the EA community will help spread it far and wide.

(I work for TLYCS the nonprofit, which is producing and promoting TLYCS the book.)

I'm the current Content Specialist for CEA (the same position held by Max Dalton when he put together the second version of the EA Handbook).

We're aware that the Handbook isn't an ideal resource and have been thinking for a while about how we might want to update it. In the process, we've consulted a few stakeholders with expertise in different cause areas. So far, we haven't officially released any edits, but we might do so in the future; we're still uncertain about timelines and how we want to prioritize this project.

In the meantime, it would be great to have an article to send along with Doing Good Better - or to send afterwards - with a number of corrections, updates, caveats, and pointers to further reading. Ideally, this would be authored by Will himself, but I can see someone else doing a good enough job at it, or someone ghost writing for Will.

I agree Evan. I still give out many Doing Good Betters (hoping people read past the poverty sections) and only send people the Handbook if they've engaged with EA ideas for a while. The intro book would ideally be written with someone with a high status in the EA community and the world in general, as even an excellent intro book may not supplant MacAskill and Singer's intro books. I'm wondering if the best intro book would be a new edition of Doing Good Better with less on global poverty to allow for more on other cause areas. That would give the new book status and mean the outdated edition will automatically stop being the default intro book (Of course that would require a lot of Will's time, even if a coauthor was brought in).

In addition, what do you think should be updated in Doing Good Better?

Your link referring to bdixon and climate change leads to Joey's post "Problems with EA representativeness and how to solve it". Can you share the post that discusses how Doing Good Better appears to underrate the degree of warming of climate change?