The person who chooses to act as a vigilante will be the one who is the angriest about the actions of the original bad actor, and their response may not be proportionate. Anyone who sees someone else being a vigilante may respond with vigilante action of their own if they feel the first vigilante action was an overreach. The scenario I’m most concerned about is a spiral of vigilante action based on differing interpretations of events. A respected official body could prevent the commons from being burned in this way.
This is a very good point. One reason I got involved in the OP was to offset some of this selection effect. On the other hand, I was also reluctant to involve EA institutions to avoid dragging them into it (I was not expecting Will MacAskill’s post or the announcement by the EA Facebook group moderators, and mainly aiming at a summary of the findings for individuals). A respected institution may have an easier time in an individual case, but it may also lose some of its luster by getting involved in disputes.
Regarding your other points, I agree many of the things I worry about above (transparency, nonbinding recommendations, avoiding boycotts and overreach) can potentially be separated from official vs private/ad hoc. However a more official body could have more power to do the things I mention, so I don’t think the issues are orthogonal.
Regarding your other points, I agree many of the things I worry about above (transparency, nonbinding recommendations, avoiding boycotts and overreach) can potentially be separated from official vs private/ad hoc. However a more official body could have more power to do the things I mention, so I don’t think the issues are orthogonal.
True, but I suspect the worst case scenario for an official body is still less bad than the worst case scenario for vigilantism. Let’s say we set up an Effective Altruism Association to be the governing body for effective altruism. Let’s say it becomes apparent over time that the board of the Effective Altruism Association is abusing its powers. And let’s say members of the board ignore pressure to step down, and there’s nothing in the Association’s charter that would allow us to fix this problem. Well at that point, someone can set up a rival League of Effective Altruists, and people can vote with their feet & start attending League-sponsored events instead of Association-sponsored events. This sounds to me like an outcome that would be bad, but not catastrophic in the way spiraling vigalantism has been for communities demographically similar to ours devoted to programming, atheism, video games, science fiction, etc. If anything, I am more worried about the case where the Association’s board is unable to do anything about vigilantism, or itself becomes the target of a hostile takeover by vigilantes.
I suspect a big cause of disagreement here is that in America at least, we’ve lost cultural memories about how best to organize ourselves.
When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, it was the Americans’ propensity for civic association that most impressed him as the key to their unprecedented ability to make democracy work. “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition,” he observed, “are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types—religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute… Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America.”
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Within all educational categories, total associational membership declined significantly between 1967 and 1993. Among the college-educated, the average number of group memberships per person fell from 2.8 to 2.0 (a 26-percent decline); among high-school graduates, the number fell from 1.8 to 1.2 (32 percent); and among those with fewer than 12 years of education, the number fell from 1.4 to 1.1 (25 percent). In other words, at all educational (and hence social) levels of American society, and counting all sorts of group memberships, the average number of associational memberships has fallen by about a fourth over the last quarter-century.
This is a very good point. One reason I got involved in the OP was to offset some of this selection effect. On the other hand, I was also reluctant to involve EA institutions to avoid dragging them into it (I was not expecting Will MacAskill’s post or the announcement by the EA Facebook group moderators, and mainly aiming at a summary of the findings for individuals). A respected institution may have an easier time in an individual case, but it may also lose some of its luster by getting involved in disputes.
Regarding your other points, I agree many of the things I worry about above (transparency, nonbinding recommendations, avoiding boycotts and overreach) can potentially be separated from official vs private/ad hoc. However a more official body could have more power to do the things I mention, so I don’t think the issues are orthogonal.
True, but I suspect the worst case scenario for an official body is still less bad than the worst case scenario for vigilantism. Let’s say we set up an Effective Altruism Association to be the governing body for effective altruism. Let’s say it becomes apparent over time that the board of the Effective Altruism Association is abusing its powers. And let’s say members of the board ignore pressure to step down, and there’s nothing in the Association’s charter that would allow us to fix this problem. Well at that point, someone can set up a rival League of Effective Altruists, and people can vote with their feet & start attending League-sponsored events instead of Association-sponsored events. This sounds to me like an outcome that would be bad, but not catastrophic in the way spiraling vigalantism has been for communities demographically similar to ours devoted to programming, atheism, video games, science fiction, etc. If anything, I am more worried about the case where the Association’s board is unable to do anything about vigilantism, or itself becomes the target of a hostile takeover by vigilantes.
I suspect a big cause of disagreement here is that in America at least, we’ve lost cultural memories about how best to organize ourselves.
From the essay Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital (15K citations on Google Scholar). You can read the essay for info on big drops in participation for churches, unions, PTAs, and civic/fraternal organizations.