You say, in effect, “not that centralised”, but, from your description, EA seems highly centralised
Your argument that it’s not centralised seems to be that EA is not a single legal entity
These are two examples, but I generally didn’t feel like your reply really engaged with Will’s description of the ways in which EA is decentralized, nor his attempt to look for finer distinctions in decentralization. It felt a bit like you just said “no, it is centralised!”.
democracy has the effect of decentralising power.
I don’t agree with this at all. IMO democracy often has the opposite effect, and many decentralized communities (e.g. the open-source community) have zero democracy. But I think this needs me to write a full post...
If we think of centralisation just on a spectrum of ‘decision-making power’, as you define it above (how few people determine what happens to the whole) EA could hardly be more centralised!
This seems false to me. If the only kind of decision you think matters is funding decisions, then sure, those are somewhat centralised. But that’s not everything, and it’s far from clear to me why you think that’s the only thing that matters?
For example, as Will discusses in the post, even amongst the individual EA orgs:
There are many of them, and they are small
They basically all do their own strategy and planning
Sure doesn’t look like centralized decision-making to me. You could say “For any decision, OP could threaten to refuse to fund an organization unless it made the choice that OP wants, therefore actually OP has the decision-making power”. But this seems to me to just not be a good description of reality. OP doesn’t behave like that, and in practice most decisions are made in a decentralized fashion.
Yet, de facto, if we think about where power, in fact, resides, it is concentrated in a very small group. If someone sets up an invite-only group called the ‘leaders’ forum’, it seems totally reasonable for people to say “ah, you guys run the show”.
This equivocates between saying that power does resides a small group, and saying that we have created the perception that power resides with a small group. As I already argued, I think the former is false, and Will explicitly agrees with the latter and thinks we should change it.
My overall impression of your post is that it seems to me that you think the non-diversity of funding is bad (which I think we all agree on), but that for some reason funding is the only thing that matters when it comes to whether we describe EA as centralized or not.
Whereas to me EA looks like a pretty decentralized movement that currently happens to have a dominant funder. Moreover, we’re lucky in that our funder doesn’t (AFAIK) throw their weight around too much.
These are two examples, but I generally didn’t feel like your reply really engaged with Will’s description of the ways in which EA is decentralized, nor his attempt to look for finer distinctions in decentralization. It felt a bit like you just said “no, it is centralised!”.
I don’t agree with this at all. IMO democracy often has the opposite effect, and many decentralized communities (e.g. the open-source community) have zero democracy. But I think this needs me to write a full post...
This seems false to me. If the only kind of decision you think matters is funding decisions, then sure, those are somewhat centralised. But that’s not everything, and it’s far from clear to me why you think that’s the only thing that matters?
For example, as Will discusses in the post, even amongst the individual EA orgs:
There are many of them, and they are small
They basically all do their own strategy and planning
Sure doesn’t look like centralized decision-making to me. You could say “For any decision, OP could threaten to refuse to fund an organization unless it made the choice that OP wants, therefore actually OP has the decision-making power”. But this seems to me to just not be a good description of reality. OP doesn’t behave like that, and in practice most decisions are made in a decentralized fashion.
This equivocates between saying that power does resides a small group, and saying that we have created the perception that power resides with a small group. As I already argued, I think the former is false, and Will explicitly agrees with the latter and thinks we should change it.
My overall impression of your post is that it seems to me that you think the non-diversity of funding is bad (which I think we all agree on), but that for some reason funding is the only thing that matters when it comes to whether we describe EA as centralized or not.
Whereas to me EA looks like a pretty decentralized movement that currently happens to have a dominant funder. Moreover, we’re lucky in that our funder doesn’t (AFAIK) throw their weight around too much.