(This is an annoyed post. Having re-read it, I think it’s mostly not mean, but please downvote it if you think it is mean and I’ll delete it.)
I have a pretty negative reaction to this post, and a number of similar others in this vein. Maybe I should write a longer post on this, but my general observation is that many people have suddenly started looking for the “adults in the room”, mostly so that they can say “why didn’t the adults prevent this bad thing from happening?”, and that they have decided that “EA Leadership” are the adults.
But I’m not sure “EA Leadership” is really a thing, since EA is a movement of all kinds of people doing all kinds of things, and so “EA Leadership” fails to identify specific people who actually have any responsibility towards you. The result is that these kinds of questions end up either being vague or suggesting some kind of mysterious shadowy council of “EA Leaders” who are secretly doing naughty things.
It gets worse! When people do look for an identifiable figure to blame, the only person who looks vaguely like a leader is Will, so they pick on him. But Will is not the CEO of EA! He’s a philosopher who writes books about EA and has received a bunch of funding to do PR stuff. But people really want him to be the CEO of EA so they can be angry that he’s not being more CEO-like, and that seems pretty unfair to me.
But I think the reality is: there are no adults in the room, who are managing everything behind the scenes, and who you can be angry at for failing you. There are a lot of people doing various specific ways, and working with each other in various more-or-less coordinated ways. “EA” does not do things, “EA” did not “endorse” SBF. Some specific individuals may have done this, but the shadowy council of EA Leadership did not meet at midnight to declare SBF the Chosen Saviour.
Habryka gave nice answers to the questions already, which is great. Here are some grumpy answers:
Why is the attendance of the Coordination forum secret? Why should it be open? It’s a get-together for some people to talk to each other, why are they obliged to be super-transparent to you? It’s not the Secret Gathering of EA Leadership.
Why did Will not consult people before he talked to Elon? Because he’s an individual who can do his own thing, and there’s no Council of Elders of EA to be “consulted” at times like this.
Why did Will not adopt Zoe’s suggestions? Is that Will’s job? To enforce the uptake of structural reforms across EA? Sounds like the sort of thing the CEO of an organization might be responsible for… but Will isn’t the CEO of EA.
Why isn’t Will doing something about people hero-worshipping him? Because that’s also not his job? If you’re concerned about people hero-worshipping Will, perhaps you should get angry at the people doing it instead of Will, who’s not obviously doing anything to encourage it.
Why has the community health team not solved emergent social problems on the forum? Because that’s hard? And maybe also not their job? Perhaps we as a community should be being nicer to people.
What is the decision-making procedure for things going into the media? There probably isn’t one? That would imply a some kind of central EA comms org, which doesn’t exist. CEA has a comms department, but I think they mostly help people out when requested. Probably any number of orgs do their own comms stuff as they see fit.
I won’t comment on Carrick except that Habryka points out that Carrick did it, again, no anointing by EA Leadership or anything.
To be clear, I’m not saying we as a community get a free pass, nor that specific individuals or organizations shouldn’t get some criticism. I just think we should avoid imagining centralized loci of control that don’t really exist.
If I want EA to become less decentralized and have some sort of internal political system, what can I do?
I have 0 power or status or ability to influence people outside of persuasive argumentation. On the other hand, McCaskill and Co have a huge ability to do so.
The idea that we can’t blame the high-status people in this community because they aren’t de jure leaders when it’s incredibly likely they are the only people who could facilitate a system in which there are de jure leaders seems misguided. 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 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 it’s mean, and I don’t think you should delete it (and clearly many others think it’s a good comment). However, I strongly disagree with the claim that EA leadership isn’t really a thing. I’ll also aim to explain why I think why asking questions directed at “EA leadership” is reasonable to me, even if they may not be to you.
But I’m not sure “EA Leadership” is really a thing
The coordination forum literally used to be called the “leaders forum”. The description of the first coordination forum was literally “leaders and experienced staff from established EA organizations”. The Centre for Effective Altruism organizes events called “Ëffective Altruism Global” and has the ability to prevent or very strongly recommend that organizers don’t allow people into community events.
When people do look for an identifiable figure to blame, the only person who looks vaguely like a leader is Will, so they pick on him. But Will is not the CEO of EA! He’s a philosopher who writes books about EA and has received a bunch of funding to do PR stuff.
If you have spent millions of dollars on a PR campaign for your book and are seen as the public face of EA, people who self-identify as EA are going to take some interest in what you say when you’re seen to be representing EA, and whether or not your decisions affect them. If Will went out and said “Actually EAs believe that abortion should be outlawed with no exceptions for rape or to save the life of the mother”, and I don’t personally endorse this claim but have been talking about how I am an EA at work, the damage is done regardless of whether he’s “the CEO of EA” or just a philosopher. If he and his team has chosen to spread longtermism by writing a book and marketing it, then it comes with the responsibility of being in the public eye, and answering for things he says or actions he takes that people will interpret as “this is what EA is about”/”this is what longtermism is about”.
But I think the reality is: there are no adults in the room, who are managing everything behind the scenes, and who you can be angry at for failing you.
There are a lot of people doing various specific ways, and working with each other in various more-or-less coordinated ways. “EA” does not do things, “EA” did not “endorse” SBF. Some specific individuals may have done this, but the shadowy council of EA Leadership did not meet at midnight to declare SBF the Chosen Saviour.
For any decision that specific individuals or organizations do, I personally do not have the power or influence to meaningfully push back against them. But some people in the EA community have more power and influence than me and can do so. So while there might not be a shadowy council of EA leadership, there are people who make decisions that affect and shape the EA movement in much greater ways than I can. And while there might not be a centralized loci of power, power is clearly not distributed evenly, and decisions are made in ways that affect me when I have close to no ability to influence it.
As long as people who aren’t part of the decisions being made are still identifying as EAs and helping promote it, they are implicitly trusting that people who are in positions to affect and shape the EA movement more than them are doing so in well considered ways, in ways that they are comfortable with or happy to endorse.
If people at my local meetup identify as EAs and talk positively about it and encourage new members to get more involved, and those with a lot more influence in shaping the EA movement (those who fund our groups, those who write the books and blog posts we discuss, those who take interviews on national TV or get featured in TIME magazine) are taking it in a direction my group don’t agree with or don’t understand, or something happens that makes the group question the ability of “EA leaders”, then it seems reasonable to ask questions, because they are now uncertain whether EA is a movement they still want to be part of, or want to endorse, or want to encourage others to join. In this case, transparency might leada to more accountability, or it might lead to more decentralized decision making. It’s a tradeoff against other considerations, and they obviously aren’t obliged to change anything, but it seems unreasonable to me that you’re taking issue with people even asking these questions?
If they weren’t part of decisions that contributed to these events, and they don’t know how these decisions are made, and they’re ridiculed for even asking about it, then you’re basically asking people who have no meaningful way to influence the decisons or get any insight into the thought process behind it to just “have faith” in the decisions that are being made. And when people change their jobs and careers and life plans around EA and where the movement is being taken, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask questions that help them gain clarity around whether the movement does in fact align with where they want their own life to go.
Also, suggesting that “there are no adults in the room” I think can come across pretty demeaning to all the people who have spent years of their life working on shaping the EA movement.
And if it’s true that “there are no adults in the room” in context of “why didn’t the adults prevent this bad thing from happening?” (i.e., if there’s no one in the EA movement who has a job that might reasonably reduce the chance of things like this or other risks to the EA movement from happening), then it would be a pretty important update for me, and probably for many others. But I doubt this is actually the case.
Thanks for this excellent comment. I’m not going to respond more since I’m not sure what I think any more, but I just wanted to clarify one thing.
Also, suggesting that “there are no adults in the room” I think can come across pretty demeaning to all the people who have spent years of their life working on shaping the EA movement.
I’m sorry about that! That wasn’t my intention: I was trying to present the idea of the “adults” as hypothetical serious beings in comparison to whom we are like children. I don’t mean to imply that the people doing work in EA are not serious or competent, but I do think it’s wrong and unfair to think that they are at some ideal level of seriousness or competency (which few if any people can live up to, and shouldn’t be expected to without consent and serious vetting).
I think that in a relevant sense, there is an EA Leadership, even if EA isn’t an organisation. E.g. CEA/EV has been set up to have a central place in the community, and runs many coordinating functions, including the EA Forum, EA Global, the community health team, etc. Plus it publishes much of the key content. I think this comment overstates how decentralised the EA community is (for better or worse).
I think a crucial difference is whether you perceive the activities as offering a service or as taking responsibility for the provision of that service. e.g. I view the CEA community health team as offering “hey, we’d like to help keep the community healthy”. In that context it doesn’t make that much sense to be annoyed that they haven’t solved the problem of “people feeling uncomfortable posting on the forum”—they’re out there trying to do some thing useful, they haven’t promised to fix everything.
As it happens, I don’t think EA is that centralised. But perhaps that’s a red herring and the real question is whether people think that some EA orgs or people have responsibility for certain community-wide things.
CEA/EV can prevent people from coming to the most important in-person meetups (EAG) and from participating in the most important EA online space (the EA Forum). In that sense, they’re not just offering services, but have a lot of power. (That power also manifests itself in many other ways, including ways that are more directly relevant to the subject of the post.) And with that power comes responsibility.
Yes, I agree that CEA has a responsibility to not abuse the social power that comes from controlling important spaces. I don’t agree that they have a general responsibility for membership of the community or something.
I think in some important cases there really are leaders, or at least people in positions of extreme responsibility, who could’ve done more. In terms of letting SBF stay in the EA community after the Alameda incident in 2018, that seems like it might’ve been a failure of information sharing (e.g.), if not an outright failure of e.g the Community Health team at CEA. If it was largely just a failure of information sharing, then that in turn could be a failure of EA culture (too much deference, worrying about prestige and PR, and Ra), for which thought leaders could be in part responsible. (To be clear, I’m not saying I would’ve done any better if I was in such a position of responsibility, or a thought leader. And maybe no one could reasonably have been expected to have done better, given all the tradeoffsinvolved.)
Who are these people? What makes them so responsible? Did they agree to that or did we just kind of decide we want someone to be responsible and they’re there? Have we considered that maybe nobody is responsible here?
letting SBF stay in the EA community
Is “not letting someone stay in the EA community” an action that people can take? The most serious such incidents that I know of a) came after multiple documented examples of serious wrongdoing, b) amounted to being banned from the EA Forum and EA conferences (i.e. venues controlled by a specific org, CEA) for a while. SBF didn’t post on the EA forum or go to EA conferences. So what, specifically, do you think people should have done?
Who are these people? What makes them so responsible? Did they agree to that or did we just kind of decide we want someone to be responsible and they’re there? Have we considered that maybe nobody is responsible here?
SBF didn’t post on the EA forum or go to EA conferences. So what, specifically, do you think people should have done?
Disowned him (publicly). Not laud him as a paragon of virtue in earning-to-give. Not invite him to speak at EA conferences. (As I say, I get that there might’ve been a failure of communication amongst people in the know, but it looks pretty bad that it was known to at least some influential people that Sam was not someone to be trusted.)
The first group of people are not the people who took the latter group of actions.
I’m being picky here, but my point is that people are being very wooly about this idea of “EA Leadership”. The FTX Foundation team and the 80k team are different people, not arms of the amorphous “EA Leadership”. So maybe the FTX Foundation team shouldn’t have lauded SBF—but they didn’t, that was someone else.
This is again where being specific matters. “The FTX Foundation team should have done more due diligence before agreeing to work with SBF” is at least a reasonable, specific, criticism that relates to the specific responsibilities those people might have. “Why did EA Leadership not Do Something?” is not.
Yes, the (former) Future Fund team are specific people. Regarding the happenings in 2018 around Alameda, it’s hard to know who the specific people are because we haven’t heard much about who whew what. It seems reasonable to suppose that people at CEA (perhaps including the executives) knew about it (given SBF and Tara Mac Aulay both worked there prior to Alameda), but also possible that due to fear of reprisals or possible NDAs, no one in any position of responsibility knew about it.
“EA leadership” is a set of very specific people—those who control the money, and those who control the brand. That means the boards of OpenPhil and EV, and the Future Fund team when that was still a thing. If CEA and 80k have their own boards (I think they don’t?), then they too.
(This is an annoyed post. Having re-read it, I think it’s mostly not mean, but please downvote it if you think it is mean and I’ll delete it.)
I have a pretty negative reaction to this post, and a number of similar others in this vein. Maybe I should write a longer post on this, but my general observation is that many people have suddenly started looking for the “adults in the room”, mostly so that they can say “why didn’t the adults prevent this bad thing from happening?”, and that they have decided that “EA Leadership” are the adults.
But I’m not sure “EA Leadership” is really a thing, since EA is a movement of all kinds of people doing all kinds of things, and so “EA Leadership” fails to identify specific people who actually have any responsibility towards you. The result is that these kinds of questions end up either being vague or suggesting some kind of mysterious shadowy council of “EA Leaders” who are secretly doing naughty things.
It gets worse! When people do look for an identifiable figure to blame, the only person who looks vaguely like a leader is Will, so they pick on him. But Will is not the CEO of EA! He’s a philosopher who writes books about EA and has received a bunch of funding to do PR stuff. But people really want him to be the CEO of EA so they can be angry that he’s not being more CEO-like, and that seems pretty unfair to me.
But I think the reality is: there are no adults in the room, who are managing everything behind the scenes, and who you can be angry at for failing you. There are a lot of people doing various specific ways, and working with each other in various more-or-less coordinated ways. “EA” does not do things, “EA” did not “endorse” SBF. Some specific individuals may have done this, but the shadowy council of EA Leadership did not meet at midnight to declare SBF the Chosen Saviour.
Habryka gave nice answers to the questions already, which is great. Here are some grumpy answers:
Why is the attendance of the Coordination forum secret? Why should it be open? It’s a get-together for some people to talk to each other, why are they obliged to be super-transparent to you? It’s not the Secret Gathering of EA Leadership.
Why did Will not consult people before he talked to Elon? Because he’s an individual who can do his own thing, and there’s no Council of Elders of EA to be “consulted” at times like this.
Why did Will not adopt Zoe’s suggestions? Is that Will’s job? To enforce the uptake of structural reforms across EA? Sounds like the sort of thing the CEO of an organization might be responsible for… but Will isn’t the CEO of EA.
Why isn’t Will doing something about people hero-worshipping him? Because that’s also not his job? If you’re concerned about people hero-worshipping Will, perhaps you should get angry at the people doing it instead of Will, who’s not obviously doing anything to encourage it.
Why has the community health team not solved emergent social problems on the forum? Because that’s hard? And maybe also not their job? Perhaps we as a community should be being nicer to people.
What is the decision-making procedure for things going into the media? There probably isn’t one? That would imply a some kind of central EA comms org, which doesn’t exist. CEA has a comms department, but I think they mostly help people out when requested. Probably any number of orgs do their own comms stuff as they see fit.
I won’t comment on Carrick except that Habryka points out that Carrick did it, again, no anointing by EA Leadership or anything.
To be clear, I’m not saying we as a community get a free pass, nor that specific individuals or organizations shouldn’t get some criticism. I just think we should avoid imagining centralized loci of control that don’t really exist.
If I want EA to become less decentralized and have some sort of internal political system, what can I do?
I have 0 power or status or ability to influence people outside of persuasive argumentation. On the other hand, McCaskill and Co have a huge ability to do so.
The idea that we can’t blame the high-status people in this community because they aren’t de jure leaders when it’s incredibly likely they are the only people who could facilitate a system in which there are de jure leaders seems misguided. 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 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.
I don’t think it’s mean, and I don’t think you should delete it (and clearly many others think it’s a good comment). However, I strongly disagree with the claim that EA leadership isn’t really a thing. I’ll also aim to explain why I think why asking questions directed at “EA leadership” is reasonable to me, even if they may not be to you.
The coordination forum literally used to be called the “leaders forum”. The description of the first coordination forum was literally “leaders and experienced staff from established EA organizations”. The Centre for Effective Altruism organizes events called “Ëffective Altruism Global” and has the ability to prevent or very strongly recommend that organizers don’t allow people into community events.
If you have spent millions of dollars on a PR campaign for your book and are seen as the public face of EA, people who self-identify as EA are going to take some interest in what you say when you’re seen to be representing EA, and whether or not your decisions affect them. If Will went out and said “Actually EAs believe that abortion should be outlawed with no exceptions for rape or to save the life of the mother”, and I don’t personally endorse this claim but have been talking about how I am an EA at work, the damage is done regardless of whether he’s “the CEO of EA” or just a philosopher. If he and his team has chosen to spread longtermism by writing a book and marketing it, then it comes with the responsibility of being in the public eye, and answering for things he says or actions he takes that people will interpret as “this is what EA is about”/”this is what longtermism is about”.
For any decision that specific individuals or organizations do, I personally do not have the power or influence to meaningfully push back against them. But some people in the EA community have more power and influence than me and can do so. So while there might not be a shadowy council of EA leadership, there are people who make decisions that affect and shape the EA movement in much greater ways than I can. And while there might not be a centralized loci of power, power is clearly not distributed evenly, and decisions are made in ways that affect me when I have close to no ability to influence it.
As long as people who aren’t part of the decisions being made are still identifying as EAs and helping promote it, they are implicitly trusting that people who are in positions to affect and shape the EA movement more than them are doing so in well considered ways, in ways that they are comfortable with or happy to endorse.
If people at my local meetup identify as EAs and talk positively about it and encourage new members to get more involved, and those with a lot more influence in shaping the EA movement (those who fund our groups, those who write the books and blog posts we discuss, those who take interviews on national TV or get featured in TIME magazine) are taking it in a direction my group don’t agree with or don’t understand, or something happens that makes the group question the ability of “EA leaders”, then it seems reasonable to ask questions, because they are now uncertain whether EA is a movement they still want to be part of, or want to endorse, or want to encourage others to join. In this case, transparency might leada to more accountability, or it might lead to more decentralized decision making. It’s a tradeoff against other considerations, and they obviously aren’t obliged to change anything, but it seems unreasonable to me that you’re taking issue with people even asking these questions?
If they weren’t part of decisions that contributed to these events, and they don’t know how these decisions are made, and they’re ridiculed for even asking about it, then you’re basically asking people who have no meaningful way to influence the decisons or get any insight into the thought process behind it to just “have faith” in the decisions that are being made. And when people change their jobs and careers and life plans around EA and where the movement is being taken, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask questions that help them gain clarity around whether the movement does in fact align with where they want their own life to go.
Also, suggesting that “there are no adults in the room” I think can come across pretty demeaning to all the people who have spent years of their life working on shaping the EA movement.
And if it’s true that “there are no adults in the room” in context of “why didn’t the adults prevent this bad thing from happening?” (i.e., if there’s no one in the EA movement who has a job that might reasonably reduce the chance of things like this or other risks to the EA movement from happening), then it would be a pretty important update for me, and probably for many others. But I doubt this is actually the case.
Thanks for this excellent comment. I’m not going to respond more since I’m not sure what I think any more, but I just wanted to clarify one thing.
I’m sorry about that! That wasn’t my intention: I was trying to present the idea of the “adults” as hypothetical serious beings in comparison to whom we are like children. I don’t mean to imply that the people doing work in EA are not serious or competent, but I do think it’s wrong and unfair to think that they are at some ideal level of seriousness or competency (which few if any people can live up to, and shouldn’t be expected to without consent and serious vetting).
No need to apologize! Thought I’d share this in case it’s a meaningful update
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oosCitFzBup2P3etg/insider-ea-content-in-gideon-lewis-kraus-s-recent-new-yorker
I think that in a relevant sense, there is an EA Leadership, even if EA isn’t an organisation. E.g. CEA/EV has been set up to have a central place in the community, and runs many coordinating functions, including the EA Forum, EA Global, the community health team, etc. Plus it publishes much of the key content. I think this comment overstates how decentralised the EA community is (for better or worse).
I think a crucial difference is whether you perceive the activities as offering a service or as taking responsibility for the provision of that service. e.g. I view the CEA community health team as offering “hey, we’d like to help keep the community healthy”. In that context it doesn’t make that much sense to be annoyed that they haven’t solved the problem of “people feeling uncomfortable posting on the forum”—they’re out there trying to do some thing useful, they haven’t promised to fix everything.
As it happens, I don’t think EA is that centralised. But perhaps that’s a red herring and the real question is whether people think that some EA orgs or people have responsibility for certain community-wide things.
CEA/EV can prevent people from coming to the most important in-person meetups (EAG) and from participating in the most important EA online space (the EA Forum). In that sense, they’re not just offering services, but have a lot of power. (That power also manifests itself in many other ways, including ways that are more directly relevant to the subject of the post.) And with that power comes responsibility.
Yes, I agree that CEA has a responsibility to not abuse the social power that comes from controlling important spaces. I don’t agree that they have a general responsibility for membership of the community or something.
I think in some important cases there really are leaders, or at least people in positions of extreme responsibility, who could’ve done more. In terms of letting SBF stay in the EA community after the Alameda incident in 2018, that seems like it might’ve been a failure of information sharing (e.g.), if not an outright failure of e.g the Community Health team at CEA. If it was largely just a failure of information sharing, then that in turn could be a failure of EA culture (too much deference, worrying about prestige and PR, and Ra), for which thought leaders could be in part responsible. (To be clear, I’m not saying I would’ve done any better if I was in such a position of responsibility, or a thought leader. And maybe no one could reasonably have been expected to have done better, given all the tradeoffs involved.)
Who are these people? What makes them so responsible? Did they agree to that or did we just kind of decide we want someone to be responsible and they’re there? Have we considered that maybe nobody is responsible here?
Is “not letting someone stay in the EA community” an action that people can take? The most serious such incidents that I know of a) came after multiple documented examples of serious wrongdoing, b) amounted to being banned from the EA Forum and EA conferences (i.e. venues controlled by a specific org, CEA) for a while. SBF didn’t post on the EA forum or go to EA conferences. So what, specifically, do you think people should have done?
Someone should have done something, is not IMO a helpful thing to say. I strongly endorse https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aHPhh6GjHtTBhe7cX/proposals-for-reform-should-come-with-detailed-stories
People in charge of granting $100Ms-$Bs of EA money. See my link to: Why didn’t the FTX Foundation secure its bag?
Disowned him (publicly). Not laud him as a paragon of virtue in earning-to-give. Not invite him to speak at EA conferences. (As I say, I get that there might’ve been a failure of communication amongst people in the know, but it looks pretty bad that it was known to at least some influential people that Sam was not someone to be trusted.)
The first group of people are not the people who took the latter group of actions.
I’m being picky here, but my point is that people are being very wooly about this idea of “EA Leadership”. The FTX Foundation team and the 80k team are different people, not arms of the amorphous “EA Leadership”. So maybe the FTX Foundation team shouldn’t have lauded SBF—but they didn’t, that was someone else.
This is again where being specific matters. “The FTX Foundation team should have done more due diligence before agreeing to work with SBF” is at least a reasonable, specific, criticism that relates to the specific responsibilities those people might have. “Why did EA Leadership not Do Something?” is not.
Yes, the (former) Future Fund team are specific people. Regarding the happenings in 2018 around Alameda, it’s hard to know who the specific people are because we haven’t heard much about who whew what. It seems reasonable to suppose that people at CEA (perhaps including the executives) knew about it (given SBF and Tara Mac Aulay both worked there prior to Alameda), but also possible that due to fear of reprisals or possible NDAs, no one in any position of responsibility knew about it.
“EA leadership” is a set of very specific people—those who control the money, and those who control the brand. That means the boards of OpenPhil and EV, and the Future Fund team when that was still a thing. If CEA and 80k have their own boards (I think they don’t?), then they too.