I appreciate this sort of pushback / liked this post! :)
For proponents of more consolidation in EA, I’d be excited for more people to try this exercise:
Grab some list of EA-affiliated organizations (e.g. this, maybe there are others)
Set a 10 min timer, scroll through, and for each ‘small’ organization, think about whether it would be good to merge this org something else or be restructured. Make a specific proposal that we can think about!
Share your babble reflections, e.g. in the comments here.
Reasoning: I worry that high level arguments for or against community restructuring sound much nicer in theory than in practice (e.g. it wouldn’t be that surprising to me if the vast majority of small orgs all had good reasons for not starting off as projects). I’ll share my 10 min version in the comments.
.
Also to push back slightly on this narrative, I think there is more coordination in EA than you might expect if you only looked at the raw number of small organizations associated with EA. Some examples:
All the Charity Entrepreneurship orgs (website lists up to 23, but some have shut down) are individual legal entities AFAIK and face some of the ‘small org’ downsides, but the CE founders in each cohort go through a bunch of training together, have a shared support network / an unusual level of understanding on what the other alumni are doing, I assume have some sort of shared communication channels, regularly meet up at EA events, etc. I’d expect the alumni connections probably makes founding a CE org feel substantially less isolating than starting a new org.
Although I guess, I don’t recall any examples of staff moving between CE orgs, or examples of subverting the other downsides the OP mentions. I’d love to be corrected if I’m wrong!
A bunch of EA community building groups / orgs are well connected with each other, the directors go to the same retreats, have shared communication channels, etc. For instance, my impression is that the EA Groups slack is used fairly regularly by a bunch of EA group organizers, and collaborations between groups are quite common. Anecdotally, I recall examples of organizers even moving between groups — e.g. Stanford EA organizers substantially helped a couple of other uni groups build up their programs.
Should there be more of a central infrastructure org within the effective animal advocacy space? If this existed, it could be a sensible place to house existing projects like Animal Advocacy Careers (feels analogous to EA Virtual Programs being housed within CEA), Animal Ask, and maybe even infrastructural research orgs like Faunalytics, Sentience Institute, etc.
Has this sort of thing been tried before?
Creating an org with this sort of remit seems like a very tricky thing to get right. I expect the fact that this doesn’t exist yet to be somewhat good evidence that no one has the collective trust / remit to just go and do this, since the EAA space has existed for a while and I don’t recall a strong push for this happening.
Possibly you could create a central infrastructural org (“Ops for EAA”) that doesn’t try to do any stewardship over the EAA space, but just offers infrastructural services fairly liberally to EAA orgs. Not sure!
Similar to the above, should more effective giving groups consider consolidating under a larger org in the back end, and retain their existing websites as ‘brands’? e.g. the regional EG groups naively seem like a good candidate for this (Ayuda Efectiva, Effektiv-Spenden.org, GiEffektivt).
If the regional EG model seems promising in general, one benefit of consolidating under a broader project might be that you could then go try and seed new regional EG groups where you think they are most needed, as opposed to solely where there is enough organiser momentum in a particular region to make this happen.
Maybe seeding efforts are already underway and I just don’t know about them!
But perhaps for EG the trustworthiness of your brand is the most important thing, and maybe the most important this is not to be associated with some vague international super-structure to gain legitimacy within your region / avoid accusations of undue foreign influence (I can think of regions where this would be a super bad idea).
A reminder that I spent only 10 minutes on this, I have no special inside knowledge / am not affiliated with any of these orgs, and my main goal was to check if there is any low hanging fruit for consolidation! I’m not sure how good either of the above ideas are.
.
Some observations:
I found it harder than expected to think of any reasonable consolidations of existing orgs
I think the following are quite compelling reasons for orgs to remain small:
If you are doing regional outreach / direct work: It seems plausible that regional advocacy orgs might have strong reasons to not want to be associated with some big super-structure.
If you are doing policy or political advocacy work: Same as above, probably there are real benefits to not having lots of policy orgs closely associated with each other.
If you have quite substantial worldview or opinion disagreements: e.g. some orgs with ostensibly similar mandates seem to exist because they are taking quite different bets (80,000 Hours and Probably Good as one example).
I’m skeptical that merging these sorts of orgs will lead to more productive results, and think competition between orgs with similar mandates is probably more productive than competition within an org (seems kind of awkward if two projects within an org are explicitly competing for the same space!).
Other thoughts:
A bunch of the newer ‘orgs’ seem to be <2 FTE providing some sort of service as a trial, who have given themselves a formal name for legitimacy and branding reasons.
In these cases, it seems totally right for someone to start a service as a quick trial by themselves, get some seed funding, and then get quick evidence from reality within the first few months.
You’d probably need to do a lot more negotiation to house yourself as a project within an established org, and I’m generally in favor of people trying things and failing fast (when downside risks are low).
I feel pretty confused if any consolidations within direct work GH&W orgs make sense. My weak impression is that a lot of more centralized GH&W orgs perform worse than program-specific orgs (scrolling through GiveWell’s top charities fund, all of the recent disbursements are to program-specific organizations, e.g. orgs that focus only/primarily on malaria interventions). But maybe an EA motivated org could do better?
I expect some small orgs exist because a bigger, potential ‘parent’ org doesn’t have enough expertise or time to incubate the smaller project. It would probably incur a bunch of management overhead to move a highly specialized small org into the bigger structure in these cases, which doesn’t seem obviously worth it to me.
In some cases, regional EG groups need to exist as separate entities at a national level to offer tax-deductible options to residents of that country. In many countries, a contribution is only tax advantaged if made to a charity incorporated in that country.
I feel like if I were to call out any specific organizations, people from those organizations would get upset, so I’m hesitant to do that exactly.
Looking at this list, I think a bunch can be consolidated somehow. I get the impression that many of these: - Have employees would be good fits at the another’s org - Share very similar funding sources - Don’t have severe branding/community risks - Aren’t part of Universities
Groups that are very friendly with EA and OP, or some AI safety groups, seem like the easiest to semi-merge. (I say semi because they could still have some levels of isolation)
If two organizations get funded by the same funding org, is it really that different than them being projects within the same org? It seems almost equally awkward to have one funder fund two competitors, than it is for one org to have two competing sub-groups.
Fyi, the list you linked doesn’t contain most of what I would consider the “small” orgs in AI, e.g. off the top of my head I’d name ARC, Redwood Research, Conjecture, Ought, FAR AI, Aligned AI, Apart, Apollo, Epoch, Center for AI Safety, Bluedot, Ashgro, AI Safety Support and Orthogonal. (Some of these aren’t even that small.) Those are the ones I’d be thinking about if I were to talk about merging orgs.
Maybe the non-AI parts of that list are more comprehensive, but my guess is that it’s just missing most of the tiny orgs that OP is talking about (e.g. OP’s own org, QURI, isn’t on the list).
(EDIT: Tbc I’m really keen on actually doing the exercise of naming concrete examples—great suggestion!)
Yeah, fair! It’s frustratingly hard to get comprehensive lists of EA orgs (it’s hard to be in the business of gatekeeping what ‘EA-affiliated’ is). I did a 5 min search for the best publicly available list and then gave up; sometimes I use the list of organizations with representatives at the last EAG for this use case.
Maybe within AI specifically, someone could repeat this exercise with something like this list. If someone knows of a better public list of EA orgs, I’d love to know about it :)
I thought about this briefly a few months ago and came up with these ideas.
CEA—incubate CBG groups as team members until they are registered as separate organisations with their own operations staff
CEA but for professional EA network building (EA Consulting network, High Impact Engineers, Hi-Med, etc). They are even more isolated than CBGs which have some support from CEA
Rethink Priorities—One of the incubated orgs could do similar work to EV Ops (which is maybe what the special projects team is doing already, but it might be good to have something more separate from RP, or a cause specific support org (animal advocacy/AI safety, biosecurity)
EV Ops—Spin out 80k/GWWC to increase capacity for other smaller orgs
Open Phil—Some of their programs might work better with project managers rather than individuals getting grants (e.g. the century fellowship)
Also looking at local groups, there is some coordination on the groups slack and some retreats but there is still a lot of duplication and a high rate of turnover which limits any sustained institutional knowledge.
I directionally agree with this, but am generally averse to putting medium-risk-or-above projects inside a big organization without a sufficiently clear upside to the risk.
As relevant here, turning CBG grantees into CEA employees could potentially create a lot of exposure for CEA for various things that happen in the groups that these people lead. I’d be much more comfortable with spinning off community building into relatively asset-light, special-purpose organizations, e.g., “EA Community Builders of the Bay Area / UK / Etc.” I think you get many of the benefits of centralization that way without exposing the balance sheets of projects that need significant operating capital (and creating a potentially more attractive target for that reason).
I appreciate this sort of pushback / liked this post! :)
For proponents of more consolidation in EA, I’d be excited for more people to try this exercise:
Grab some list of EA-affiliated organizations (e.g. this, maybe there are others)
Set a 10 min timer, scroll through, and for each ‘small’ organization, think about whether it would be good to merge this org something else or be restructured. Make a specific proposal that we can think about!
Share your babble reflections, e.g. in the comments here.
Reasoning: I worry that high level arguments for or against community restructuring sound much nicer in theory than in practice (e.g. it wouldn’t be that surprising to me if the vast majority of small orgs all had good reasons for not starting off as projects). I’ll share my 10 min version in the comments.
.
Also to push back slightly on this narrative, I think there is more coordination in EA than you might expect if you only looked at the raw number of small organizations associated with EA. Some examples:
All the Charity Entrepreneurship orgs (website lists up to 23, but some have shut down) are individual legal entities AFAIK and face some of the ‘small org’ downsides, but the CE founders in each cohort go through a bunch of training together, have a shared support network / an unusual level of understanding on what the other alumni are doing, I assume have some sort of shared communication channels, regularly meet up at EA events, etc. I’d expect the alumni connections probably makes founding a CE org feel substantially less isolating than starting a new org.
Although I guess, I don’t recall any examples of staff moving between CE orgs, or examples of subverting the other downsides the OP mentions. I’d love to be corrected if I’m wrong!
A bunch of EA community building groups / orgs are well connected with each other, the directors go to the same retreats, have shared communication channels, etc. For instance, my impression is that the EA Groups slack is used fairly regularly by a bunch of EA group organizers, and collaborations between groups are quite common. Anecdotally, I recall examples of organizers even moving between groups — e.g. Stanford EA organizers substantially helped a couple of other uni groups build up their programs.
Here is my babble from the above exercise:
Should there be more of a central infrastructure org within the effective animal advocacy space? If this existed, it could be a sensible place to house existing projects like Animal Advocacy Careers (feels analogous to EA Virtual Programs being housed within CEA), Animal Ask, and maybe even infrastructural research orgs like Faunalytics, Sentience Institute, etc.
Has this sort of thing been tried before?
Creating an org with this sort of remit seems like a very tricky thing to get right. I expect the fact that this doesn’t exist yet to be somewhat good evidence that no one has the collective trust / remit to just go and do this, since the EAA space has existed for a while and I don’t recall a strong push for this happening.
Possibly you could create a central infrastructural org (“Ops for EAA”) that doesn’t try to do any stewardship over the EAA space, but just offers infrastructural services fairly liberally to EAA orgs. Not sure!
Similar to the above, should more effective giving groups consider consolidating under a larger org in the back end, and retain their existing websites as ‘brands’? e.g. the regional EG groups naively seem like a good candidate for this (Ayuda Efectiva, Effektiv-Spenden.org, GiEffektivt).
If the regional EG model seems promising in general, one benefit of consolidating under a broader project might be that you could then go try and seed new regional EG groups where you think they are most needed, as opposed to solely where there is enough organiser momentum in a particular region to make this happen.
Maybe seeding efforts are already underway and I just don’t know about them!
But perhaps for EG the trustworthiness of your brand is the most important thing, and maybe the most important this is not to be associated with some vague international super-structure to gain legitimacy within your region / avoid accusations of undue foreign influence (I can think of regions where this would be a super bad idea).
A reminder that I spent only 10 minutes on this, I have no special inside knowledge / am not affiliated with any of these orgs, and my main goal was to check if there is any low hanging fruit for consolidation! I’m not sure how good either of the above ideas are.
.
Some observations:
I found it harder than expected to think of any reasonable consolidations of existing orgs
I think the following are quite compelling reasons for orgs to remain small:
If you are doing regional outreach / direct work: It seems plausible that regional advocacy orgs might have strong reasons to not want to be associated with some big super-structure.
If you are doing policy or political advocacy work: Same as above, probably there are real benefits to not having lots of policy orgs closely associated with each other.
If you have quite substantial worldview or opinion disagreements: e.g. some orgs with ostensibly similar mandates seem to exist because they are taking quite different bets (80,000 Hours and Probably Good as one example).
I’m skeptical that merging these sorts of orgs will lead to more productive results, and think competition between orgs with similar mandates is probably more productive than competition within an org (seems kind of awkward if two projects within an org are explicitly competing for the same space!).
Other thoughts:
A bunch of the newer ‘orgs’ seem to be <2 FTE providing some sort of service as a trial, who have given themselves a formal name for legitimacy and branding reasons.
In these cases, it seems totally right for someone to start a service as a quick trial by themselves, get some seed funding, and then get quick evidence from reality within the first few months.
You’d probably need to do a lot more negotiation to house yourself as a project within an established org, and I’m generally in favor of people trying things and failing fast (when downside risks are low).
I feel pretty confused if any consolidations within direct work GH&W orgs make sense. My weak impression is that a lot of more centralized GH&W orgs perform worse than program-specific orgs (scrolling through GiveWell’s top charities fund, all of the recent disbursements are to program-specific organizations, e.g. orgs that focus only/primarily on malaria interventions). But maybe an EA motivated org could do better?
I expect some small orgs exist because a bigger, potential ‘parent’ org doesn’t have enough expertise or time to incubate the smaller project. It would probably incur a bunch of management overhead to move a highly specialized small org into the bigger structure in these cases, which doesn’t seem obviously worth it to me.
In some cases, regional EG groups need to exist as separate entities at a national level to offer tax-deductible options to residents of that country. In many countries, a contribution is only tax advantaged if made to a charity incorporated in that country.
I feel like if I were to call out any specific organizations, people from those organizations would get upset, so I’m hesitant to do that exactly.
Looking at this list, I think a bunch can be consolidated somehow. I get the impression that many of these:
- Have employees would be good fits at the another’s org
- Share very similar funding sources
- Don’t have severe branding/community risks
- Aren’t part of Universities
Groups that are very friendly with EA and OP, or some AI safety groups, seem like the easiest to semi-merge. (I say semi because they could still have some levels of isolation)
If two organizations get funded by the same funding org, is it really that different than them being projects within the same org? It seems almost equally awkward to have one funder fund two competitors, than it is for one org to have two competing sub-groups.
Fyi, the list you linked doesn’t contain most of what I would consider the “small” orgs in AI, e.g. off the top of my head I’d name ARC, Redwood Research, Conjecture, Ought, FAR AI, Aligned AI, Apart, Apollo, Epoch, Center for AI Safety, Bluedot, Ashgro, AI Safety Support and Orthogonal. (Some of these aren’t even that small.) Those are the ones I’d be thinking about if I were to talk about merging orgs.
Maybe the non-AI parts of that list are more comprehensive, but my guess is that it’s just missing most of the tiny orgs that OP is talking about (e.g. OP’s own org, QURI, isn’t on the list).
(EDIT: Tbc I’m really keen on actually doing the exercise of naming concrete examples—great suggestion!)
Yeah, fair! It’s frustratingly hard to get comprehensive lists of EA orgs (it’s hard to be in the business of gatekeeping what ‘EA-affiliated’ is). I did a 5 min search for the best publicly available list and then gave up; sometimes I use the list of organizations with representatives at the last EAG for this use case.
Maybe within AI specifically, someone could repeat this exercise with something like this list. If someone knows of a better public list of EA orgs, I’d love to know about it :)
I thought about this briefly a few months ago and came up with these ideas.
CEA—incubate CBG groups as team members until they are registered as separate organisations with their own operations staff
CEA but for professional EA network building (EA Consulting network, High Impact Engineers, Hi-Med, etc). They are even more isolated than CBGs which have some support from CEA
Rethink Priorities—One of the incubated orgs could do similar work to EV Ops (which is maybe what the special projects team is doing already, but it might be good to have something more separate from RP, or a cause specific support org (animal advocacy/AI safety, biosecurity)
EV Ops—Spin out 80k/GWWC to increase capacity for other smaller orgs
Open Phil—Some of their programs might work better with project managers rather than individuals getting grants (e.g. the century fellowship)
Also looking at local groups, there is some coordination on the groups slack and some retreats but there is still a lot of duplication and a high rate of turnover which limits any sustained institutional knowledge.
I directionally agree with this, but am generally averse to putting medium-risk-or-above projects inside a big organization without a sufficiently clear upside to the risk.
As relevant here, turning CBG grantees into CEA employees could potentially create a lot of exposure for CEA for various things that happen in the groups that these people lead. I’d be much more comfortable with spinning off community building into relatively asset-light, special-purpose organizations, e.g., “EA Community Builders of the Bay Area / UK / Etc.” I think you get many of the benefits of centralization that way without exposing the balance sheets of projects that need significant operating capital (and creating a potentially more attractive target for that reason).
A separate organisation just for CBGs would have been useful too rather than a lot of one and two person teams with constant turnover.