The EA Concepts project is no longer being updated; we've redirected most articles to their respective entries on the EA Forum Wiki, a newer collection of information on effective altruism.
We've kept EA Concepts open for a few reasons:
- To ensure that others' links to the project don't break
- To display the organizing structure for concepts, which some people find helpful
- To maintain a few pages that aren't a good fit for the wiki
- To preserve the memory of the project
There are countless actions we could take to try to improve the world. Identifying the most effective actions is difficult.
The effective altruism community conducts research aimed at addressing this problem, drawing on existing disciplines like economics, epistemology, ethics, and decision theory.
The EA Concepts project was an attempt to organize the most relevant ideas in a rough conceptual map of the effective altruism research space.
At the highest level, we divided the research space into the following categories:
- Relevant features of the world, which includes inquiries of how the world is and how our actions can impact it.
- Ethical decision-making, which provides tools for translating facts about the world into decisions that advance our values.
- Assorted recommendations, which catalogs applications of the above decision-making process in various contexts.