I can also think of ways decentralization makes things worse (e.g., in my very limited past experience I’ve personally witnessed decentralization make an abuser be able to move easily from small group to small group without people knowing).
As an example of this, I’m involved in the contra dance community which is almost entirely organized at the level of individual dance groups. I can think of several examples of people who moved on to a different group after getting kicked out of their original group, sometimes multiple times.
Some of this is that the contra dance world doesn’t have any group with the role of CEA’s community health team (disclosure: my wife is on that team), but even if it did have one it would be very hard to coordinate with the hundreds of local groups around the country. In a decentralized system it’s very hard to share information about bad actors to the people who need to know it without making it essentially public, and making things public is often a large escalation that people who report problems to you don’t want.
But those are two very different communities / movements and I don’t think that the situations are similar. As you said, there is something like CEA and the EA movement also has the ambition to act in a somewhat coordinated fashion to solve the world’s biggest problems, whereas dance groups grow like wild flowers wherever and whenever enough people interested in dance come together regularly.
I am not saying that there is nothing to learn by comparing these different situations but this doesn’t seem to be an argument against the theory that centralization of power could have somehow contributed to creating an environment in which people felt badly treated or even harassed. Rather it seems to be more of an illustration that preventing such behaviors is a really difficult problem regardless of concentration of power.
My point here was that the conclusion that can be drawn from your example is orthogonal to the question of how concentrated power is. Your example did not provide much evidence against the claim that concentration of power may be a contributing factor to the issue here. Feel free to reread my prior comment.
As an example of this, I’m involved in the contra dance community which is almost entirely organized at the level of individual dance groups. I can think of several examples of people who moved on to a different group after getting kicked out of their original group, sometimes multiple times.
Some of this is that the contra dance world doesn’t have any group with the role of CEA’s community health team (disclosure: my wife is on that team), but even if it did have one it would be very hard to coordinate with the hundreds of local groups around the country. In a decentralized system it’s very hard to share information about bad actors to the people who need to know it without making it essentially public, and making things public is often a large escalation that people who report problems to you don’t want.
But those are two very different communities / movements and I don’t think that the situations are similar. As you said, there is something like CEA and the EA movement also has the ambition to act in a somewhat coordinated fashion to solve the world’s biggest problems, whereas dance groups grow like wild flowers wherever and whenever enough people interested in dance come together regularly.
I am not saying that there is nothing to learn by comparing these different situations but this doesn’t seem to be an argument against the theory that centralization of power could have somehow contributed to creating an environment in which people felt badly treated or even harassed. Rather it seems to be more of an illustration that preventing such behaviors is a really difficult problem regardless of concentration of power.
That’s a pretty different claim from the “this is what happens when you centralize power so much” that started this thread!
My point here was that the conclusion that can be drawn from your example is orthogonal to the question of how concentrated power is. Your example did not provide much evidence against the claim that concentration of power may be a contributing factor to the issue here. Feel free to reread my prior comment.