In what sense does EA have something like a leadership?
There is no official overarching EA organisation. Strictly speaking, EA is just a collection of people who all individually does whatever they want. Some of these people have chosen to set up various orgs that does various things.
But in a less formal but still very real way, EA is very hierarchical. There is a lot of concentration of power.
Some of this is based on status and trust. Some people and orgs have built up a reputation which grants them a lot of soft power within the EA network.
Some of this is because of entrenched infrastructure. CEA runs EA global and gets to decide who can attend. CEA also owns the trademark for “Effective Altruism”, and sometimes use this to pressure other projects to do what CEA wants. (I don’t know how often this happens since I only have sparce anecdotal information.)
But the biggest power factor is control of money. Most EA funding comes from a few mega donors.
And all of these three points mix. EA funds is an infrastructure (2) that controls the flow of funding (3) which CEA could set up because they have status and trust (1). Because of how these things intermingle, the same few people might end up controlling all three.
So maybe EA don’t have a leadership, but we do have some sort of power center. What, if anything, does the people in power owe the rest of us?
There isn’t an obvious answer. Probably the above question is not even the right framing.
For myself, I’m mostly over debating what the central powers of EA should do. Given the massive lack of transparency, I just don’t know.
I’d like to see an EA movement that is less centralised, and I don’t expect the people currently in power to do anything about that. Maybe they can’t or maybe they don’t want to. I don’t care anymore which one it is.
I’d love to see someone set up alternative EA infrastructure. I want a competitor to EA Funds. I want an alternative job board that is not controlled by 80k. This is not about these orgs being bad, but about centralisation being bad.
But I also know that it is hard work setting up alternative infrastructure. It takes time for new things to get traction. It takes time for the word to spread about you even existing.
If established EA orgs want to decrease centralisation (which again, I don’t know if they do) then one of the biggest things they could do is to promote their competitors.
In what sense does EA have something like a leadership?
There is no official overarching EA organisation. Strictly speaking, EA is just a collection of people who all individually does whatever they want. Some of these people have chosen to set up various orgs that does various things.
But in a less formal but still very real way, EA is very hierarchical. There is a lot of concentration of power.
Some of this is based on status and trust. Some people and orgs have built up a reputation which grants them a lot of soft power within the EA network.
Some of this is because of entrenched infrastructure. CEA runs EA global and gets to decide who can attend. CEA also owns the trademark for “Effective Altruism”, and sometimes use this to pressure other projects to do what CEA wants. (I don’t know how often this happens since I only have sparce anecdotal information.)
But the biggest power factor is control of money. Most EA funding comes from a few mega donors.
And all of these three points mix. EA funds is an infrastructure (2) that controls the flow of funding (3) which CEA could set up because they have status and trust (1). Because of how these things intermingle, the same few people might end up controlling all three.
So maybe EA don’t have a leadership, but we do have some sort of power center. What, if anything, does the people in power owe the rest of us?
There isn’t an obvious answer. Probably the above question is not even the right framing.
For myself, I’m mostly over debating what the central powers of EA should do. Given the massive lack of transparency, I just don’t know.
I’d like to see an EA movement that is less centralised, and I don’t expect the people currently in power to do anything about that. Maybe they can’t or maybe they don’t want to. I don’t care anymore which one it is.
I’d love to see someone set up alternative EA infrastructure. I want a competitor to EA Funds. I want an alternative job board that is not controlled by 80k. This is not about these orgs being bad, but about centralisation being bad.
But I also know that it is hard work setting up alternative infrastructure. It takes time for new things to get traction. It takes time for the word to spread about you even existing.
Did you know there is a second EA career advice org?
Probably Good | Impact-focused Career Advice
If established EA orgs want to decrease centralisation (which again, I don’t know if they do) then one of the biggest things they could do is to promote their competitors.