Bob Jacobs reached out to me privately after reading this comment. He gave me his permission to share what was said. I won’t try to summarize our whole conversation, but I’ll give some highlights. We agreed on two concrete ways EA could be reformed:
Trying to internationalize EA beyond the Anglosphere countries by translating resources like the EA Forum and the EA Newsletter into other languages than English. (Bob’s idea. I agree.)
Trying to internationalize EA beyond the Anglosphere countries by funding more non-Anglosphere-based people and projects. (Bob’s idea. I agree. I also added that I think it’s a good idea for charities focused on global poverty to have people from globally poor countries in leadership roles. I just put what I said about this to Bob in a quick take.)
Bob also talked to me about two concrete ideas I don’t have strong opinions on:
Reforming the EA Forum’s karma system (which he discusses in the Substack post).
Turning EA organizations into worker co-ops (a suggestion he’s previously made on the EA Forum here, which he mentioned in the Substack post).
As I told Bob, I haven’t thought much about the EA Forum’s karma system and, honestly, I don’t want to. Maybe I’ll give it deeper thought if someone else does the hardest part of the work for me first and makes a compelling post about it — including what specific changes they want made.
Workplace democracy and worker co-ops are a topic I’m curious about, but that’s also a big topic I barely know anything about. I would have to do a lot more research to form a strong opinion.
In theory, I like the idea of workplace democracy. I like the idea, more generally, of making non-democratic things democratic — like online communities — and of trying to make democratic things more democratic (most obviously, reforming electoral systems to make them more proportional, but also experiments in partial direct democracy like ballot initiatives).
But I haven’t thought about or read about the practicalities of workplace democracy or worker co-ops, either for for-profit companies or non-profit organizations. A lot of things sound great in theory but become more complex and thorny when you try them out. (For example, corporate lobbies have been using ballot initiatives to push self-serving legislation. These corporate-backed ballot initiatives can be long and have confusing wording — maybe deliberately. That’s not something I anticipated happening when I first heard about ballot initiatives.)
Bob Jacobs reached out to me privately after reading this comment. He gave me his permission to share what was said. I won’t try to summarize our whole conversation, but I’ll give some highlights. We agreed on two concrete ways EA could be reformed:
Trying to internationalize EA beyond the Anglosphere countries by translating resources like the EA Forum and the EA Newsletter into other languages than English. (Bob’s idea. I agree.)
Trying to internationalize EA beyond the Anglosphere countries by funding more non-Anglosphere-based people and projects. (Bob’s idea. I agree. I also added that I think it’s a good idea for charities focused on global poverty to have people from globally poor countries in leadership roles. I just put what I said about this to Bob in a quick take.)
Bob also talked to me about two concrete ideas I don’t have strong opinions on:
Reforming the EA Forum’s karma system (which he discusses in the Substack post).
Turning EA organizations into worker co-ops (a suggestion he’s previously made on the EA Forum here, which he mentioned in the Substack post).
As I told Bob, I haven’t thought much about the EA Forum’s karma system and, honestly, I don’t want to. Maybe I’ll give it deeper thought if someone else does the hardest part of the work for me first and makes a compelling post about it — including what specific changes they want made.
Workplace democracy and worker co-ops are a topic I’m curious about, but that’s also a big topic I barely know anything about. I would have to do a lot more research to form a strong opinion.
In theory, I like the idea of workplace democracy. I like the idea, more generally, of making non-democratic things democratic — like online communities — and of trying to make democratic things more democratic (most obviously, reforming electoral systems to make them more proportional, but also experiments in partial direct democracy like ballot initiatives).
But I haven’t thought about or read about the practicalities of workplace democracy or worker co-ops, either for for-profit companies or non-profit organizations. A lot of things sound great in theory but become more complex and thorny when you try them out. (For example, corporate lobbies have been using ballot initiatives to push self-serving legislation. These corporate-backed ballot initiatives can be long and have confusing wording — maybe deliberately. That’s not something I anticipated happening when I first heard about ballot initiatives.)