For the EA community: People who are already dead-set on US cancer research (or whatever) go through the motions of EAness to get their vote, diluting the truthseeking nature of the community. And expending mentorships, EAG slots, etc. on people who are going through the motions to get a vote is not a good use of limited resources.
For the donors: The problem is that the donors will always have the option of the existing system—e.g., deferring to OpenPhil, or to SFF, or EA Funds, picking recipients themselves, etc. To get anywhere, you’ve got to persuade the donors that your method will produce better results than the status quo. I think there’s a strong argument that the collective wisdom of the EA community could theoretically do that, and a less clear argument that it could practically do that. But the argument that a community of 50% current EAs and 50% join-for-predetermined-pet-causes-folks could do so seems a lot weaker to me!
Maybe it works better under particularly strong versions of “some form of EA were to be practiced on a national scale”? But you’d have to convert at least large swaths of donors to the democratic system first. Otherwise, EA-aligned donors see their monies siphoned off for opera etc. and get nothing in return for their preferred causes from non-participating donors. Across the history of philanthropy, I suspect the percentage of donors who would be happy to hand over control to the demos is . . . low. So I’m struggling to see a viable theory of change between “bootstrapping” and national adoption.
For the donors, I don’t have a lot to add, but I’ll re-state my point.
Donors today at least claim to be worried about having outsized power in a way that could cause them to get their causes or allocations ‘wrong’. As you note, the wisdom of the crowd could solve this. If these donors don’t want things going off course, they could pre-specify a list of subcauses they’re interested in funding, or even a broader area, or this should keep those benefits while mitigating most of the harms.
People who are already dead-set on US cancer research (or whatever) go through the motions of EAness to get their vote, diluting the truthseeking nature of the community.
Again, I know my take on this is a bit unorthodox, but it’s important to remember that we’re not bridging is-ought. If someone truly believes that funding the opera is the highest moral good, and then they determine the most effective way to do so, they are practicing truthseeking. But if they truly believed that preventing suffering was the highest moral good and still voted to fund the opera, then they would (probably) not be truthseeking. I think this distinction is important—both ‘failure modes’ produce the same outcome by very different means!
Whether it is bad to expend those resources depends on how you define EA. If EA is truly cause-neutral, then there’s no problem. But I think you and I agree that Actually Existing EA does generally prefer ‘reduce suffering’ as a cause (and is cause-neutral within that), and in this sense it would be a shame if resources were spent on other things. Hence, a bootstrapped version of democratic altruism would probably restrict itself to this and let people choose within it.
That’s valid—I do not have a brain scanner so cannot reliably distinguish someone who merely went through the motions to vote for opera vs. someone who seriously considered the world’s most pressing problems and honestly decided that opera was at the top of the list.
In theory, EA principles are cause-neutral, so one could apply them to the belief that the greatest good is introducing people to the Flying Spaghetti Monster and being touched by his noodle-y appendage. And I guess I want opera people to do opera as effectively as possible (my hesitation is based on lack of clarity on what that even means in the opera context)? I’m just not interested in funding either of those, nor am I interested in providing strong incentives for people with those goals to join the existing EA community in significant numbers. They are welcome to start the Effective Opera or Effective FSM movements, though!
For the EA community: People who are already dead-set on US cancer research (or whatever) go through the motions of EAness to get their vote, diluting the truthseeking nature of the community. And expending mentorships, EAG slots, etc. on people who are going through the motions to get a vote is not a good use of limited resources.
For the donors: The problem is that the donors will always have the option of the existing system—e.g., deferring to OpenPhil, or to SFF, or EA Funds, picking recipients themselves, etc. To get anywhere, you’ve got to persuade the donors that your method will produce better results than the status quo. I think there’s a strong argument that the collective wisdom of the EA community could theoretically do that, and a less clear argument that it could practically do that. But the argument that a community of 50% current EAs and 50% join-for-predetermined-pet-causes-folks could do so seems a lot weaker to me!
Maybe it works better under particularly strong versions of “some form of EA were to be practiced on a national scale”? But you’d have to convert at least large swaths of donors to the democratic system first. Otherwise, EA-aligned donors see their monies siphoned off for opera etc. and get nothing in return for their preferred causes from non-participating donors. Across the history of philanthropy, I suspect the percentage of donors who would be happy to hand over control to the demos is . . . low. So I’m struggling to see a viable theory of change between “bootstrapping” and national adoption.
For the donors, I don’t have a lot to add, but I’ll re-state my point.
Donors today at least claim to be worried about having outsized power in a way that could cause them to get their causes or allocations ‘wrong’. As you note, the wisdom of the crowd could solve this. If these donors don’t want things going off course, they could pre-specify a list of subcauses they’re interested in funding, or even a broader area, or this should keep those benefits while mitigating most of the harms.
Again, I know my take on this is a bit unorthodox, but it’s important to remember that we’re not bridging is-ought. If someone truly believes that funding the opera is the highest moral good, and then they determine the most effective way to do so, they are practicing truthseeking. But if they truly believed that preventing suffering was the highest moral good and still voted to fund the opera, then they would (probably) not be truthseeking. I think this distinction is important—both ‘failure modes’ produce the same outcome by very different means!
Whether it is bad to expend those resources depends on how you define EA. If EA is truly cause-neutral, then there’s no problem. But I think you and I agree that Actually Existing EA does generally prefer ‘reduce suffering’ as a cause (and is cause-neutral within that), and in this sense it would be a shame if resources were spent on other things. Hence, a bootstrapped version of democratic altruism would probably restrict itself to this and let people choose within it.
That’s valid—I do not have a brain scanner so cannot reliably distinguish someone who merely went through the motions to vote for opera vs. someone who seriously considered the world’s most pressing problems and honestly decided that opera was at the top of the list.
In theory, EA principles are cause-neutral, so one could apply them to the belief that the greatest good is introducing people to the Flying Spaghetti Monster and being touched by his noodle-y appendage. And I guess I want opera people to do opera as effectively as possible (my hesitation is based on lack of clarity on what that even means in the opera context)? I’m just not interested in funding either of those, nor am I interested in providing strong incentives for people with those goals to join the existing EA community in significant numbers. They are welcome to start the Effective Opera or Effective FSM movements, though!