They curate and run a conference called EA Global, effectivealtruism.org (including this forum)… Unless they cede control of these major parts of EA infrastructure… then they will continue to be the de facto leaders of the movement.
I don’t think this is true, necessarily. They can run this infrastructure without leading the movement; for example, the website could be descriptive rather than prescriptive, and they could run the conferences just by renting event spaces and then inviting speakers from whichever orgs are the current thought leaders.
I agree in the abstract. However, I think in practice this is pretty hard to do, because there’s a lot of subjective judgement in deciding how to describe a movement or who the current thought leaders are.
I’d say more towards the former (unless there’s a lot of moderation going on that I’m unaware of). The forum is largely self-regulating by the use of up/downvoting, which isn’t possible in other avenues. There are obviously, and necessarily, some exceptions to this (eg: seperating out the community tag, the digest has a lot more curation).
I don’t think this is true, necessarily. They can run this infrastructure without leading the movement; for example, the website could be descriptive rather than prescriptive, and they could run the conferences just by renting event spaces and then inviting speakers from whichever orgs are the current thought leaders.
I agree in the abstract. However, I think in practice this is pretty hard to do, because there’s a lot of subjective judgement in deciding how to describe a movement or who the current thought leaders are.
I’d be curious to hear your impression on where the Forum team is on the scale of “just running infrastructure” or “leading the movement.”
I’d say more towards the former (unless there’s a lot of moderation going on that I’m unaware of). The forum is largely self-regulating by the use of up/downvoting, which isn’t possible in other avenues. There are obviously, and necessarily, some exceptions to this (eg: seperating out the community tag, the digest has a lot more curation).