Jonas Vollmer

Writing the preliminary content for an encyclopedia of effective altruism.

Pablo Stafforini applied for a grant of $17,000 over six months to write the preliminary content for an encyclopedia of effective altruism.

I advised in favor of this grant because I believe it is important for the EA community to organize its knowledge and make it easily accessible to the community. If successful, this resource would make it significantly easier for community members to:

familiarize themselves with EA knowledge,

introduce newcomers to EA ideas (see also some of the arguments outlined in The Value of Wikipedia Contributions in Social Sciences), and

easily retrieve publications on a particular topic (currently spread out across many journals, blogs, research agendas, and websites).

In Stafforini’s own words: “It is widely accepted that having existing research in a particular field organized systematically and succinctly is of high value (…).”

Several previous EA encyclopedia projects have not taken off or stopped being maintained for various reasons. In the application, Stafforini did not address the implementation and long-term maintenance of the project, which led to initial skepticism among fund managers. I tried to address these potential issues by sending follow-up questions and suggestions to Stafforini. I also suggested he reach out to the Centre for Effective Altruism so his project can serve to update or replace EA Concepts. The responses reduced my skepticism substantially: I believe Pablo will deliver high-quality written content and integrate it appropriately with existing resources. I assign a credence of 35% that this project will be maintained well in the longer term, which seems high enough for this to be worth trying.

Stafforini’s track record suggests he is well-suited for this project: He was one of the main authors and the project manager of EA Concepts (in my view the most successful EA encyclopedia so far), one of the main editors of EA-related Wikipedia articles, and a research assistant for Will MacAskill’s book Doing Good Better. Based on in-person interactions, I believe Stafforini to be particularly familiar with the academic and EA-adjacent literature on many EA topics and unusually truth-seeking and unlikely to present one-sided perspectives on topics he feels strongly about. Also, this appears to be a relatively inexpensive grant.