Governance in general seems like it’s mainly about mitigation of worst case scenarios.
Doesn’t seem like that to me. And just because “governance in general” does something doesn’t mean we should.
This is an empirical question.
Yeah, and it’s unclear. I don’t see why it is relevant anyway. I never claimed that creating an EA panel would lead to a political divide between organizations.
Part of the reason this hasn’t been much of a problem is because the EA movement is sufficiently “elitist” to filter out troublemakers during the recruitment stage.
Better mechanisms for mitigating bad actors who get through means we can be less paranoid about growth.
We’re not paranoid about growth and we’re not being deliberately elitist. People won’t change their recruiting efforts just because a few people got officially kicked out. When the rubber hits the road on spreading EA, people just busy themselves with their activities, rather than optimizing some complicated function.
People in EA have done this a fair amount. I’ve heard of at least two EAs besides Jeff who have spent significant time looking at the history of social movements, and here is OpenPhil’s research in to the history of philanthropy. I assume a smart EA-type movement of the future would also do this stuff.
Yeah, EA, which is not a typical social movement. I’ve not heard of others doing this. Hardly any.
Saying that you want to experiment with EA because risking the stability of a(n unusually important) social movement just because it might benefit random people with unknown intentions who may or may not study our history is taking it a little far.
I also think that contributing to society’s stock of knowledge about how to organize people is valuable, because groups are rarely set up for the purpose of doing harm and often end up incidentally doing good (e.g. charitable activities of fraternal organizations).
Well most of them are relatively ineffective and most of them don’t study histories of social movements. As for the ones that do, they don’t look up obscure things such as this. When people spend significant time looking at the history of social movements, they look at large, notable, well documented cases. They will not look at a few people’s online actions. There is no shortage of stories of people doing online things at this low level of notability and size.
Saying that you want to experiment with EA because risking the stability of a(n unusually important) social movement just because it might benefit random people with unknown intentions who may or may not study our history is taking it a little far.
Doesn’t seem like that to me. And just because “governance in general” does something doesn’t mean we should.
Yeah, and it’s unclear. I don’t see why it is relevant anyway. I never claimed that creating an EA panel would lead to a political divide between organizations.
We’re not paranoid about growth and we’re not being deliberately elitist. People won’t change their recruiting efforts just because a few people got officially kicked out. When the rubber hits the road on spreading EA, people just busy themselves with their activities, rather than optimizing some complicated function.
Yeah, EA, which is not a typical social movement. I’ve not heard of others doing this. Hardly any.
Saying that you want to experiment with EA because risking the stability of a(n unusually important) social movement just because it might benefit random people with unknown intentions who may or may not study our history is taking it a little far.
Well most of them are relatively ineffective and most of them don’t study histories of social movements. As for the ones that do, they don’t look up obscure things such as this. When people spend significant time looking at the history of social movements, they look at large, notable, well documented cases. They will not look at a few people’s online actions. There is no shortage of stories of people doing online things at this low level of notability and size.
That’s fair.