If that’s your goal, I think you should try harder to understand why core org EAs currently don’t agree with your suggestions, and try to address their cruxes. For this ToC, “upvotes on the EA Forum” is a useless metric—all you should care about is persuading a few people who have already thought about this all a lot. I don’t think that your post here is very well optimized for this ToC.
… I think the arguments it makes are weak (and I’ve been thinking about these arguments for years, so it would be a bit surprising if there was a big update from thinking about them more.)
If you and other core org EAs have thoroughly considered many of the issues the post raises, why isn’t there more reasoning transparency on this? Besides being a good practice in general (especially when the topic is how the EA ecosystem fundamentally operates), it would make it a lot easier for the authors and others on the forum to deliver more constructive critiques that target cruxes.
As far as I know, the cruxes of core org EAs are nowhere to be found for many of the topics this post covers.
I think Lark’s response is reasonably close to my object-level position.
My quick summary of a big part of my disagreement: a major theme of this post suggests that various powerful EAs hand over a bunch of power to people who disagree with them. The advantage of doing that is that it mitigates various echo chamber failure modes. The disadvantage of doing that is that now, people who you disagree with have a lot of your resources, and they might do stuff that you disagree with. For example, consider the proposal “OpenPhil should diversify its grantmaking by giving half its money to a randomly chosen Frenchman”. This probably reduces echo chamber problems in EA, but it also seems to me like a terrible idea.
I don’t think the post properly engages with the question “how ought various powerful people weigh the pros and cons of transferring their power to people they disagree with”. I think this question is very important, and I think about it a fair bit, but I think that this post is a pretty shallow discussion of it that doesn’t contribute much novel insight.
I encourage people to write posts on the topic of “how ought various powerful people weigh the pros and cons of transferring their power to people they disagree with”; perhaps such posts could look at historical examples, or mechanisms via which powerful people can get the echo-chamber-reduction effects without the random-people-now-use-your-resources-to-do-their-random-goals effect.
If you and other core org EAs have thoroughly considered many of the issues the post raises, why isn’t there more reasoning transparency on this? Besides being a good practice in general (especially when the topic is how the EA ecosystem fundamentally operates), it would make it a lot easier for the authors and others on the forum to deliver more constructive critiques that target cruxes.
As far as I know, the cruxes of core org EAs are nowhere to be found for many of the topics this post covers.
I think Lark’s response is reasonably close to my object-level position.
My quick summary of a big part of my disagreement: a major theme of this post suggests that various powerful EAs hand over a bunch of power to people who disagree with them. The advantage of doing that is that it mitigates various echo chamber failure modes. The disadvantage of doing that is that now, people who you disagree with have a lot of your resources, and they might do stuff that you disagree with. For example, consider the proposal “OpenPhil should diversify its grantmaking by giving half its money to a randomly chosen Frenchman”. This probably reduces echo chamber problems in EA, but it also seems to me like a terrible idea.
I don’t think the post properly engages with the question “how ought various powerful people weigh the pros and cons of transferring their power to people they disagree with”. I think this question is very important, and I think about it a fair bit, but I think that this post is a pretty shallow discussion of it that doesn’t contribute much novel insight.
I encourage people to write posts on the topic of “how ought various powerful people weigh the pros and cons of transferring their power to people they disagree with”; perhaps such posts could look at historical examples, or mechanisms via which powerful people can get the echo-chamber-reduction effects without the random-people-now-use-your-resources-to-do-their-random-goals effect.