Thanks for reading and commenting! The post is intended to be about incentives, information discovery, and theory of change. The core idea is that the community should fund people to develop more concrete proposals, because the current incentive structure doesn’t create enough incentives for people to do that for free. From there, I tried to address how we could maximize the chances that the concrete proposals were those that had community support, would maximize information gain, and tied into a viable theory of change.
Part of that information discovery was seeing whether people would be willing to fund reform work even modestly. Throwing $25-$50 into a group pot would be a slightly costly way to demonstrate interest. I don’t see better ways of discovering the level and depth of community support: I’m concerned about just polling people at the current stage; there are many ideas that sound good at the three-sentence stage but fall apart if you try to sketch them out. And there are many people who have priors against reform that won’t update on a three-sentence sketch.
I cut some material on theory of change, which may have been a mistake in retrospect. You’re right that the theory of change is a bit incremental . . . but I am not sure what the better process would be. I was hoping that if someone had a better one, it would come out in the comments. Many reform-minded posts haven’t described how we get from three-line proposal to real-world effects at all.
One possibility is that the powers-that-be would take everyone’s three-line proposals, invest time into developing them all, evaluate the developed proposals, and then figure out how to implement them. I don’t think that is a realistic theory of change; the powers-that-be are handling the largest financial, legal, and reputational crisis in the history of EA and so are rather bandwidth-constrained. Moreover, leadership bandwidth will always be constrained, and it’s reasonable for leadership not to want to devote significant time to proposals without solid evidence of widespread community support. So I think a realistic theory of change has to include a phase of developing and winnowing the proposals before they are ready for detailed leadership evaluation. If the leadership responds positively to developed proposals with strong community support, then the theory of change is pretty straightforward.
If it turns out a significant majority people just don’t care that much, the strong reformers may be better off starting their own movement (just as the EA founders did in the 2000s) rather than spending their energies on substantially reforming a movement in which they lack grassroots support. I don’t mean that in an unfriendly way; sometimes the most effective means of reform is to break away and create a constrast community. For example, I would suggest that Luther did far more to reform the Catholic Church in the direction he wished by breaking away than he ever could have done by staying inside. Competition is generally a good thing. But I think that would be premature without obtaining more information about how the community responds to more fleshed-out proposals.
In contrast, if there were strong community support for concrete proposals, and the community demonstrated a willingness to put some money behind it, that would suggest it may be worthwhile to launch a community-funded reform meta organization. I think many of the reformers’ goals could be achieved without the support of the existing powers-that-be with a high-six/low-seven figure budget. But that strategy only makes sense given a certain level of broader community support and engagement, which I suggest would be obtained through the observing the response to more concrete proposals.
Thanks for reading and commenting! The post is intended to be about incentives, information discovery, and theory of change. The core idea is that the community should fund people to develop more concrete proposals, because the current incentive structure doesn’t create enough incentives for people to do that for free. From there, I tried to address how we could maximize the chances that the concrete proposals were those that had community support, would maximize information gain, and tied into a viable theory of change.
Part of that information discovery was seeing whether people would be willing to fund reform work even modestly. Throwing $25-$50 into a group pot would be a slightly costly way to demonstrate interest. I don’t see better ways of discovering the level and depth of community support: I’m concerned about just polling people at the current stage; there are many ideas that sound good at the three-sentence stage but fall apart if you try to sketch them out. And there are many people who have priors against reform that won’t update on a three-sentence sketch.
I cut some material on theory of change, which may have been a mistake in retrospect. You’re right that the theory of change is a bit incremental . . . but I am not sure what the better process would be. I was hoping that if someone had a better one, it would come out in the comments. Many reform-minded posts haven’t described how we get from three-line proposal to real-world effects at all.
One possibility is that the powers-that-be would take everyone’s three-line proposals, invest time into developing them all, evaluate the developed proposals, and then figure out how to implement them. I don’t think that is a realistic theory of change; the powers-that-be are handling the largest financial, legal, and reputational crisis in the history of EA and so are rather bandwidth-constrained. Moreover, leadership bandwidth will always be constrained, and it’s reasonable for leadership not to want to devote significant time to proposals without solid evidence of widespread community support. So I think a realistic theory of change has to include a phase of developing and winnowing the proposals before they are ready for detailed leadership evaluation. If the leadership responds positively to developed proposals with strong community support, then the theory of change is pretty straightforward.
If it turns out a significant majority people just don’t care that much, the strong reformers may be better off starting their own movement (just as the EA founders did in the 2000s) rather than spending their energies on substantially reforming a movement in which they lack grassroots support. I don’t mean that in an unfriendly way; sometimes the most effective means of reform is to break away and create a constrast community. For example, I would suggest that Luther did far more to reform the Catholic Church in the direction he wished by breaking away than he ever could have done by staying inside. Competition is generally a good thing. But I think that would be premature without obtaining more information about how the community responds to more fleshed-out proposals.
In contrast, if there were strong community support for concrete proposals, and the community demonstrated a willingness to put some money behind it, that would suggest it may be worthwhile to launch a community-funded reform meta organization. I think many of the reformers’ goals could be achieved without the support of the existing powers-that-be with a high-six/low-seven figure budget. But that strategy only makes sense given a certain level of broader community support and engagement, which I suggest would be obtained through the observing the response to more concrete proposals.