Do people perceive a hierarchy or power structure of some kind within effective altruism? I was wary of its centralization stymieing its grassroots potential and pluralistic voices, especially with what appeared to be co-opting of effective altruism for elitist or branding purposes. Some months ago, to me this seemed the rise of Effective Altruism Outreach with its exclusive conferences, the pivot of the CEA and 80,000 Hours to courting only the most elite potential rather than inspiring a broad cross-section of individuals like Peter Singer and The Life You Can Save organization have historically done.
These worries of mine seem to be overblown. Especially with 80,000 Hours, it seems to me them doing case studies and very specified research leading to recommendations to students from elite universities is a properly conservative approach. In doing novel and unusual research, 80,000 Hours needs to not only start small to make sure they get things right, but be careful to ensure they don’t make bad recommendations. If 80,000 Hours was overly optimistic and oversold their recommendations to any wishful student who might follow them, they could influence university students to choose paths of low impact. Counterfactually, this would be a net negative, because 80,000 Hours could have made recommendations which would have been better. It’s also my personal opinion if 80,000 Hours made poor recommendations with little real confidence to their members and effective altruists at large, that’d be rude and irresponsible. They’re not doing that. They engage in thorough, well-paced research, and work with highly productive young adults who do or will acquire credible degrees which would’ve ensured them promising careers regardless of 80,000 Hours influence. 80,000 Hours measure the added impact. In playing it safe for now, I think 80,000 Hours can build a foundation of expertise which will allow them to advise (hopefully tens or hundreds of) thousands of careers with greater reliability in coming years.
The Centre for Effective Altruism spins off a variety of projects, and is sometimes stymied in its outreach efforts because it only has enough person-hours to focus on raising marginal funds for the next several months of operations, so it can’t focus on broad outreach as much. Focusing on Effective Altruism Outreach and Effective Altruism Global conferences seems like a safer bet in terms of possible impact based on the success of 2013 and 2014 Effective Altruism Summits organized by Leverage Research, with the upshot of EA Global having even more outreach potential than those other conferences, even adjusted for the relative scale of events. So, attracting hundreds of individuals who can make it to these conferences for one weekend rather than trying to attract thousands more instead with methods uncalibrated and untested makes sense. Frankly, effective altruism is still a relatively small movement with organizations facing multiple bottlenecks limiting what they can do in a given year. As organizations which earnestly believe growing effective altruism itself is the most important focus right now, I assume the CEA and its affiliates are pursuing the best strategy they can identify with the limited data they have on what will work best. I don’t expect I’d do much differently.
Some hierarchy seems like a good thing to me. Almost all of the world’s most effective organizations have some degree of hierarchy or another—even relatively egalitarian ones like Google. (And note that Google is ruthlessly selective about who they hire.)
Effective Altruism isn’t an organisation though; it’s some combination of:
An attitude (or a question), and the collection or community of people who share it
A movement
A cause, or collection of causes
We don’t normally see a strong top-down hierarchy in these except in some religious movements new and old:
Take the attitude of scepticism towards religious claims, or of asking the question which position on religion has the strongest evidence. Richard Dawkins is the closest person to being a leader of this, but isn’t very close (fortunately, if you ask me!)
The enviromental movement looks like a good parallel, and we don’t see something like the Global Environment Facility at the top of it.
The same goes for the environmental cause. You might find causes which have top dogs, but they’re mostly extra narrowly defined (e.g. the cause of catching Kony).
I agree that the hierarchy seen in e.g. the Catholic Church seems excessive. But I suspect the aggressive egalitarianism of Occupy Wall Street contributed to the movement accomplishing less than, say, the Tea Party movement, which elected a bunch of representatives to Congress.
It’s also not clear to me that the environmentalist movement is one that we want to copy. See e.g. this video of environmentalists signing a petition to support the banning of dihydrogen monoxide (a chemistry term for water). The environmentalist movement has accomplished plenty of worthwhile stuff, and has some great people, but getting dumbed down to the level seen in that video seems like a fate to try and avoid.
The key question with hierarchies is whether the people at the top are thoughtful and competent people. I feel like the EA movement has been pretty lucky in this regard.
The key question with hierarchies is whether the people at the top are thoughtful and competent people. I feel like the EA movement has been pretty lucky in this regard.
Not sure if I agree with this—it seems like that’s the sort of thing all kinds of cults say, before their leaders turn out to be self-interested megalomaniacs who’ve just been funnelling more and more of the cult’s money to themselves. More of an “outside view” would be helpful.
Let’s say I told you I thought my boss at a nonprofit I work for was a pretty good boss. And you told me that this was “the sort of thing all kinds of cults say, before their leaders turn out to be self-interested megalomaniacs who’ve just been funnelling more and more of the cult’s money to themselves”. Do you think that’d be a valid concern?
I think you’re much more worried about this than you need to be. Groupthink is definitely something to guard against, and we shouldn’t assume being high status makes you always correct about things, but cult fears seem generally overblown to me.
Do people perceive a hierarchy or power structure of some kind within effective altruism? I was wary of its centralization stymieing its grassroots potential and pluralistic voices, especially with what appeared to be co-opting of effective altruism for elitist or branding purposes. Some months ago, to me this seemed the rise of Effective Altruism Outreach with its exclusive conferences, the pivot of the CEA and 80,000 Hours to courting only the most elite potential rather than inspiring a broad cross-section of individuals like Peter Singer and The Life You Can Save organization have historically done.
These worries of mine seem to be overblown. Especially with 80,000 Hours, it seems to me them doing case studies and very specified research leading to recommendations to students from elite universities is a properly conservative approach. In doing novel and unusual research, 80,000 Hours needs to not only start small to make sure they get things right, but be careful to ensure they don’t make bad recommendations. If 80,000 Hours was overly optimistic and oversold their recommendations to any wishful student who might follow them, they could influence university students to choose paths of low impact. Counterfactually, this would be a net negative, because 80,000 Hours could have made recommendations which would have been better. It’s also my personal opinion if 80,000 Hours made poor recommendations with little real confidence to their members and effective altruists at large, that’d be rude and irresponsible. They’re not doing that. They engage in thorough, well-paced research, and work with highly productive young adults who do or will acquire credible degrees which would’ve ensured them promising careers regardless of 80,000 Hours influence. 80,000 Hours measure the added impact. In playing it safe for now, I think 80,000 Hours can build a foundation of expertise which will allow them to advise (hopefully tens or hundreds of) thousands of careers with greater reliability in coming years.
The Centre for Effective Altruism spins off a variety of projects, and is sometimes stymied in its outreach efforts because it only has enough person-hours to focus on raising marginal funds for the next several months of operations, so it can’t focus on broad outreach as much. Focusing on Effective Altruism Outreach and Effective Altruism Global conferences seems like a safer bet in terms of possible impact based on the success of 2013 and 2014 Effective Altruism Summits organized by Leverage Research, with the upshot of EA Global having even more outreach potential than those other conferences, even adjusted for the relative scale of events. So, attracting hundreds of individuals who can make it to these conferences for one weekend rather than trying to attract thousands more instead with methods uncalibrated and untested makes sense. Frankly, effective altruism is still a relatively small movement with organizations facing multiple bottlenecks limiting what they can do in a given year. As organizations which earnestly believe growing effective altruism itself is the most important focus right now, I assume the CEA and its affiliates are pursuing the best strategy they can identify with the limited data they have on what will work best. I don’t expect I’d do much differently.
Some hierarchy seems like a good thing to me. Almost all of the world’s most effective organizations have some degree of hierarchy or another—even relatively egalitarian ones like Google. (And note that Google is ruthlessly selective about who they hire.)
Effective Altruism isn’t an organisation though; it’s some combination of:
An attitude (or a question), and the collection or community of people who share it
A movement
A cause, or collection of causes
We don’t normally see a strong top-down hierarchy in these except in some religious movements new and old:
Take the attitude of scepticism towards religious claims, or of asking the question which position on religion has the strongest evidence. Richard Dawkins is the closest person to being a leader of this, but isn’t very close (fortunately, if you ask me!)
The enviromental movement looks like a good parallel, and we don’t see something like the Global Environment Facility at the top of it.
The same goes for the environmental cause. You might find causes which have top dogs, but they’re mostly extra narrowly defined (e.g. the cause of catching Kony).
I agree that the hierarchy seen in e.g. the Catholic Church seems excessive. But I suspect the aggressive egalitarianism of Occupy Wall Street contributed to the movement accomplishing less than, say, the Tea Party movement, which elected a bunch of representatives to Congress.
It’s also not clear to me that the environmentalist movement is one that we want to copy. See e.g. this video of environmentalists signing a petition to support the banning of dihydrogen monoxide (a chemistry term for water). The environmentalist movement has accomplished plenty of worthwhile stuff, and has some great people, but getting dumbed down to the level seen in that video seems like a fate to try and avoid.
The key question with hierarchies is whether the people at the top are thoughtful and competent people. I feel like the EA movement has been pretty lucky in this regard.
Not sure if I agree with this—it seems like that’s the sort of thing all kinds of cults say, before their leaders turn out to be self-interested megalomaniacs who’ve just been funnelling more and more of the cult’s money to themselves. More of an “outside view” would be helpful.
Let’s say I told you I thought my boss at a nonprofit I work for was a pretty good boss. And you told me that this was “the sort of thing all kinds of cults say, before their leaders turn out to be self-interested megalomaniacs who’ve just been funnelling more and more of the cult’s money to themselves”. Do you think that’d be a valid concern?
I think you’re much more worried about this than you need to be. Groupthink is definitely something to guard against, and we shouldn’t assume being high status makes you always correct about things, but cult fears seem generally overblown to me.