Background First, I want to say that I really like seeing criticism that’s well organized and presented like this. It’s often not fun to be criticized, but the much scarier thing is for no one to care in the first place.
This post was clearly a great deal of work, and I’m happy to see so many points organized and cited.
I obviously feel pretty bad about this situation where, several people all felt like they had to do this in secret in order to feel safe. I think tensions around these issues feel much more heated than I’d like them to. Most of the specific points and proposals seem like things that in a slightly different world, all sides could feel much more chill discussing.
I’m personally in a weird position, where I don’t feel like one of the main EAs who make decisions (outside of maybe RP), but I’ve been around for a while and know some of them. I did some grantmaking, and now am working on an org that tries to help figure out how to improve community epistemics (QURI).
Some Quick Impressions I think one big division I see in discussions like this, is that between:
What’s in the best interest of EA leadership/funding, conditional on them not dramatically changing their beliefs about key things (this might be very unlikely).
What’s an ~irreconcilable different opinion (with a reasonable time of debate/investigation, say, a few days of solid reading).
Bucket 1 is more about convincing and informing each other. The way to make progress there is by deeply understanding those with power, and explaining how it helps their goals.
Bucket 2 is more about relative power. No two people are perfectly aligned, even after years of deliberation. Frustratingly, the main ways to make progress here are to either move it from some players to others, or doing things like just making power moves (taking actions that help your interests, in comparison to other stakeholders).
Right now, in EA, the vast majority of funding (and thus control) ultimately comes from one source. This is a really uncomfortable position, in many ways.
However, other members of the community clearly have some power. They could do some nice things like write friendly posts, or some not so nice things (think of strikes) like leaking information or complaining/ranting to antagonistic journalists.
I imagine that eventually we could find better ways to do group bargaining, like some sort of voting system (similar to what you recommend).
Back to this post, I think that some of the way this post is written reminds me of “lists of demands” that I’m used to seeing in fairly antagonistic negotiations, in the style of Bucket 2.
My guess is that this wasn’t your intention. Given that it’s so long (and must have involved a lot of coordination to write), I could definitely sympathize with “let’s just get it out there” instead of making sure it’s style is optimized for Bucket 1 (if that was your intention). That said, If I were a grantmaker now, I could easily see myself putting this in my “some PR fire to deal with” bucket rather than “some useful information for me to eventually spend time with”.
Do you think that group bargaining/voting in EA would be a good thing for funding/prioritization?
I personally like the current approach that has individual EAs and orgs make their own decisions on what is the best thing to do in the world.
For example, I would be unlikely to fund an organization that the majority of EAs in a vote believed should be funded, but I personally believed to be net harmful. Although if this situation were to occur, I would try to have some conversations about where the wild disagreement was stemming from.
I think there’s probably a bunch of different ways to incorporate voting. Many would be bad, some good.
Some types of things I could see being interesting:
Many EAs vote on “Community delegates” that have certain privileges around EA community decisions.
There could be certain funding groups that incorporate voting, roughly in proportion to the amounts donated. This would probably need some inside group to clear funding targets (making sure they don’t have any confidential baggage/risks) before getting proposed.
EAs vote directly on new potential EA Forum features / changes.
We focus more on community polling, and EA leaders pay attention to these. This is very soft, but could still be useful.
EAs vote on questions for EA leaders to answer, in yearly/regular events.
I’d be interested to see some of those tried for sure!
I imagine you’d also likely agree that these proposals tradeoff against everything else that the EA orgs could be doing, and it’s not super clear any are the best option to pursue relative to other goals right now.
I imagine you’d also likely agree that these proposals tradeoff against everything else that the EA orgs could be doing, and it’s not super clear any are the best option to pursue relative to other goals right now.
Of course. Very few proposals I come up with are a good idea for myself, let alone others, to really pursue.
Background
First, I want to say that I really like seeing criticism that’s well organized and presented like this. It’s often not fun to be criticized, but the much scarier thing is for no one to care in the first place.
This post was clearly a great deal of work, and I’m happy to see so many points organized and cited.
I obviously feel pretty bad about this situation where, several people all felt like they had to do this in secret in order to feel safe. I think tensions around these issues feel much more heated than I’d like them to. Most of the specific points and proposals seem like things that in a slightly different world, all sides could feel much more chill discussing.
I’m personally in a weird position, where I don’t feel like one of the main EAs who make decisions (outside of maybe RP), but I’ve been around for a while and know some of them. I did some grantmaking, and now am working on an org that tries to help figure out how to improve community epistemics (QURI).
Some Quick Impressions
I think one big division I see in discussions like this, is that between:
What’s in the best interest of EA leadership/funding, conditional on them not dramatically changing their beliefs about key things (this might be very unlikely).
What’s an ~irreconcilable different opinion (with a reasonable time of debate/investigation, say, a few days of solid reading).
Bucket 1 is more about convincing and informing each other. The way to make progress there is by deeply understanding those with power, and explaining how it helps their goals.
Bucket 2 is more about relative power. No two people are perfectly aligned, even after years of deliberation. Frustratingly, the main ways to make progress here are to either move it from some players to others, or doing things like just making power moves (taking actions that help your interests, in comparison to other stakeholders).
Right now, in EA, the vast majority of funding (and thus control) ultimately comes from one source. This is a really uncomfortable position, in many ways.
However, other members of the community clearly have some power. They could do some nice things like write friendly posts, or some not so nice things (think of strikes) like leaking information or complaining/ranting to antagonistic journalists.
I imagine that eventually we could find better ways to do group bargaining, like some sort of voting system (similar to what you recommend).
Back to this post, I think that some of the way this post is written reminds me of “lists of demands” that I’m used to seeing in fairly antagonistic negotiations, in the style of Bucket 2.
My guess is that this wasn’t your intention. Given that it’s so long (and must have involved a lot of coordination to write), I could definitely sympathize with “let’s just get it out there” instead of making sure it’s style is optimized for Bucket 1 (if that was your intention). That said, If I were a grantmaker now, I could easily see myself putting this in my “some PR fire to deal with” bucket rather than “some useful information for me to eventually spend time with”.
Do you think that group bargaining/voting in EA would be a good thing for funding/prioritization?
I personally like the current approach that has individual EAs and orgs make their own decisions on what is the best thing to do in the world.
For example, I would be unlikely to fund an organization that the majority of EAs in a vote believed should be funded, but I personally believed to be net harmful. Although if this situation were to occur, I would try to have some conversations about where the wild disagreement was stemming from.
I think there’s probably a bunch of different ways to incorporate voting. Many would be bad, some good.
Some types of things I could see being interesting:
Many EAs vote on “Community delegates” that have certain privileges around EA community decisions.
There could be certain funding groups that incorporate voting, roughly in proportion to the amounts donated. This would probably need some inside group to clear funding targets (making sure they don’t have any confidential baggage/risks) before getting proposed.
EAs vote directly on new potential EA Forum features / changes.
We focus more on community polling, and EA leaders pay attention to these. This is very soft, but could still be useful.
EAs vote on questions for EA leaders to answer, in yearly/regular events.
I’d be interested to see some of those tried for sure!
I imagine you’d also likely agree that these proposals tradeoff against everything else that the EA orgs could be doing, and it’s not super clear any are the best option to pursue relative to other goals right now.
Of course. Very few proposals I come up with are a good idea for myself, let alone others, to really pursue.