The main crux here might be the extent to which CEA has a monopoly on supporting people who want to do good effectively.
To the extent that it is a monopoly, it’s harder for people to start new projects in the space simply because they didn’t get there first.
To the extent that it isn’t a monopoly, anyone who thinks CEA could be much better can always try to start their own thing. Yes it would be very hard; it was very hard for the founders of CEA too.
But I think CEA is much less of a monopoly than it seems a lot of EAs think it is.
That’s part of the point of this post, right? There’s even an example of people starting a competitor to CEA in the ‘EA student group support’ space, getting funding from Open Phil, and having people like Will say they did a great job. And before Probably Good, there was only one org providing EAs with careers advice; but instead of calling for 80,000 Hours to make big changes to the way 80,000 Hours thinks they should run their free service, Omer and Sella started Probably Good, with financial support from Open Phil and encouragement from 80,000 Hours. In the ‘EA career support’ space, there’s also now Successif, Magnify Mentoring and High Impact Professionals, each focusing on areas they thought needed more attention.
“Ah, but the conferences are much more important as a centralized function and they are basically a monopoly.” In 2018, CEA gave a $10,000 grant to a competitor conference that had 100 attendees.
“But the EA Forum!” There are tons of Slack spaces and Facebook groups etc. not run by CEA—CEA is definitely not in control of all online discussion between EAs. But maybe a competitor forum is next on the list (not something Michael’s particularly concerned about though, so maybe someone else wants to have a go).
“Community Health!” Oh my god, if you found a successful competitor to the Community Health team, I will shower you with praise and gratitude. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they did too.
“Okay, maybe not CEA, but Open Phil!” Future Fund. Regardless of how FTX turned out, this was at least a proof of concept.
“Look, EA just needs to be radically different but there’s already an EA!” Start your own movement. Holden and Elie thought charity evaluators should be a lot better so they started GiveWell. The Oxford crew thought people should be doing good better so they started CEA. If you think EA just fundamentally needs to be more democratic but keep everything else the same, start a movement for Democratic Effective Altruism. I might even start one for Do-acratic EA.
There’s likely a second crux that influences how one views the extent to which CEA/EVF is a “monopoly” or has extreme advantages. That is whether it is advisible for the same organization (EVF) to be the primary provider of many different kinds of important coordinating functions, or whether that gives it too much power.
If that isn’t a concern, then pointing to the existence and viability of organizations that work in the same spaces at CEA/EVF orgs is a fairly good response.
“Start your own orgs” is still a possible response if one concludes that CEA/EVF’s dominant market position in numerous forms of coordination is a problem. However, I think the difficulty level is raised two orders of magnitude from most of the examples you gave:
The first raise is that the new org has to outcompete the EVF org to displace the latter from its role as the primary provider of the coordination system.
The second raise is that this would need to happen over several different coordinating functions to reduce CEA/EVF’s influence to an appropriate level.
(Although I would prefer a meta with less power concentration, “democratic” is not the primary word I’d use to justify that preference.)
The main crux here might be the extent to which CEA has a monopoly on supporting people who want to do good effectively.
To the extent that it is a monopoly, it’s harder for people to start new projects in the space simply because they didn’t get there first.
To the extent that it isn’t a monopoly, anyone who thinks CEA could be much better can always try to start their own thing. Yes it would be very hard; it was very hard for the founders of CEA too.
But I think CEA is much less of a monopoly than it seems a lot of EAs think it is.
That’s part of the point of this post, right? There’s even an example of people starting a competitor to CEA in the ‘EA student group support’ space, getting funding from Open Phil, and having people like Will say they did a great job. And before Probably Good, there was only one org providing EAs with careers advice; but instead of calling for 80,000 Hours to make big changes to the way 80,000 Hours thinks they should run their free service, Omer and Sella started Probably Good, with financial support from Open Phil and encouragement from 80,000 Hours. In the ‘EA career support’ space, there’s also now Successif, Magnify Mentoring and High Impact Professionals, each focusing on areas they thought needed more attention.
“Ah, but the conferences are much more important as a centralized function and they are basically a monopoly.” In 2018, CEA gave a $10,000 grant to a competitor conference that had 100 attendees.
“But the EA Forum!” There are tons of Slack spaces and Facebook groups etc. not run by CEA—CEA is definitely not in control of all online discussion between EAs. But maybe a competitor forum is next on the list (not something Michael’s particularly concerned about though, so maybe someone else wants to have a go).
“Community Health!” Oh my god, if you found a successful competitor to the Community Health team, I will shower you with praise and gratitude. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they did too.
“Okay, maybe not CEA, but Open Phil!” Future Fund. Regardless of how FTX turned out, this was at least a proof of concept.
“Look, EA just needs to be radically different but there’s already an EA!” Start your own movement. Holden and Elie thought charity evaluators should be a lot better so they started GiveWell. The Oxford crew thought people should be doing good better so they started CEA. If you think EA just fundamentally needs to be more democratic but keep everything else the same, start a movement for Democratic Effective Altruism. I might even start one for Do-acratic EA.
I think that’s one major crux.
There’s likely a second crux that influences how one views the extent to which CEA/EVF is a “monopoly” or has extreme advantages. That is whether it is advisible for the same organization (EVF) to be the primary provider of many different kinds of important coordinating functions, or whether that gives it too much power.
If that isn’t a concern, then pointing to the existence and viability of organizations that work in the same spaces at CEA/EVF orgs is a fairly good response.
“Start your own orgs” is still a possible response if one concludes that CEA/EVF’s dominant market position in numerous forms of coordination is a problem. However, I think the difficulty level is raised two orders of magnitude from most of the examples you gave:
The first raise is that the new org has to outcompete the EVF org to displace the latter from its role as the primary provider of the coordination system.
The second raise is that this would need to happen over several different coordinating functions to reduce CEA/EVF’s influence to an appropriate level.
(Although I would prefer a meta with less power concentration, “democratic” is not the primary word I’d use to justify that preference.)