I’m really not sure this is true. A market is one way of aggregating knowledge and preferences, but there are others (e.g. democracy). And as in a democracy, we expect many or most decisions to be better handled by a small group of people whose job it is.
This doesn’t sound like most people’s view on democracy to me. Normally it’s more like ‘we have to relinquish control over our lives to someone, so it gives slightly better incentives if we have a fractional say in who that someone is’.
I’m reminded of Scott Siskind on prediction markets—while there might be some grantmakers who I happen to trust, EA prioritisation is exceptionally hard, and I think ‘have the community have as representative a say in it as they want to have’ is a far better Schelling point than ‘appoint a handful of gatekeepers and encourage everyone to defer to them’.
First of all, relevant xkcd.
This seems like a cheap shot. What’s the equivalent of systemwide security risk in this analogy? Looking at the specific CEA form example, if you fill out a feedback form at the event, do CEA currently need to share it among their forum, community health, movement building departments? If not, then your privacy would actually increase post-split, since the minimum number of people you could usefully consent to sharing it with would have decreased.
Also, what’s the analogy where you end up with an increasing number of sandboxes? The worst case scenario in that respect seems to be ‘organisations realise splitting didn’t help and recombine to their original state’.
Secondly, this may be true in some aspects but not in others, and I’d still expect overhead to increase, or some things to become much more challenging.
I agree in the sense that overhead would increase in expectation, but a) the gains might outweigh it—IMO higher fidelity comparison is worth a lot and b) it also seems like there’s a <50% but plausible chance that movement-wide overhead would actually decrease, since you’d need shared services for helping establish small organisations. And that’s before considering things like efficiency of services, which I’m confident would increase for the reasons I gave here.
This doesn’t sound like most people’s view on democracy to me. Normally it’s more like ‘we have to relinquish control over our lives to someone, so it gives slightly better incentives if we have a fractional say in who that someone is’.
I’m reminded of Scott Siskind on prediction markets—while there might be some grantmakers who I happen to trust, EA prioritisation is exceptionally hard, and I think ‘have the community have as representative a say in it as they want to have’ is a far better Schelling point than ‘appoint a handful of gatekeepers and encourage everyone to defer to them’.
This seems like a cheap shot. What’s the equivalent of systemwide security risk in this analogy? Looking at the specific CEA form example, if you fill out a feedback form at the event, do CEA currently need to share it among their forum, community health, movement building departments? If not, then your privacy would actually increase post-split, since the minimum number of people you could usefully consent to sharing it with would have decreased.
Also, what’s the analogy where you end up with an increasing number of sandboxes? The worst case scenario in that respect seems to be ‘organisations realise splitting didn’t help and recombine to their original state’.
I agree in the sense that overhead would increase in expectation, but a) the gains might outweigh it—IMO higher fidelity comparison is worth a lot and b) it also seems like there’s a <50% but plausible chance that movement-wide overhead would actually decrease, since you’d need shared services for helping establish small organisations. And that’s before considering things like efficiency of services, which I’m confident would increase for the reasons I gave here.