[Epistemic Status: low, I think this is probably wrong, but I would like to debug it publicly]
If I have a criticism of EA along Institutional Decision Making lines, it is this:
For a movement that wants to change how decisions get made, we should make those changes in our own organisations first.
Examples of good progress: - prizes—EA orgs have offered prizes for innovation - voting systems—it’s good that the forum is run on upvotes and that often I think EA uses the right tool for the job in terms of voting
Things I would like to see more of: - an organisation listening to prediction markets/polls. If we believe nations should listen to forecasting can we make clearer which markets our orgs are looking and and listening to? - an organisation run by prediction markets. The above but taking it further - removing siloes in EA. If you have confidence to email random people it’s relatively easy to get stuff done, but can we lower the friction to allow good ideas to spread further? - etc
It’s fine if we think these things will never work, but it seems weird to me that we think improvements would work elsewhere but that we don’t want them in our orgs. That’s like being NIMBY about our own suggested improvements.
Counterarguments - these aren’t solutions people are actually arguing for. Yeah this is an okay point. But I think the seeds of them exist.
- prediction markets work in big orgs not small ones. Maybe, but isn’t it worth running one small inefficient organisation to try and learn the failure modes before we suggest this for nation states
EA criticism
[Epistemic Status: low, I think this is probably wrong, but I would like to debug it publicly]
If I have a criticism of EA along Institutional Decision Making lines, it is this:
For a movement that wants to change how decisions get made, we should make those changes in our own organisations first.
Examples of good progress:
- prizes—EA orgs have offered prizes for innovation
- voting systems—it’s good that the forum is run on upvotes and that often I think EA uses the right tool for the job in terms of voting
Things I would like to see more of:
- an organisation listening to prediction markets/polls. If we believe nations should listen to forecasting can we make clearer which markets our orgs are looking and and listening to?
- an organisation run by prediction markets. The above but taking it further
- removing siloes in EA. If you have confidence to email random people it’s relatively easy to get stuff done, but can we lower the friction to allow good ideas to spread further?
- etc
It’s fine if we think these things will never work, but it seems weird to me that we think improvements would work elsewhere but that we don’t want them in our orgs. That’s like being NIMBY about our own suggested improvements.
Counterarguments
- these aren’t solutions people are actually arguing for. Yeah this is an okay point. But I think the seeds of them exist.
- prediction markets work in big orgs not small ones. Maybe, but isn’t it worth running one small inefficient organisation to try and learn the failure modes before we suggest this for nation states