My model is that the “community” doesn’t really have much power directly, at this point. OP has power, and to the extent that they fund certain groups (at this point, when funding is so centralized), CEA and a few other groups have power.
I more or less agree with this. Though I think some of CEA’s power derives not only from having OP funding, but also the type of work CEA does (e.g. deciding who attends and talks at EAG). And other orgs and individuals have power related to reputation, quality of work, and ability to connect people with resources (money, jobs, etc).
Regarding how different parts of the community might be able to implement changes, it might be helpful to think about “top-down” vs. “bottom-up” reforms.
Top-down reforms would be initiated by the orgs/people that already have power. The problem, as you note, is that “OP and these other top EA groups feel like they just have a lot going on, and aren’t well positioned to do other significant reforms/changes.” (There may also be an issue whereby people with power don’t like to give it up.) But some changes are already in the works, most notably the EV breakup. This creates lots of opportunities to fix past problems, e.g. around board composition since there will be a lot more boards in the post-breakup world. Examples I’d like to see include:
EA ombudsperson/people on CEA’s board and/or advisory panel of with representatives from different parts of the community. (There used to be an advisory panel of this sort, but from what I understand they were consulted for practically, or perhaps literally, nothing).
Reduced reliance on OP’s GCRCB program as the overwhelmingly dominant funder of EA orgs. I’d like it even more if we could find a way to reduce reliance on OP overall as a funder, but that would require finding new money (hard) or making do with less money (bad). But even if OP shifted to funding CEA and other key EA orgs from a roughly even mix of its Global Catastrophic Risks and its Global Health and Wellbeing teams, that would be an enormous improvement IMO.
The fact that key EA orgs (including ones responsible for functions on behalf of the community) are overwhelmingly funded by a program which has priorities that only align with a subset of the community is IMO the most problematic incentive structure in EA. Compounding this problem, I think awareness of this dynamic is generally quite limited (people think of CEA as being funded by OP, not by OP’s GCRCB program), and appreciation of its implications even more so.
Vastly expanding the universe of people who serve on the boards of organizations that have power, and hopefully including more community representation on those boards.
Creating, implementing, and sharing good organizational policies around COI, donor due diligence, whistleblower protections, etc. (Note that this is supposedly in process.[1])
Bottom up reforms would be initiated by lay-EAs, the folks who make up the vast majority of the community. The obstacles to bottom up reforms are finding ways to fund them and coordinate them; almost by definition these people aren’t organized.
Examples I’d like to see include:
People starting dedicated projects focused on improving EA governance (broadly defined)
This could also involve a contest to identify (and incentivize the identification of) the best ideas
Establishment of some sort of coalition to facilitate coordination between local groups. I think “groups as a whole” could serve as a decentralized locus of power that could serve as a counterbalance to the existing centralized power bases. But right now, I don’t get the impression that there are good ways for groups to coordinate.
EAIF focusing on and/or earmarking some percentage of grantmaking towards improving EA governance (broadly defined). As mentioned earlier, lack of funding is a bit obstacle for bottom up reforms, so the EAIF (~$20m in grants since start of 2020) could be a huge help.
Individual EAs acting empowered to improve governance (broadly defined), e.g. publicly voicing support for various reforms, calling out problems they see, incorporating governance issues into their giving decisions, serving on boards, etc)
In December, Zach Robinson wrote: “EV also started working on structural improvements shortly after FTX’s collapse and continued to do so alongside the investigation. Over the past year, we have implemented structural governance and oversight improvements, including restructuring the way the two EV charities work together, updating and improving key corporate policies and procedures at both charities, increasing the rigor of donor due diligence, and staffing up the in-house legal departments. Nevertheless, good governance and oversight is not a goal that can ever be definitively ‘completed’, and we’ll continue to iterate and improve. We plan to open source those improvements where feasible so the whole EA ecosystem can learn from EV’s challenges and benefit from the work we’ve done.”
Open sourcing these improvements would be terrific, though to the best of my knowledge this hasn’t actually happened yet, which is disappointing. Though this stuff has been shared and I’ve just missed it.
Can you say more about why the distinction between “Open Philanthropy” and “Open Philanthropy GCRCB team” matters? What subset of the community does this GCRCB team align with vs not? I’ve never heard this before
In 2023, 80% of CEA’s budget came from OP’s GCRCB team. This creates an obvious incentive for CEA to prioritize the stuff the GCRCB team prioritizes.
As its name suggests, the GCRCB team has an overt focus on Global Catastrophic Risks. Here’s how OP’s website describes this team:
We want to increase the number of people who aim to prevent catastrophic events, and help them to achieve their goals.
We believe that scope-sensitive giving often means focusing on the reduction of global catastrophic risks — those which could endanger billions of people. We support organizations and projects that connect and support people who want to work on these issues, with a special focus on biosecurity and risks from advanced AI. In doing so, we hope to grow and empower the community of people focused on addressing threats to humanity and protecting the future of human civilization.
The work we fund in this area is primarily focused on identifying and supporting people who are or could eventually become helpful partners, critics, and grantees.
This team was formerly known as “Effective Altruism Community Growth (Longtermism).”
CEA has also received a much smaller amount of funding from OP’s “Effective Altruism (Global Health and Wellbeing)” team. From what I can tell, the GHW team basically focuses on meta charities doing global poverty type and animal welfare work (often via fundraising for effective charities in those fields). The OP website notes:
“This focus area uses the lens of our global health and wellbeing portfolio, just as our global catastrophic risks capacity building area uses the lens of our GCR portfolio… Our funding so far has focused on [grantees that] Raise funds for highly effective charities, Enable people to have a greater impact with their careers, and found and incubate new charities working on important and neglected interventions.”
There is an enormous difference between these teams in terms of their historical and ongoing impact on EA funding and incentives. The GCRCB team has granted over $400 million since 2016, including over $70 million to CEA and over $25 million to 80k. Compare that to the GHW which launched “in July 2022. In its first 12 months, the program had a budget of $10 million.”
So basically there’s been a ton of funding for a long time for EA community building that prioritizes AI/Bio/other GCR work, and a vastly smaller amount of funding that only became available recently for EA community building that uses a global poverty/animal welfare lens. And, as your question suggests, this dynamic is not at all well understood.
I think the correct interpretation of this is that OP GHW doesn’t think general community building for its cause areas is cost effective, which seems quite plausible to me. [Edit: note I’m saying community-building in general, not just the EA community specifically—so under this view, the skewing of the EA community is less relevant. My baseline assumption is that any sort of community-building in developed countries isn’t an efficient use of money, so you need quite a strong case for increased impact for it to be worthwhile.].
I agree it’s likely they have a smaller budget, but equating budget with total spend per year (rather than saying that one is an indication of the other) is slightly begging the question—any gap between the two may reflect relevant CEAs.
I don’t think they had dramatically more money in 2023, and (without checking the numbers again to save time) I am pretty sure they mostly maxed out their budget both years.
That may well have been OP’s thinking and they may have been correct about the relative cost effectiveness of community building in GCR vs. GHW. But that doesn’t change the fact that this funding strategy had massive (and IMO problematic) implications for the incentive structure of the entire EA community.
I think it should be fairly uncontroversial that the best way to align the incentives of organizations like CEA with the views and values of the broader community would be if they were funded by organizations/program areas that made decisions using the lens of EA, not subsets of EA like GCR or GHW. OP is free to prioritize whatever it wants, including prioritizing things ahead of aligning CEA’s incentives with those of the EA community. But as things stand significant misalignment of incentives exists, and I think it’s important to acknowledge and spread awareness of that situation.
By analogy, suppose there were a Center for Medical Studies that was funded ~80% by a group interested in just cardiology. Influenced by the resultant incentives, the CMS hires a bunch of cardiologists, pushes medical students toward cardiology residencies, and devotes an entire instance of its flagship Medical Research Global conference to the exclusive study of topics in cardiology. All those things are fine, but this org shouldn’t use a name that implies that it takes a more general and balanced perspective on the field of medical studies, and should make very very clear that it doesn’t speak for the medical community as a whole.
> funded by organizations/program areas that made decisions using the lens of EA
I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar thing occured—those orgs/programs decide that it isn’t that cost-effective to do GHW community-building. I could see it going another way, but my baseline assumption is that any sort of community-building in developed countries isn’t an efficient use of money, so you need quite a strong case for increased impact for it to be worthwhile.
I dunno, I think a funder that had a goal and mindset of funding EA community building could just do stuff like fund cause-agnostic EAGs and a maintenance of a cause-agnostic effectivealtruism.org, and nor really worry about things like the relative cost-effectiveness of GCR community building vs. GHW community building.
I more or less agree with this. Though I think some of CEA’s power derives not only from having OP funding, but also the type of work CEA does (e.g. deciding who attends and talks at EAG). And other orgs and individuals have power related to reputation, quality of work, and ability to connect people with resources (money, jobs, etc).
Regarding how different parts of the community might be able to implement changes, it might be helpful to think about “top-down” vs. “bottom-up” reforms.
Top-down reforms would be initiated by the orgs/people that already have power. The problem, as you note, is that “OP and these other top EA groups feel like they just have a lot going on, and aren’t well positioned to do other significant reforms/changes.” (There may also be an issue whereby people with power don’t like to give it up.) But some changes are already in the works, most notably the EV breakup. This creates lots of opportunities to fix past problems, e.g. around board composition since there will be a lot more boards in the post-breakup world. Examples I’d like to see include:
EA ombudsperson/people on CEA’s board and/or advisory panel of with representatives from different parts of the community. (There used to be an advisory panel of this sort, but from what I understand they were consulted for practically, or perhaps literally, nothing).
Reduced reliance on OP’s GCRCB program as the overwhelmingly dominant funder of EA orgs. I’d like it even more if we could find a way to reduce reliance on OP overall as a funder, but that would require finding new money (hard) or making do with less money (bad). But even if OP shifted to funding CEA and other key EA orgs from a roughly even mix of its Global Catastrophic Risks and its Global Health and Wellbeing teams, that would be an enormous improvement IMO.
The fact that key EA orgs (including ones responsible for functions on behalf of the community) are overwhelmingly funded by a program which has priorities that only align with a subset of the community is IMO the most problematic incentive structure in EA. Compounding this problem, I think awareness of this dynamic is generally quite limited (people think of CEA as being funded by OP, not by OP’s GCRCB program), and appreciation of its implications even more so.
Vastly expanding the universe of people who serve on the boards of organizations that have power, and hopefully including more community representation on those boards.
Creating, implementing, and sharing good organizational policies around COI, donor due diligence, whistleblower protections, etc. (Note that this is supposedly in process.[1])
Bottom up reforms would be initiated by lay-EAs, the folks who make up the vast majority of the community. The obstacles to bottom up reforms are finding ways to fund them and coordinate them; almost by definition these people aren’t organized.
Examples I’d like to see include:
People starting dedicated projects focused on improving EA governance (broadly defined)
This could also involve a contest to identify (and incentivize the identification of) the best ideas
Establishment of some sort of coalition to facilitate coordination between local groups. I think “groups as a whole” could serve as a decentralized locus of power that could serve as a counterbalance to the existing centralized power bases. But right now, I don’t get the impression that there are good ways for groups to coordinate.
EAIF focusing on and/or earmarking some percentage of grantmaking towards improving EA governance (broadly defined). As mentioned earlier, lack of funding is a bit obstacle for bottom up reforms, so the EAIF (~$20m in grants since start of 2020) could be a huge help.
Individual EAs acting empowered to improve governance (broadly defined), e.g. publicly voicing support for various reforms, calling out problems they see, incorporating governance issues into their giving decisions, serving on boards, etc)
In December, Zach Robinson wrote: “EV also started working on structural improvements shortly after FTX’s collapse and continued to do so alongside the investigation. Over the past year, we have implemented structural governance and oversight improvements, including restructuring the way the two EV charities work together, updating and improving key corporate policies and procedures at both charities, increasing the rigor of donor due diligence, and staffing up the in-house legal departments. Nevertheless, good governance and oversight is not a goal that can ever be definitively ‘completed’, and we’ll continue to iterate and improve. We plan to open source those improvements where feasible so the whole EA ecosystem can learn from EV’s challenges and benefit from the work we’ve done.”
Open sourcing these improvements would be terrific, though to the best of my knowledge this hasn’t actually happened yet, which is disappointing. Though this stuff has been shared and I’ve just missed it.
Can you say more about why the distinction between “Open Philanthropy” and “Open Philanthropy GCRCB team” matters? What subset of the community does this GCRCB team align with vs not? I’ve never heard this before
In 2023, 80% of CEA’s budget came from OP’s GCRCB team. This creates an obvious incentive for CEA to prioritize the stuff the GCRCB team prioritizes.
As its name suggests, the GCRCB team has an overt focus on Global Catastrophic Risks. Here’s how OP’s website describes this team:
CEA has also received a much smaller amount of funding from OP’s “Effective Altruism (Global Health and Wellbeing)” team. From what I can tell, the GHW team basically focuses on meta charities doing global poverty type and animal welfare work (often via fundraising for effective charities in those fields). The OP website notes:
There is an enormous difference between these teams in terms of their historical and ongoing impact on EA funding and incentives. The GCRCB team has granted over $400 million since 2016, including over $70 million to CEA and over $25 million to 80k. Compare that to the GHW which launched “in July 2022. In its first 12 months, the program had a budget of $10 million.”
So basically there’s been a ton of funding for a long time for EA community building that prioritizes AI/Bio/other GCR work, and a vastly smaller amount of funding that only became available recently for EA community building that uses a global poverty/animal welfare lens. And, as your question suggests, this dynamic is not at all well understood.
I think the correct interpretation of this is that OP GHW doesn’t think general community building for its cause areas is cost effective, which seems quite plausible to me. [Edit: note I’m saying community-building in general, not just the EA community specifically—so under this view, the skewing of the EA community is less relevant. My baseline assumption is that any sort of community-building in developed countries isn’t an efficient use of money, so you need quite a strong case for increased impact for it to be worthwhile.].
The risk, I think, is that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where:
Prominent EA institutions get funded mostly from OP-GCRCB money
Those institutions then prioritise GCRs[1] more
The EA community gets more focused on GCRs by either deferring to these institutions or evaporative cooling by less GCR/longtermist EAs
Due to the increased GCR focus of EA, GHW/AW funders think that funding prominent EA institutions is not cost-effective for their goals
Go-to step 1
Using this as a general term for AI x-risk, longtermism, etc/
They also have a much smaller budget (as indicated by total spend per year).
You can see a direct comparison of total funding in this post I wrote: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nnTQaLpBfy2znG5vm/the-flow-of-funding-in-ea-movement-building#Overall_picture
I agree it’s likely they have a smaller budget, but equating budget with total spend per year (rather than saying that one is an indication of the other) is slightly begging the question—any gap between the two may reflect relevant CEAs.
Fair point, I couldn’t find a link to point to the budget, but:
“We launched this program in July 2022. In its first 12 months, the program had a budget of $10 million.”
From their website—https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/ea-global-health-and-wellbeing/
I don’t think they had dramatically more money in 2023, and (without checking the numbers again to save time) I am pretty sure they mostly maxed out their budget both years.
That may well have been OP’s thinking and they may have been correct about the relative cost effectiveness of community building in GCR vs. GHW. But that doesn’t change the fact that this funding strategy had massive (and IMO problematic) implications for the incentive structure of the entire EA community.
I think it should be fairly uncontroversial that the best way to align the incentives of organizations like CEA with the views and values of the broader community would be if they were funded by organizations/program areas that made decisions using the lens of EA, not subsets of EA like GCR or GHW. OP is free to prioritize whatever it wants, including prioritizing things ahead of aligning CEA’s incentives with those of the EA community. But as things stand significant misalignment of incentives exists, and I think it’s important to acknowledge and spread awareness of that situation.
A name change would be a good start.
By analogy, suppose there were a Center for Medical Studies that was funded ~80% by a group interested in just cardiology. Influenced by the resultant incentives, the CMS hires a bunch of cardiologists, pushes medical students toward cardiology residencies, and devotes an entire instance of its flagship Medical Research Global conference to the exclusive study of topics in cardiology. All those things are fine, but this org shouldn’t use a name that implies that it takes a more general and balanced perspective on the field of medical studies, and should make very very clear that it doesn’t speak for the medical community as a whole.
> funded by organizations/program areas that made decisions using the lens of EA
I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar thing occured—those orgs/programs decide that it isn’t that cost-effective to do GHW community-building. I could see it going another way, but my baseline assumption is that any sort of community-building in developed countries isn’t an efficient use of money, so you need quite a strong case for increased impact for it to be worthwhile.
I dunno, I think a funder that had a goal and mindset of funding EA community building could just do stuff like fund cause-agnostic EAGs and a maintenance of a cause-agnostic effectivealtruism.org, and nor really worry about things like the relative cost-effectiveness of GCR community building vs. GHW community building.