Whether you could get someone nominally āunderā you to do an arbitrary thing is not a good proxy for power.
CEA is a regular hierarchical company, but it would still go very poorly if you decided to, on a power trip, tell one of your employees what to eat for lunch. This mostly doesnāt matter, though, because that is a goal you are very unlikely to have.
As a co-organizer of the Boston Meetup, if you sent me an email demanding that we serve potatoes at the next gathering, I would be very confused. But you could get CEAās groups team to come up with guidance on meetup food, heavily influence that process, and I could then receive an email advocating serving potatoes from people I trusted and who I was pretty sure had thought about it a lot more than I had. Which would have a decent chance of resulting in potatoes at the next meetup.
Power is always, in a technical sense, indirect: no one is pulling levers inside other peopleās heads to get them to do things. There is always some amount of inspiration, persuasion, threat, or other intermediary. Sometimes this is formalized, sometimes āsoftā, but that mostly only matters for legibility. Maybe a better measurement for power is something like, if thereās something important about the way things are currently done that you want to change, how likely and how much are you able to cause that change?
By that measure, OP has a tremendous amount of power: through a combination of employing highly respected people and having control over the funding of most EA work they can make large and deep changes to how the EA movement grows and what work is carried out under its banner.
Thanks! This feels like a reasonable definition, but seems different from what Michael was talking about? He said:
unless you have ābuy-inā from one of the listed āsenior EAsā, it is very hard to get traction or funding for your project (I speak from experience). In that sense, EA feels quite like a big, conventional organisation.
If CEA tried to push some dietary standard Iām pretty sure there would be a ton of complaints and blowback. But even if we somehow kept going through all of that, Iām pretty sure you would still be able to run a potato-less meet up, which doesnāt feel consistent with the āneed buy-inā claim.
(Whereas in ābig, conventional organizationsā if the CEO says āthe cafeteria is going to serve potatoesā then the chefs donāt have much of a choice.)
Whether you could get someone nominally āunderā you to do an arbitrary thing is not a good proxy for power.
CEA is a regular hierarchical company, but it would still go very poorly if you decided to, on a power trip, tell one of your employees what to eat for lunch. This mostly doesnāt matter, though, because that is a goal you are very unlikely to have.
As a co-organizer of the Boston Meetup, if you sent me an email demanding that we serve potatoes at the next gathering, I would be very confused. But you could get CEAās groups team to come up with guidance on meetup food, heavily influence that process, and I could then receive an email advocating serving potatoes from people I trusted and who I was pretty sure had thought about it a lot more than I had. Which would have a decent chance of resulting in potatoes at the next meetup.
Power is always, in a technical sense, indirect: no one is pulling levers inside other peopleās heads to get them to do things. There is always some amount of inspiration, persuasion, threat, or other intermediary. Sometimes this is formalized, sometimes āsoftā, but that mostly only matters for legibility. Maybe a better measurement for power is something like, if thereās something important about the way things are currently done that you want to change, how likely and how much are you able to cause that change?
By that measure, OP has a tremendous amount of power: through a combination of employing highly respected people and having control over the funding of most EA work they can make large and deep changes to how the EA movement grows and what work is carried out under its banner.
Thanks! This feels like a reasonable definition, but seems different from what Michael was talking about? He said:
If CEA tried to push some dietary standard Iām pretty sure there would be a ton of complaints and blowback. But even if we somehow kept going through all of that, Iām pretty sure you would still be able to run a potato-less meet up, which doesnāt feel consistent with the āneed buy-inā claim.
(Whereas in ābig, conventional organizationsā if the CEO says āthe cafeteria is going to serve potatoesā then the chefs donāt have much of a choice.)