I am sceptical of the idea that a substantial amount of EA funds should be allocated democratically.
I appreciate the spirit of this post, and agree with many of the specific concerns you raise. However, you seem to be making assumptions about what it’d look like to allocate funding democratically (with regard to who would get to weigh in, what they’d be weighing in on, and how they’d be weighing in), and then drawing much broader conclusions about whether democratizing funding is a good idea. I think you persuasively argue against one such approach, but that others are worth considering.
Individual voters do not have sufficient incentives to allocate collective funds in an effective manner
For instance, I agree with this point with regard to EA voters, but why would the voters have to be EAs? Why not find the stakeholders who do have sufficient incentives to allocate funding well; i.e., those who stand to benefit most from the decisions that are made? And why have them vote on different cause areas, versus weighing in on specific initiatives within a given cause area? Etc.
Any proposal to democratize funding is going to face challenges—I suspect it will inevitably be expensive and burdensome to do this well. But presumably, the way to figure out whether this is worth pursuing is to determine the point of allocating funding (more) democratically, generate specific proposals on this basis, and then evaluate whether any could be implemented effectively.
Come up with a detailed proposal, describe exactly how it would work, convince people to give you funding to run the experiment, and then report back and tell us how it went.
The default assumption always is that doing everything differently won’t work very well. It doesn’t matter what the precise change is. So skepticism is the correct attitude until this is proven that it can work.
It is a good idea though for the people who are enthused about this idea to follow their passion, and build and test concrete proposals. Go forth and try to make the world better.
Why not find the stakeholders who do have sufficient incentives to allocate funding well; i.e., those who stand to benefit most from the decisions that are made?
Could you give me a concrete example? For many concerns it’s impossible to reach them (eg longtermist ideas about the future) and for global health and development while it’s possible (although I am slightly sceptical of the benefits)
I agree that democratizing funding is easier for GWH causes than for more longtermist ones, and there is correspondingly more precedent for this in global health. I’m not going to do a lit review, but Tables 3 and 4 here list some of the things that have been tried (though I wouldn’t read the paper). Personally, I think the move is probably to survey potential beneficiaries—rather than doing something more deliberative—and then factor their preferences/values into decisions about which projects within a given cause area to prioritize (rather than having them choose causes). The case is trickier for longtermist causes—both normatively and practically—but Will MacAskill and Tyler John’s WaPo op-ed touches on some creative ways of doing this.
But my point is really: EA has developed some excellent, remarkably creative solutions to other problems in priority setting. My sense is that when GiveWell was started, the perception of many people in global health was that it would be impossible to do what they were trying to do. Open Philanthropy has also developed some innovative approaches to priority setting, and seems to do a great job of implementing them.
When we look at efforts by many non-EA organizations to allocate funding democratically, the track record does not look good (to me). But the EA community has solved other, likely far more challenging priority-setting problems, so I think it’d be a mistake to say “this is impossible to do well” without seriously interrogating all of the options.
There’s already a large amount of democratized funding. It’s gathered via taxes and spent by bodies that are backed by democratic processes.
In EA there’s a belief that the dollars spent by EA orgs are more efficiently spent than those by the government. Choosing EA as the electorate would be a choice with the intention of not regressing to the average dollar effectiveness of dollars in our government budgets.
In contrast to the budget of our governments and even African governments the budget of EA is very tiny.
I appreciate the spirit of this post, and agree with many of the specific concerns you raise. However, you seem to be making assumptions about what it’d look like to allocate funding democratically (with regard to who would get to weigh in, what they’d be weighing in on, and how they’d be weighing in), and then drawing much broader conclusions about whether democratizing funding is a good idea. I think you persuasively argue against one such approach, but that others are worth considering.
For instance, I agree with this point with regard to EA voters, but why would the voters have to be EAs? Why not find the stakeholders who do have sufficient incentives to allocate funding well; i.e., those who stand to benefit most from the decisions that are made? And why have them vote on different cause areas, versus weighing in on specific initiatives within a given cause area? Etc.
Any proposal to democratize funding is going to face challenges—I suspect it will inevitably be expensive and burdensome to do this well. But presumably, the way to figure out whether this is worth pursuing is to determine the point of allocating funding (more) democratically, generate specific proposals on this basis, and then evaluate whether any could be implemented effectively.
Then go for it.
Come up with a detailed proposal, describe exactly how it would work, convince people to give you funding to run the experiment, and then report back and tell us how it went.
The default assumption always is that doing everything differently won’t work very well. It doesn’t matter what the precise change is. So skepticism is the correct attitude until this is proven that it can work.
It is a good idea though for the people who are enthused about this idea to follow their passion, and build and test concrete proposals. Go forth and try to make the world better.
Could you give me a concrete example? For many concerns it’s impossible to reach them (eg longtermist ideas about the future) and for global health and development while it’s possible (although I am slightly sceptical of the benefits)
Sure! A couple of thoughts:
I agree that democratizing funding is easier for GWH causes than for more longtermist ones, and there is correspondingly more precedent for this in global health. I’m not going to do a lit review, but Tables 3 and 4 here list some of the things that have been tried (though I wouldn’t read the paper). Personally, I think the move is probably to survey potential beneficiaries—rather than doing something more deliberative—and then factor their preferences/values into decisions about which projects within a given cause area to prioritize (rather than having them choose causes). The case is trickier for longtermist causes—both normatively and practically—but Will MacAskill and Tyler John’s WaPo op-ed touches on some creative ways of doing this.
But my point is really: EA has developed some excellent, remarkably creative solutions to other problems in priority setting. My sense is that when GiveWell was started, the perception of many people in global health was that it would be impossible to do what they were trying to do. Open Philanthropy has also developed some innovative approaches to priority setting, and seems to do a great job of implementing them.
When we look at efforts by many non-EA organizations to allocate funding democratically, the track record does not look good (to me). But the EA community has solved other, likely far more challenging priority-setting problems, so I think it’d be a mistake to say “this is impossible to do well” without seriously interrogating all of the options.
There’s already a large amount of democratized funding. It’s gathered via taxes and spent by bodies that are backed by democratic processes.
In EA there’s a belief that the dollars spent by EA orgs are more efficiently spent than those by the government. Choosing EA as the electorate would be a choice with the intention of not regressing to the average dollar effectiveness of dollars in our government budgets.
In contrast to the budget of our governments and even African governments the budget of EA is very tiny.