Asking individuals to quantify such benefits seems like a de facto way of not actually considering them—individuals very rarely have time to do a thorough job, and any work they publish will be inevitably speculative, and easy enough to criticise on the margins that orgs that don’t want to change their behaviour will be able to find a reason not to.
Since EA orgs’ lack of transparency is a widespread concern among EAs, it seems a reasonable use of resources for EA orgs that don’t think it’s worth it to produce a one-off (or perhaps once-every-n-years) report giving their own reasons as to why it isn’t. Then the community as a whole can discuss the report, and if the sentiment is broadly positive the org can confidently go on as they are, and if there’s a lot of pushback on it, a) the org might choose to listen and change its practices and b) if they don’t, it will at least be more evident that they’ve explicitly chosen not to heed the community’s views, which I’d hope would guide them towards more caution, and gradually separate the visionaries from the motivated reasoners.
Another option would be a one-time or periodic “EA Governance and Transparency Red Teaming Contest” with volunteer judges who were not affiliated with the large meta organizations. I do not think a six-figure prize fund would be necessary; to be honest, a major purpose of there being a prize fund for this contest would be to credibly signal to would-be writers that the organizations are seriously interested in ideas about improving governance and transparency.
To build off of what you said, it’s really hard for people to feel motivated to do even a moderately thorough job on a proposal or a cost-effectiveness analysis without a credible signal that there is a sufficient likelihood that the organization(s) in question will actually be responsive to a proposal/analysis. Right now, it would feel like sending an unsolicited grant proposal to an organization that doesn’t list your cause area as one of its interests and has not historically funded in that area. At least in that example, the author potentially stands to gain from a grant acceptance, while the author of a governance/transparency proposal benefits no more than any other member of the community.
I mean, I don’t even know what the claim is that I’m supposed to produce a report giving my own reasons for. I guess the answer is “nothing.”
(Which obviously is fine! Not all forum posts need to be targeted at getting me to change my behavior. In fact, almost none are. But I thought I might have been in the target audience, so hence I wrote the comment.)
Asking individuals to quantify such benefits seems like a de facto way of not actually considering them—individuals very rarely have time to do a thorough job, and any work they publish will be inevitably speculative, and easy enough to criticise on the margins that orgs that don’t want to change their behaviour will be able to find a reason not to.
Since EA orgs’ lack of transparency is a widespread concern among EAs, it seems a reasonable use of resources for EA orgs that don’t think it’s worth it to produce a one-off (or perhaps once-every-n-years) report giving their own reasons as to why it isn’t. Then the community as a whole can discuss the report, and if the sentiment is broadly positive the org can confidently go on as they are, and if there’s a lot of pushback on it, a) the org might choose to listen and change its practices and b) if they don’t, it will at least be more evident that they’ve explicitly chosen not to heed the community’s views, which I’d hope would guide them towards more caution, and gradually separate the visionaries from the motivated reasoners.
Another option would be a one-time or periodic “EA Governance and Transparency Red Teaming Contest” with volunteer judges who were not affiliated with the large meta organizations. I do not think a six-figure prize fund would be necessary; to be honest, a major purpose of there being a prize fund for this contest would be to credibly signal to would-be writers that the organizations are seriously interested in ideas about improving governance and transparency.
To build off of what you said, it’s really hard for people to feel motivated to do even a moderately thorough job on a proposal or a cost-effectiveness analysis without a credible signal that there is a sufficient likelihood that the organization(s) in question will actually be responsive to a proposal/analysis. Right now, it would feel like sending an unsolicited grant proposal to an organization that doesn’t list your cause area as one of its interests and has not historically funded in that area. At least in that example, the author potentially stands to gain from a grant acceptance, while the author of a governance/transparency proposal benefits no more than any other member of the community.
I mean, I don’t even know what the claim is that I’m supposed to produce a report giving my own reasons for. I guess the answer is “nothing.”
(Which obviously is fine! Not all forum posts need to be targeted at getting me to change my behavior. In fact, almost none are. But I thought I might have been in the target audience, so hence I wrote the comment.)
I think the suggestion is something like this (I am elaborating a bit)-- certain organizations should consider producing a report that explains:
(1) How their organization displays good governance, accountability, and transparency (“GAT”);
(2) Why the organization believes its current level of GAT is sufficient under the circumstances; and possibly
(3) Why the organization believes that future improvements in GAT that might be considered would not be cost-effective / prudent / advisible.
Of course, if the organization thought it should improve its GAT, it could say that instead.
(3) would probably need a crowdsourced list of ideas and a poll on which ones the community was most interested in.