There is a very big difference between “Surely setting up a membership society, a solved-problem, is not insurmountable” as directed at the collective leadership that controls about a half-billion in unrestricted spend a year, and the same comment directed at Michael personally. Many challenges are fairly solvable with access to significant monies, but have a low probability of success without that.
Moreover, Michael’s would-be task is harder than what he is saying the collective leadership should do. Legally forming a membership society is not difficult; equipping that society to actually do the stuff CEA/EVF does is the hard part. He would be creating an alternative meta structure that would have to compete with the existing one that has tens of millions per year in support. The potential donors are good EAs; they will look at a request to fund a global conference and consider the marginal value of an additional conference.
I found the second half of the comment to be helpful.
Yeah sorry I should have drawn a stronger link between the first and second half. As in, if Open Phil thinks it’s a good idea, they’ll let CEA do it or fund Michael to do it. If they don’t, CEA can’t do it and Michael can’t do it. That CEA currently has a lot more funding is not the issue.
But of course, Open Phil may well have greater trust in CEA’s general competence than Michael’s since they fund the former and not the latter, so maybe it wouldn’t be quite as easy as that (but maybe for good reason, hard to tell as an outsider). But the attitude of “This is so easy, why don’t you do it??” is so common on this forum and I think it’s holding EA back a lot, so I want to challenge it where I see it.
But the attitude of “This is so easy, why don’t you do it??” is so common on this forum and I think it’s holding EA back a lot, so I want to challenge it where I see it.
❤️
Also I wish people gave Giving What We Can more credit; it seems to me like they are basically doing this: membership org, relatively egalitarian donor base of 10k+ people, open access events, etc.
Same with EA Norway, Czech EA, and probably others.
As for the last sentence, I think it depends on the nature of the criticism/proposal. Here, I think it’s fair to critique Michael’s proposal on the grounds that it does not acknowledge that the plausible range of action for almost anyone but Open Phil is substantially constrained by Open Phil’s willingness to go along.
That being said, “this seems fairly easy, is there a reason you you don’t do it” can be a valid line of argument in appropriate circumstances.
I’d also like to call positive attention to Michael taking a concrete step that could involve a significant personal commitment of time (i.e., applying to be on the EVF board) in addition to writing on the Forum about the issue he sees.
EA Norway did this! (Set up a membership society which includes voting rights in the organization, make a newsletter, run conferences, etc.)
I don’t at all want to diminish how hard they worked, but I don’t think it was as challenging as you imply (e.g. I don’t know their budget but I’m sure it’s way less than $500 million/year).
Setting up a society can definitely be done on much less than $500M/yr! The point of my remark was to contrast what Michael had called on leadership to do with what sounded like a suggestion that Michael do the same thing personally. The reference to $500M was meant to underscore the extreme difference between Michael’s ask and what was asked of him in return, not to suggest $500M was necessary to form a society.
That being said, while I haven’t seen a recent budget for CEA, my assumption is that running an organization that could serve as a potential replacement for CEA (which is what this particular subthread was about in my view) would cost tens of millions USD per year. Michael’s view (as roughly/imprecisely summarized by me) is that many central coordinating functions (e.g., “natural monopolies”) currently handled by CEA should be instead run by a membership society. So the example of EA Norway doesn’t really update my belief in my asserion in the context of this discussion that “[l]egally forming a membership society is not difficult; equipping that society to actually do the stuff CEA/EVF does is the hard part.”
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.)
It’s definitely hard to replace CEA! But this thread has an air of helplessness, like there are only 10 people in the world who can do anything in EA, and this seems immediately falsified by the large number of people who are doing things in EA, including specifically the stuff Michael suggests like having membership societies.
(Note: I don’t know to what extent you endorse this view of helplessness, so feel a little like I’m picking on you here, but I feel fairly confident that the median reader would take away a sense of helplessness from this thread.)
There is a very big difference between “Surely setting up a membership society, a solved-problem, is not insurmountable” as directed at the collective leadership that controls about a half-billion in unrestricted spend a year, and the same comment directed at Michael personally. Many challenges are fairly solvable with access to significant monies, but have a low probability of success without that.
Moreover, Michael’s would-be task is harder than what he is saying the collective leadership should do. Legally forming a membership society is not difficult; equipping that society to actually do the stuff CEA/EVF does is the hard part. He would be creating an alternative meta structure that would have to compete with the existing one that has tens of millions per year in support. The potential donors are good EAs; they will look at a request to fund a global conference and consider the marginal value of an additional conference.
I found the second half of the comment to be helpful.
Yeah sorry I should have drawn a stronger link between the first and second half. As in, if Open Phil thinks it’s a good idea, they’ll let CEA do it or fund Michael to do it. If they don’t, CEA can’t do it and Michael can’t do it. That CEA currently has a lot more funding is not the issue.
But of course, Open Phil may well have greater trust in CEA’s general competence than Michael’s since they fund the former and not the latter, so maybe it wouldn’t be quite as easy as that (but maybe for good reason, hard to tell as an outsider). But the attitude of “This is so easy, why don’t you do it??” is so common on this forum and I think it’s holding EA back a lot, so I want to challenge it where I see it.
❤️
Also I wish people gave Giving What We Can more credit; it seems to me like they are basically doing this: membership org, relatively egalitarian donor base of 10k+ people, open access events, etc.
Same with EA Norway, Czech EA, and probably others.
Upvoted; thanks.
As for the last sentence, I think it depends on the nature of the criticism/proposal. Here, I think it’s fair to critique Michael’s proposal on the grounds that it does not acknowledge that the plausible range of action for almost anyone but Open Phil is substantially constrained by Open Phil’s willingness to go along.
That being said, “this seems fairly easy, is there a reason you you don’t do it” can be a valid line of argument in appropriate circumstances.
I’d also like to call positive attention to Michael taking a concrete step that could involve a significant personal commitment of time (i.e., applying to be on the EVF board) in addition to writing on the Forum about the issue he sees.
EA Norway did this! (Set up a membership society which includes voting rights in the organization, make a newsletter, run conferences, etc.)
I don’t at all want to diminish how hard they worked, but I don’t think it was as challenging as you imply (e.g. I don’t know their budget but I’m sure it’s way less than $500 million/year).
Setting up a society can definitely be done on much less than $500M/yr! The point of my remark was to contrast what Michael had called on leadership to do with what sounded like a suggestion that Michael do the same thing personally. The reference to $500M was meant to underscore the extreme difference between Michael’s ask and what was asked of him in return, not to suggest $500M was necessary to form a society.
That being said, while I haven’t seen a recent budget for CEA, my assumption is that running an organization that could serve as a potential replacement for CEA (which is what this particular subthread was about in my view) would cost tens of millions USD per year. Michael’s view (as roughly/imprecisely summarized by me) is that many central coordinating functions (e.g., “natural monopolies”) currently handled by CEA should be instead run by a membership society. So the example of EA Norway doesn’t really update my belief in my asserion in the context of this discussion that “[l]egally forming a membership society is not difficult; equipping that society to actually do the stuff CEA/EVF does is the hard part.”
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.)
It’s definitely hard to replace CEA! But this thread has an air of helplessness, like there are only 10 people in the world who can do anything in EA, and this seems immediately falsified by the large number of people who are doing things in EA, including specifically the stuff Michael suggests like having membership societies.
(Note: I don’t know to what extent you endorse this view of helplessness, so feel a little like I’m picking on you here, but I feel fairly confident that the median reader would take away a sense of helplessness from this thread.)