EA - Two things that I think could make the community better by Kaleem

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Two things that I think could make the community better, published by Kaleem on April 26, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.(alternate title: CEA shouldn’t be the C of EA).A very short summary:Issue 1: CEA’s name is bad and leads to lots of confusion and frustrationSuggestion: CEA should change its nameIssue2 :‘The ‘community health team’ is part of CEA, which is something which might reduce the community’s trust in the community health teamSuggestion: ‘The community health team’ should not be part of CEAA reasonable Summary:The name “The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA)” causes some people in the community to misunderstand what CEA is/does, and for them to misattribute responsibility to CEA that CEA itself doesn’t think belongs to it.In addition, the community health team, which tries to serve the whole community, is part of CEA. This may further the confusion about CEA’s role in the movement, and might be hampering the community health team’s effectiveness and trustworthiness.By renaming/rebranding, CEA can resolve and prevent many ongoing communications and PR issues within the movement.And by spinning-off into an independent organization, the community health team can improve on having an impartial and inscrutable reputation and record in the community.Epistemic status: Of my observations - quite sure,. Of my two main suggestions, also quite sure. I find it difficult to write things to the point where I feel comfortable posting them on the forum, but I also know It’d probably be better for me to post more ok-ish posts than to sit on a pile of never-read drafts which might have some useful ideas in them. So yeah - I know this isn’t greatOn Issue 1: Changing CEA’s name(I was going to post this before CEA posted their post in which they claim that they’re open to changing their name. I think it's still worth posting, hopefully to be a place where the topic can be more thoroughly argued in the comments).One of the things that I like about the EA community is that it is decentralized, meaning there is no single person or entity who sets the direction of, or represents, the community (It’s like Sunni Islam in that way, rather than being like the Catholic Church, which is centrally controlled by the Vatican and the Pope). I think other people in the community like it too - it helps the community house a wide variety of (often competing) views, and for people to form organizations with different strategies or goals based on differently-weighed cause-prioritization without facing as much institutional resistance than they would if we were all playing to the tune of one organization and their plan. Of course, cases have also been made for more centralization, in certain ways.The EA community has grown significantly over the past couple of years. Whereas ~10 years ago it might have been known by nearly everyone in the EA community what each of the few organizations were working on, today there is a much larger number of organizations/projects and many more members in the community, which means that it is more likely that there are members of the EA community who don’t know what some organizations, such as CEA, actually do. This is likely to be even more true of people who are new to the community and are trying to figure out what the ecosystem looks like and remembering what all the weird initialized org names are.This usually wouldn't be an issue - if one were to list all the organizations associated with EA, you wouldn’t/shouldn't expect anyone to know what each and every one of them does (at least not in detail - but you might know all their cause areas). However, when someone looks through that list, looking for one organization which might be the authority in the movement, “The Centre For Effective Altruism” has a sense of authority and officiali...