I don’t think de jure leaders for the movement as a whole are possible or desirable, to be clear. Our current model to my mind looks like a highly polycentric community with many robust local groups and organizations. Those organizations often have de jure leaders. But then in the wider community people are simply influential for informal reasons.
I think that’s fine (and indeed pretty decentralised!). I’m not sure what specific problems you have with it? Which of the recent problems stemmed from centralized decision-making rather than individuals or organizations making decentralized decisions that you just disagree with?
I’m not especially interested in assigning blame but when you ask the question who could make significant change to the culture or structure of EA I do think the answer falls on the thought leaders, even if they don’t have official positions.
I don’t agree with this. IMO significant changes to culture or structure in communities rarely come from high-status people and usually come from lots of people in the community. You have the power of persuasive argumentation (which I also think is about as much power as most people have, and quite effective in EA): go forth and argue for what you want!
To be clear I wasn’t necessarily advocating for political organization or centralization, but I disagree that the lack of centralization is an excuse for the thought leaders when they could create centralization If they wanted. It basically serves as a get-out-of-jail-free card for anything they do, since they have de facto control but can always lean back on not having official leadership positions. For the most part the other comments better explain what I meant.
I think a significant point of disagreement here is to what degree we see some people as having de facto control or not.
As you’ve probably realised, my view of the EA community is as broadly lacking in coordination or control, but with a few influential actors. Maybe I’m just wrong, though.
Yea I agree that is the main crux of our disagreement. I guess a lot of it comes down to what it means for someone to have (de facto) control. Ultimately we are just setting some arbitrary threshold for what control means. I don’t think it matters that much to iron out if certain people have “control” or not, but it would probably be useful to think about it in more numerical terms in relation to some sort of median EA.
Some metrics to use
Ability to set the internal discourse (e.g. karma/attention multiplier on forum posts compared to a baseline ea)
Ability to set external discourse (e.g. who is going on high viewership media stuff)
I think this would be a huge improvement in the discourse. Focussing on specific activities or behaviours that we can agree on rather than vaguer terms like “control” would probably help a lot. Examples of arguments in that vein that I would probably like a lot more:
“CEA shouldn’t have a comms arm”
“There should be more organizations running EA conferences”
“EA Forum moderators should have more power versus CEA and be user-appointed”
“People should not hold positions in more than one funding body”
I don’t think de jure leaders for the movement as a whole are possible or desirable, to be clear. Our current model to my mind looks like a highly polycentric community with many robust local groups and organizations. Those organizations often have de jure leaders. But then in the wider community people are simply influential for informal reasons.
I think that’s fine (and indeed pretty decentralised!). I’m not sure what specific problems you have with it? Which of the recent problems stemmed from centralized decision-making rather than individuals or organizations making decentralized decisions that you just disagree with?
I don’t agree with this. IMO significant changes to culture or structure in communities rarely come from high-status people and usually come from lots of people in the community. You have the power of persuasive argumentation (which I also think is about as much power as most people have, and quite effective in EA): go forth and argue for what you want!
To be clear I wasn’t necessarily advocating for political organization or centralization, but I disagree that the lack of centralization is an excuse for the thought leaders when they could create centralization If they wanted. It basically serves as a get-out-of-jail-free card for anything they do, since they have de facto control but can always lean back on not having official leadership positions. For the most part the other comments better explain what I meant.
I think a significant point of disagreement here is to what degree we see some people as having de facto control or not.
As you’ve probably realised, my view of the EA community is as broadly lacking in coordination or control, but with a few influential actors. Maybe I’m just wrong, though.
Yea I agree that is the main crux of our disagreement. I guess a lot of it comes down to what it means for someone to have (de facto) control. Ultimately we are just setting some arbitrary threshold for what control means. I don’t think it matters that much to iron out if certain people have “control” or not, but it would probably be useful to think about it in more numerical terms in relation to some sort of median EA.
Some metrics to use
Ability to set the internal discourse (e.g. karma/attention multiplier on forum posts compared to a baseline ea)
Ability to set external discourse (e.g. who is going on high viewership media stuff)
Control of the movement of money
Control of organizational direction for ea orgs
I think this would be a huge improvement in the discourse. Focussing on specific activities or behaviours that we can agree on rather than vaguer terms like “control” would probably help a lot. Examples of arguments in that vein that I would probably like a lot more:
“CEA shouldn’t have a comms arm”
“There should be more organizations running EA conferences”
“EA Forum moderators should have more power versus CEA and be user-appointed”
“People should not hold positions in more than one funding body”
etc.