By transparency, I mean publishing explanations behind important decisions much more regularly and quickly to the EA Forum. This is mostly relevant for grantmakers and grantmaking organisations and isn’t super relevant for your role.
But for example, if you made a decision behind a big change to the karma system on the EA Forum, I would like you to publish an explanation behind your decision for the sake of transparency.
Agree that this would be better but as you say it is obviously very time consuming. I (ironically) don’t really have capacity soon to do this, but would encourage others to have a go at some BOTECs related to this post.
I’m not aware of any examples of outright corruption in EA.
I think an example of the kind of decision for which reasoning should be published on the EA Forum is when 80 000 hours starts listing multiple jobs in a new organisation on its job board. Doing this for OpenAI might have led to earlier scrutiny.
Another example might be the Wytham Abbey purchase but I’m not sure how much time had passed between the purchase and the discussion on this forum.
(This meta-analysis (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00208523211033236) suggests that transparency has a small effect on government corruption, but I would not put too much weight on the results since effects seem to be context specific and I’m not sure how much we can extrapolate from governments to a network of organisations. )
Thanks for your comment!
By transparency, I mean publishing explanations behind important decisions much more regularly and quickly to the EA Forum. This is mostly relevant for grantmakers and grantmaking organisations and isn’t super relevant for your role.
But for example, if you made a decision behind a big change to the karma system on the EA Forum, I would like you to publish an explanation behind your decision for the sake of transparency.
Agree that this would be better but as you say it is obviously very time consuming. I (ironically) don’t really have capacity soon to do this, but would encourage others to have a go at some BOTECs related to this post.
I’m not aware of any examples of outright corruption in EA.
I think an example of the kind of decision for which reasoning should be published on the EA Forum is when 80 000 hours starts listing multiple jobs in a new organisation on its job board. Doing this for OpenAI might have led to earlier scrutiny.
Another example might be the Wytham Abbey purchase but I’m not sure how much time had passed between the purchase and the discussion on this forum.
I think a great example of transparency was this post (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4JF39v548SETuMewp/?commentId=R2Axqfvbyq89fSRYQ) from the EAG organisers explaining why they’re making a set of changes to EAG, allowing scrutiny from the EA community.
(This meta-analysis (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00208523211033236) suggests that transparency has a small effect on government corruption, but I would not put too much weight on the results since effects seem to be context specific and I’m not sure how much we can extrapolate from governments to a network of organisations. )