Some critics worry that democracy might impede nimble decision-making or divert energy from high-impact goals. Yet EA Norwayâs record â attracting steady funding and successfully supporting members with their careers and donations â suggests otherwise.
Iâm somewhat confused about what led you to this conclusion. I was the co-director of EA Germany for two years, an organization that is similarly structured. When I compare it to the memberless nonprofits where Iâm a board member, the overhead for organizing a general assembly has been greater, yet it hasnât resulted in significant decision-making input from the members.
Having fee-paying members suits an organization that benefits its members. At EA Germany, the target group for the interventions wasnât the members, but rather people in earlier stages of the talent pipeline. If I want to contribute to talent pipeline development, I would prefer to donate to the charity I consider most cost-effective. It is unlikely that this would be the national EA group, given the numerous players in this space. Therefore, I would personally hesitate to join a national group that requires fees, unless tax reasons or special insider knowledge lead me to believe this is the best use of my donations.
Overall, I worry that national membership groups in EA lead people to make decisions that are not solely motivated by EA principles. My theory is that the main activities currently undertaken by national EA organizations could be carried out more cost-effectively by fewer players with a broader geographic reach. I fear that membership organizations are not the best structures to critically evaluate their existence and shut down if they believe membersâ time and money could be better spent elsewhere.
First and foremost, I think the thoughts expressed here make sense and this comment is more just expressing a different perspective, not necessarily disagreeing.
I wanted to bring up an existing framework for thinking about this from Raghuram Rajanâs âThe Third Pillar,â which provides economic arguments for why local communities matter even when theyâre less âefficientâ than centralized alternatives.
The core economic benefits of local community structures include:
Information advantages: Local groups understand context that centralized organizations miss
Adaptation capacity: They can respond quickly to local opportunities and constraints
Social capital generation: They create trust networks that enable coordination
Motivation infrastructure: They provide ongoing support that sustains long-term engagement
So when you bring up the question of efficiency and adherence to optimal reflective practices I start thinking about it from a more systemic perspective.
Hereâs a question that comes to mind: if local EA communities make people 3x more motivated to pursue high-impact careers, or make it much easier for newcomers to engage with EA ideas, then even if these local groups are only operating at 75% efficiency compared to some theoretical global optimum, you still get significant net benefit.
I think this becomes a governance design problem rather than a simple efficiency question. The real challenge is building local communities that capture these motivational benefits while maintaining mechanisms for critical self-evaluation. (Which I think happens through impact evaluations and similar at least in EA Sweden.)
I disagree with the pure globalization solution here. From a broader macroeconomic perspective, weâve seen repeatedly that dismantling local institutions in favor of âmore efficientâ centralized alternatives often destroys valuable social infrastructure thatâs hard to rebuild. The national EA model might be preserving something important that pure optimization would eliminate.
Hereâs a question that comes to mind: if local EA communities make people 3x more motivated to pursue high-impact careers, or make it much easier for newcomers to engage with EA ideas, then even if these local groups are only operating at 75% efficiency compared to some theoretical global optimum, you still get significant net benefit.
I am sympathetic to this argument vibes wise and I thought this was an elegant numerate utilitarian case for it. Part of my motivation is that I think it would be good if a lot of EA-ish values were a lot more mainstream. Like, I would even say that you probably get non-linear returns to scale in some important ways. You kind of need a critical mass of people to do certain things.
It feels like, necessarily, these organizations would also be about providing value to the members as well. That is a good thing.
I think there is something like a âbut what if we get watered down too muchâ concern latent here. I can kind of see how this would happen, but I am also not that worried about it. The tent is already pretty big in some ways. Stuff like numerate utilitarianism, empiricism, broad moral circles, thoughtfulness, tough trade-offs doesnât seem in danger of going away soon. Probably EA growing would spread these ideas rather than shrink them.
Also, I just think that societies/âpeople all over the world could significantly benefit from stronger third pillars and that the ideal versions of these sorts of community spaces would tend to share a lot of things in common with EA.
Picture it. The year is 2035 (9 years after the RSI near-miss event triggered the first Great Revolt). You ride your bitchinâ electric scooter to the EA-adjacent community center where you and your friends co-work on a local voter awareness campaign, startup idea, or just a fun painting or whatever. An intentional community.
That sounds like a step towards the glorious transhumanist future to me, but maybe the margins on that are bad in practice and the community centers of my day dreams will remain merely EA-adjacent. Perhaps, I just need to move to a town with cooler libraries. I am really not sure what the Dao here is or where the official EA brand really fits into any of this.
Picture it. The year is 2035 (9 years after the RSI near-miss event triggered the first Great Revolt). You ride your bitchinâ electric scooter to the EA-adjacent community center where you and your friends co-work on a local voter awareness campaign, startup idea, or just a fun painting or whatever. An intentional community.
We run something similar in Munich, where we have a coworking space that also hosts EA-adjacent events (including crafting events), located in the middle of the city, allowing people to bike there. So, very sympathetic to the idea of having local groups doing this.
Picture it. The year is 2035 (9 years after the RSI near-miss event triggered the first Great Revolt). You ride your bitchinâ electric scooter to the EA-adjacent community center where you and your friends co-work on a local voter awareness campaign, startup idea, or just a fun painting or whatever. An intentional community.
One could think of religious congregations as a sort of rough analogue here. At least in theory, they have both member-service and broader-benefit objectives (of course, your opinion on the extent to which this is true may depend on the congregation and religion in question). While something that near-exclusively benefits the broader community may get external funding (e.g., the church soup kitchen), at least in the US everything else is probably being paid for by member/âattendee donations.
And in a sense, the self-funding mechanism provides something of a check on concerns that a membership-based democratic organization will weight its membersâ welfare too much. If self-funding is predominant, then the members have implicitly decided that the extent to which they value the personal benefits of the organization plus their estimate of the organizationâs broader altruist achievements justifies the expenses.
In contrast, I would be hesitant to draw too many conclusions from EA Norwayâs ability to attract non-member/âsupporter funding. As a practical matter, âEA org in a small countryâ may be a pseudo-monopoly in the sense that having multiple organizations in the same ecological niche may not be healthy or sustainable. External funder decisions could merely reflect the reality that the niche is occupied adequately enough, rather than a belief that the EA Norway approach would outcompete alternative approaches. Thatâs relevant insofar as other meta functions may have a larger organizational carrying capacity than âEA org in a small countryâ does.
I agree with the benefits of local community structures. However, I donât believe that national EA groups can offer as much as informal local groups. I help manage both formal and informal networks of EA (adjacent) individuals in Munich, and there, I see these points much more clearly. Running a coworking space, hosting in-person events, convening private meetings, and having one-on-ones seem like activities that would fit your list.
Yeah for sure, I think the devil might be in the details here around how things are run and what the purpose of the national organisation is. Since Sweden and Norway have 8x less of a population than germany I think the effect of a ânation-wide groupâ might be different?
In my experience, Iâve found that EA Sweden focuses on and provides a lot of the things that you listed so I would be very curious to hear what the difference between a local and national organisation would be? Is there a difference in the dynamics of them being motivated to sustain themselves because of the scale?
You probably have a lot more experience than me in this so it would be very interesting to hear!
If Iâm reading Patrickâs comment correctly, there are two different ideas going on:
The democratic approach requires greater overhead (e.g., âthe overhead for organizing a general assemblyâ) without producing better results to justify the extra overhead
Fewer /â geographically broader orgs would have greater efficiency for ~the usual reasons we might think larger orgs might do better than smaller ones
These effects should be, in theory, somewhat separateâone could envision a nationally focused org without membership/âdemocracy, or a big transnational group with it. Do you think your list of advantages is more about localness or more about being democratic?
Thereâs something about a prior on having democratic decision making as part of this because it allows for better community engagement usually? Representation often leads to feelings of inclusion and whilst Iâve only dabbled in the sociology here it seems like the option of saying no is quite important for members to feel heard?
My guess would be that the main pros of having democratic deliberation doesnât come from when the going is normal but rather as a resillience mechanism? Democracies tend to react late to major changes and not change path often but when they do they do it properly? (I think this statement is true but it might as well be a cultural myth that Iâve heard in the social choice adjacent community.)
My guess would be that the main pros of having democratic deliberation doesnât come from when the going is normal but rather as a resillience mechanism?
Perhaps, but I can also imagine that a hand-selected nonprofit board may be able to spot risks and react to them better than a board voted in an assembly. The coordination function of an assembly in trying to fill specific board roles seems lower than if a smaller group of existing board members can discuss it.
Yeah, I think youâre right and I also believe that it can be a both and?
You can have a general non-profit board and at the same time have a form of representative democracy going on which seems the best we can currently do for this?
I think it is fundamentally about a more timeless trade-off between hierarchical organisations that generally are able to act with more âcommanderâs intentâ versus democratic models that are more of a flat voting model. The democratic models suffer when there is a lot of single person linear thinking involved but do well at providing direct information for what people care about whilst the inverse is true for the hierarchical one and the project of good governance is to some extent somewhere in between.
I can see democratic models providing value, but the practical implementation is tricky. I can only speak from my experience in EA Germany, where member engagement in national-level strategy and participation in the national community seemed much lower than what I experience on the international level (in this forum, for example) or even at the city level at times.
I would be more excited about either local structures (cities or small regions with fewer than 10 million people) or larger structures (sub-continents, professional groups, etc.) where people truly form a community in the sense that they see each other in person, or where there is a large enough body to allow for meaningful participation in democratic processes.
Iâm somewhat confused about what led you to this conclusion. I was the co-director of EA Germany for two years, an organization that is similarly structured. When I compare it to the memberless nonprofits where Iâm a board member, the overhead for organizing a general assembly has been greater, yet it hasnât resulted in significant decision-making input from the members.
The postâs main claim is relatively modest: âyou donât need to panic about democracy in EA.â Speaking for myself, I contributed to this post because I have the impression that often, when someone suggests increased democratisation, the responses are mostly, âoh, that will never work because of this, that, and the other reasonâ before moving on. In writing this post, I wanted to update people away from that by providing an example of where democratic elements have worked reasonably well. Nonetheless, I agree that there will be examples of organisations where it doesnât work as well, and maybe EA Germany is one of those organisations.
In the rest of your comment, it feels like youâre mainly questioning the value of national community building orgs rather than the value of democratising national community building orgs. Thatâs a reasonable thing to question, but I think itâs a separate discussion. Unless Iâm misunderstanding you?
Thank you for writing this up!
Iâm somewhat confused about what led you to this conclusion. I was the co-director of EA Germany for two years, an organization that is similarly structured. When I compare it to the memberless nonprofits where Iâm a board member, the overhead for organizing a general assembly has been greater, yet it hasnât resulted in significant decision-making input from the members.
Having fee-paying members suits an organization that benefits its members. At EA Germany, the target group for the interventions wasnât the members, but rather people in earlier stages of the talent pipeline. If I want to contribute to talent pipeline development, I would prefer to donate to the charity I consider most cost-effective. It is unlikely that this would be the national EA group, given the numerous players in this space. Therefore, I would personally hesitate to join a national group that requires fees, unless tax reasons or special insider knowledge lead me to believe this is the best use of my donations.
Overall, I worry that national membership groups in EA lead people to make decisions that are not solely motivated by EA principles. My theory is that the main activities currently undertaken by national EA organizations could be carried out more cost-effectively by fewer players with a broader geographic reach. I fear that membership organizations are not the best structures to critically evaluate their existence and shut down if they believe membersâ time and money could be better spent elsewhere.
First and foremost, I think the thoughts expressed here make sense and this comment is more just expressing a different perspective, not necessarily disagreeing.
I wanted to bring up an existing framework for thinking about this from Raghuram Rajanâs âThe Third Pillar,â which provides economic arguments for why local communities matter even when theyâre less âefficientâ than centralized alternatives.
The core economic benefits of local community structures include:
Information advantages: Local groups understand context that centralized organizations miss
Adaptation capacity: They can respond quickly to local opportunities and constraints
Social capital generation: They create trust networks that enable coordination
Motivation infrastructure: They provide ongoing support that sustains long-term engagement
So when you bring up the question of efficiency and adherence to optimal reflective practices I start thinking about it from a more systemic perspective.
Hereâs a question that comes to mind: if local EA communities make people 3x more motivated to pursue high-impact careers, or make it much easier for newcomers to engage with EA ideas, then even if these local groups are only operating at 75% efficiency compared to some theoretical global optimum, you still get significant net benefit.
I think this becomes a governance design problem rather than a simple efficiency question. The real challenge is building local communities that capture these motivational benefits while maintaining mechanisms for critical self-evaluation. (Which I think happens through impact evaluations and similar at least in EA Sweden.)
I disagree with the pure globalization solution here. From a broader macroeconomic perspective, weâve seen repeatedly that dismantling local institutions in favor of âmore efficientâ centralized alternatives often destroys valuable social infrastructure thatâs hard to rebuild. The national EA model might be preserving something important that pure optimization would eliminate.
I am sympathetic to this argument vibes wise and I thought this was an elegant numerate utilitarian case for it. Part of my motivation is that I think it would be good if a lot of EA-ish values were a lot more mainstream. Like, I would even say that you probably get non-linear returns to scale in some important ways. You kind of need a critical mass of people to do certain things.
It feels like, necessarily, these organizations would also be about providing value to the members as well. That is a good thing.
I think there is something like a âbut what if we get watered down too muchâ concern latent here. I can kind of see how this would happen, but I am also not that worried about it. The tent is already pretty big in some ways. Stuff like numerate utilitarianism, empiricism, broad moral circles, thoughtfulness, tough trade-offs doesnât seem in danger of going away soon. Probably EA growing would spread these ideas rather than shrink them.
Also, I just think that societies/âpeople all over the world could significantly benefit from stronger third pillars and that the ideal versions of these sorts of community spaces would tend to share a lot of things in common with EA.
Picture it. The year is 2035 (9 years after the RSI near-miss event triggered the first Great Revolt). You ride your bitchinâ electric scooter to the EA-adjacent community center where you and your friends co-work on a local voter awareness campaign, startup idea, or just a fun painting or whatever. An intentional community.
That sounds like a step towards the glorious transhumanist future to me, but maybe the margins on that are bad in practice and the community centers of my day dreams will remain merely EA-adjacent. Perhaps, I just need to move to a town with cooler libraries. I am really not sure what the Dao here is or where the official EA brand really fits into any of this.
We run something similar in Munich, where we have a coworking space that also hosts EA-adjacent events (including crafting events), located in the middle of the city, allowing people to bike there. So, very sympathetic to the idea of having local groups doing this.
One could think of religious congregations as a sort of rough analogue here. At least in theory, they have both member-service and broader-benefit objectives (of course, your opinion on the extent to which this is true may depend on the congregation and religion in question). While something that near-exclusively benefits the broader community may get external funding (e.g., the church soup kitchen), at least in the US everything else is probably being paid for by member/âattendee donations.
And in a sense, the self-funding mechanism provides something of a check on concerns that a membership-based democratic organization will weight its membersâ welfare too much. If self-funding is predominant, then the members have implicitly decided that the extent to which they value the personal benefits of the organization plus their estimate of the organizationâs broader altruist achievements justifies the expenses.
In contrast, I would be hesitant to draw too many conclusions from EA Norwayâs ability to attract non-member/âsupporter funding. As a practical matter, âEA org in a small countryâ may be a pseudo-monopoly in the sense that having multiple organizations in the same ecological niche may not be healthy or sustainable. External funder decisions could merely reflect the reality that the niche is occupied adequately enough, rather than a belief that the EA Norway approach would outcompete alternative approaches. Thatâs relevant insofar as other meta functions may have a larger organizational carrying capacity than âEA org in a small countryâ does.
I agree with the benefits of local community structures. However, I donât believe that national EA groups can offer as much as informal local groups. I help manage both formal and informal networks of EA (adjacent) individuals in Munich, and there, I see these points much more clearly. Running a coworking space, hosting in-person events, convening private meetings, and having one-on-ones seem like activities that would fit your list.
Yeah for sure, I think the devil might be in the details here around how things are run and what the purpose of the national organisation is. Since Sweden and Norway have 8x less of a population than germany I think the effect of a ânation-wide groupâ might be different?
In my experience, Iâve found that EA Sweden focuses on and provides a lot of the things that you listed so I would be very curious to hear what the difference between a local and national organisation would be? Is there a difference in the dynamics of them being motivated to sustain themselves because of the scale?
You probably have a lot more experience than me in this so it would be very interesting to hear!
If Iâm reading Patrickâs comment correctly, there are two different ideas going on:
The democratic approach requires greater overhead (e.g., âthe overhead for organizing a general assemblyâ) without producing better results to justify the extra overhead
Fewer /â geographically broader orgs would have greater efficiency for ~the usual reasons we might think larger orgs might do better than smaller ones
These effects should be, in theory, somewhat separateâone could envision a nationally focused org without membership/âdemocracy, or a big transnational group with it. Do you think your list of advantages is more about localness or more about being democratic?
I like that decomposition.
Thereâs something about a prior on having democratic decision making as part of this because it allows for better community engagement usually? Representation often leads to feelings of inclusion and whilst Iâve only dabbled in the sociology here it seems like the option of saying no is quite important for members to feel heard?
My guess would be that the main pros of having democratic deliberation doesnât come from when the going is normal but rather as a resillience mechanism? Democracies tend to react late to major changes and not change path often but when they do they do it properly? (I think this statement is true but it might as well be a cultural myth that Iâve heard in the social choice adjacent community.)
Perhaps, but I can also imagine that a hand-selected nonprofit board may be able to spot risks and react to them better than a board voted in an assembly. The coordination function of an assembly in trying to fill specific board roles seems lower than if a smaller group of existing board members can discuss it.
Yeah, I think youâre right and I also believe that it can be a both and?
You can have a general non-profit board and at the same time have a form of representative democracy going on which seems the best we can currently do for this?
I think it is fundamentally about a more timeless trade-off between hierarchical organisations that generally are able to act with more âcommanderâs intentâ versus democratic models that are more of a flat voting model. The democratic models suffer when there is a lot of single person linear thinking involved but do well at providing direct information for what people care about whilst the inverse is true for the hierarchical one and the project of good governance is to some extent somewhere in between.
I can see democratic models providing value, but the practical implementation is tricky. I can only speak from my experience in EA Germany, where member engagement in national-level strategy and participation in the national community seemed much lower than what I experience on the international level (in this forum, for example) or even at the city level at times.
I would be more excited about either local structures (cities or small regions with fewer than 10 million people) or larger structures (sub-continents, professional groups, etc.) where people truly form a community in the sense that they see each other in person, or where there is a large enough body to allow for meaningful participation in democratic processes.
The postâs main claim is relatively modest: âyou donât need to panic about democracy in EA.â Speaking for myself, I contributed to this post because I have the impression that often, when someone suggests increased democratisation, the responses are mostly, âoh, that will never work because of this, that, and the other reasonâ before moving on. In writing this post, I wanted to update people away from that by providing an example of where democratic elements have worked reasonably well. Nonetheless, I agree that there will be examples of organisations where it doesnât work as well, and maybe EA Germany is one of those organisations.
In the rest of your comment, it feels like youâre mainly questioning the value of national community building orgs rather than the value of democratising national community building orgs. Thatâs a reasonable thing to question, but I think itâs a separate discussion. Unless Iâm misunderstanding you?