Alignment is super-important for EA organisations, I would put it as priority number 1, because if you’re aligned to EA values then you’re at least trying to do the most good for the world, whereas if you’re not, you may not be even trying to do that.
Hi Robin—thanks for this and I see your point. I think Jason put it perfectly above—alignment is often about the median Board member, where expertise is about the best Board member in a given context. So you can have both.
I have also seen a lot of trustees learn about the mission of the charity as part of the recruitment process and we shouldn’t assume the only aligned people are people who already identify as EAs.
The downsides of prioritising alignment almost to the exclusion of all else are pretty clear, I think, and harder to mitigate than the downsides or lacking technical expertise, which takes years to develop.
The nature of most EA funding also provides a check on misalignment. An EA organization that became significantly misaligned from its major funders would quickly find itself unfunded. As opposed to Wikimedia, which had/has a different funding structure as I understand it.
Alignment is super-important for EA organisations, I would put it as priority number 1, because if you’re aligned to EA values then you’re at least trying to do the most good for the world, whereas if you’re not, you may not be even trying to do that.
For an example of a not-for-profit non-EA organisation that has suffered from a lack of alignment in recent times, I would point to the Wikimedia Foundation, which has regranted excess funds to extremely dubious organisations: https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633 (see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-10-31/News_and_notes ). This is quite apart from the encyclopedia project itself arguably deviating from its stated goals of maintaining a neutral point of view, which is a whole other level of misalignment, but I won’t get into that here.
Hi Robin—thanks for this and I see your point. I think Jason put it perfectly above—alignment is often about the median Board member, where expertise is about the best Board member in a given context. So you can have both.
I have also seen a lot of trustees learn about the mission of the charity as part of the recruitment process and we shouldn’t assume the only aligned people are people who already identify as EAs.
The downsides of prioritising alignment almost to the exclusion of all else are pretty clear, I think, and harder to mitigate than the downsides or lacking technical expertise, which takes years to develop.
The nature of most EA funding also provides a check on misalignment. An EA organization that became significantly misaligned from its major funders would quickly find itself unfunded. As opposed to Wikimedia, which had/has a different funding structure as I understand it.