I am not AGB, but it’s clear that a huge fraction of the power that CEA has comes from it being perceived as a representative of the EA community, and because the community empowered it to solve coordination problems between its members. That power is given conditional on CEA acting on behalf of the people who invested that power.
Sure, maybe CEA accepted those resources (and the expectations that came with that) with the goal of doing the most good, but de-facto CEA as an institution basically only exists because of its endorsement by the EA community, and the post as written seems to me like it basically is denying that power relationship and responsibility.
Lightcone in its stewardship of LW is in a very similar position. Our goal with LW is to develop an art of rationality and reduce existential risk, but as an institution we are definitely also responsible for optimizing for the goals of the other stakeholders who have invested in LessWrong (like the authors, commenters, Eliezer who founded the site, and the broader rationality community which has invested in LessWrong as a kind of town square). People would be really pissed if we banned long-term contributors to LW, even if we thought it was best by our own lights, and rightfully so. They have invested resources which make them a legitimate stakeholder in the commons that we are administering.
(there is some degree to which we do have leeway here because there is widespread buy-in for something like “Well Kept Gardens Die by Pacifism”, but that leeway comes from the fact that there is widespread buy-in for discretion-based moderation, and that buy-in does not exist for all forms of possible changes to LW)
Thanks! For what it’s worth, the thing you are describing seems consistent with describing EAs as “teammates” (I also think that sports teams are successful ~entirely because of the work of their constituent team members) but I concede that the term is vague.
[Edit: further explained and qualified in a new comment below.]
Agreed, although I would note that the application varies from function to function.
For instance, I don’t think it runs EAGs or funds EAGxes through power granted by the community. So I think CEA has considerably more room to do what it thinks best by its own lights when dealing with its events than in (e.g.,) operating the community health team.
I would put other core community infrastructure in a similar bucket as community health, at least to the extent it constitutes a function where coordination of effort is an important factor and CEA can be seen as occupying the field. For example, it makes sense to coordinate a single main Forum, a single sponsor of university groups at a particular university, etc.
Huh, EAG feels like one of the most obvious community-institutions. Like, it’s the central in-person gathering event of the EA community, and it’s exactly the kind of thing where you want to empower an organization to run a centrally controlled version of it, because having a Schelling-event is very valuable.
But of course, in empowering someone to do that, CEA accepts some substantial responsibility to organize the event with the preferences of the community in mind. Like, EAG is really hard to organize if you are not in an “official EA-representative” position, and a huge fraction of the complexity comes from managing that representation.
I could have been clearer that different CEA functions are on a continuum in their relationship with the community, rather than sounding more binary at points. Also, my view that CEA has more freedom around EAGs than certain other functions doesn’t mean I would assign no meaningful constraints.
That being said, I think the “desirability of empowering an organization to run a centrally controlled” function is probably necessary but not sufficient to rely on the community-empowerment narrative. Here, there are various factors that pull me toward finding a weaker obligation on CEA’s part—the obligation not to unfairly or inappropriately appropriate for its own objectives the assembling of many EAs in one city at one time in a way that deprives other actors of their opportunity to make a play for that external/community resource. In other words, I see a minimum duty to manage that resource in an interoperable and cooperative manner . . . but generally not a duty to allocate CEA’s own resources and programming decisions in a way that lines up with community preferences.
I don’t think there is anything that prevents an organization from running a conference, even a top-notch conference, by its own lights and without necessarily surrendering a significant amount of control to the community. One plausible narrative here is that CEA put on a top-notch conference that others couldn’t or didn’t match (backing from Open Phil and formerly FTXFF doubtless would help!) and that the centralizing elements are roughly the natural result of what happens when you put on a conference that is much better than the alternatives. In this narrative, there would be no implied deal that makes CEA largely the agent of the community in running EAG.
That strikes me as at least equally plausible on its face than one than a narrative in which the community “empower[ed]” CEA to run a conference with centralizing tendencies as long as the community retained sizable influence regarding how it is run. And given my desire to incentivize orgs to organize (and funders to fund) top-notch conferences, as well as a default toward the proper response to a conference you don’t like being organizing your own, I am inclined to make the natural-result narrative my starting point .
At the same time, I recognize the coordination work associated with EAGs—although I would specifically emphasize the coordination value of having a bunch of EAs in about the same place at the same time away from their day jobs. To me, that’s the main resource that is necessarily shared, in the sense of being something that can by its nature only happen 2-3 times per year, and is of community origin (rather than a CEA resource). I would take a fairly hard line against CEA actions that I judged to be an unfair or inappropriate grab at that resource. So while I would not impose the same duty you imply, I would assign a choice for CEA between that duty and a duty to run EAGs in an interoperable and cooperative manner.
Under that alternate duty, I would expect CEA to play nice with people and orgs who want to plan their own speakers and events that happen during the days of (or just before/after) the EAG. I would also expect CEA to take reasonable efforts to present its attendees with an option to opt-in to Swapcard with people who are not EAG attendees but are attending one of the other, non-CEA events. Failing to do these kinds of things would constitute a misuse of CEA’s dominant position that deprives other would-be actors the ability to tap into the collective community resource of co-location in space and time, and deprives the individual community members of free choice.
On the other hand, the alternative duty would not generally extend to deferring to the community’s preference on cause-area coverage for functions organized by CEA. Or to CEA’s decisions about who to provide travel grants or admittance to its own events. CEA choosing to de-emphasize cause area X in its own event planning, or employ a higher bar for travel grants for people working in cause area X, does not logically preclude the community from doing these things itself. To the extent the community finds it difficult to perform these functions (or delegate another org to do so), that would update me toward the natural-result narrative and away from viewing CEA as a delegate who primarily exercises the community’s power.
In contrast, my implied model for university groups is that the maximum healthy carrying capacity is usually one group per university due to a limited resource (student interest/attention) that is independent of CEA or any other org. Interoperability or co-existence is impractical, as the expected result would be failure of both/all groups from stretching the resource too thin. Moreover, starting a university group is within the operational capabilities of a number of actors (most non-EA student groups do not receive much in the way of external support, so the barriers to entry are pretty low). This raises the need for coordination among numerous potential actors. Under those circumstances, the empowerment/cooperation narrative is pretty convincing.
And many of the reasons I’m relatively more inclined to give CEA a freer hand on EAGs are lacking with the Forum. There are reasons a variety of conferences would be desirable (even if you want a single flagship conference), while the positive side of the ledger for multiple fora is more marginal. The speech on the Forum isn’t CEA’s own, so I’m not much less worried that expectations of community control of fora would reduce CEA’s incentives and ability to speak its own message. The examples of topics on which I would defer to CEA’s ability to use its own resources to pursue its own mission don’t have good analogues in the Forum context. There are many actors who could pull off running a central forum—the LW code could be forked, servers are fairly cheap, and the moderation lift would be manageable for a relatively small group of volunteers.
A thing you might not know is that I was on the founding team of the EA Global series (and was in charge of EA Global for roughly the first two years of its existence). This of course doesn’t mean I am right in my analysis here, but it does mean that I have a lot of detailed knowledge about the kind of community negotiations that were going on at the time.
I agree with a bunch of the arguments you made, but my sense is that when creating EA Global, CEA leaned heavily on its coordinating role within the community (which I think made sense).
Indeed, CEA took over the EA Summit from Leverage explicitly because both parties thought it was pretty important to have a centralized annual EA conference.
I didn’t know that, and adding in historical facts could definitely move me away from my starting point! For example, they could easily update me more toward thinking that (1) CEA would need to more explicitly disclaim intent to run the semi-official coordinating event, (2) it would need to provide some advance notice and a phase-out to allow other actors to stand up their own conferences that sought to fulfill a centralizing function; and (3) it would have a broader affirmative obligation to cooperate with any actor that wanted to stand up an alternative to EAG.
I am not AGB, but it’s clear that a huge fraction of the power that CEA has comes from it being perceived as a representative of the EA community, and because the community empowered it to solve coordination problems between its members. That power is given conditional on CEA acting on behalf of the people who invested that power.
Sure, maybe CEA accepted those resources (and the expectations that came with that) with the goal of doing the most good, but de-facto CEA as an institution basically only exists because of its endorsement by the EA community, and the post as written seems to me like it basically is denying that power relationship and responsibility.
Lightcone in its stewardship of LW is in a very similar position. Our goal with LW is to develop an art of rationality and reduce existential risk, but as an institution we are definitely also responsible for optimizing for the goals of the other stakeholders who have invested in LessWrong (like the authors, commenters, Eliezer who founded the site, and the broader rationality community which has invested in LessWrong as a kind of town square). People would be really pissed if we banned long-term contributors to LW, even if we thought it was best by our own lights, and rightfully so. They have invested resources which make them a legitimate stakeholder in the commons that we are administering.
(there is some degree to which we do have leeway here because there is widespread buy-in for something like “Well Kept Gardens Die by Pacifism”, but that leeway comes from the fact that there is widespread buy-in for discretion-based moderation, and that buy-in does not exist for all forms of possible changes to LW)
Thanks! For what it’s worth, the thing you are describing seems consistent with describing EAs as “teammates” (I also think that sports teams are successful ~entirely because of the work of their constituent team members) but I concede that the term is vague.
[Edit: further explained and qualified in a new comment below.]
Agreed, although I would note that the application varies from function to function.
For instance, I don’t think it runs EAGs or funds EAGxes through power granted by the community. So I think CEA has considerably more room to do what it thinks best by its own lights when dealing with its events than in (e.g.,) operating the community health team.
I would put other core community infrastructure in a similar bucket as community health, at least to the extent it constitutes a function where coordination of effort is an important factor and CEA can be seen as occupying the field. For example, it makes sense to coordinate a single main Forum, a single sponsor of university groups at a particular university, etc.
Huh, EAG feels like one of the most obvious community-institutions. Like, it’s the central in-person gathering event of the EA community, and it’s exactly the kind of thing where you want to empower an organization to run a centrally controlled version of it, because having a Schelling-event is very valuable.
But of course, in empowering someone to do that, CEA accepts some substantial responsibility to organize the event with the preferences of the community in mind. Like, EAG is really hard to organize if you are not in an “official EA-representative” position, and a huge fraction of the complexity comes from managing that representation.
I could have been clearer that different CEA functions are on a continuum in their relationship with the community, rather than sounding more binary at points. Also, my view that CEA has more freedom around EAGs than certain other functions doesn’t mean I would assign no meaningful constraints.
That being said, I think the “desirability of empowering an organization to run a centrally controlled” function is probably necessary but not sufficient to rely on the community-empowerment narrative. Here, there are various factors that pull me toward finding a weaker obligation on CEA’s part—the obligation not to unfairly or inappropriately appropriate for its own objectives the assembling of many EAs in one city at one time in a way that deprives other actors of their opportunity to make a play for that external/community resource. In other words, I see a minimum duty to manage that resource in an interoperable and cooperative manner . . . but generally not a duty to allocate CEA’s own resources and programming decisions in a way that lines up with community preferences.
I don’t think there is anything that prevents an organization from running a conference, even a top-notch conference, by its own lights and without necessarily surrendering a significant amount of control to the community. One plausible narrative here is that CEA put on a top-notch conference that others couldn’t or didn’t match (backing from Open Phil and formerly FTXFF doubtless would help!) and that the centralizing elements are roughly the natural result of what happens when you put on a conference that is much better than the alternatives. In this narrative, there would be no implied deal that makes CEA largely the agent of the community in running EAG.
That strikes me as at least equally plausible on its face than one than a narrative in which the community “empower[ed]” CEA to run a conference with centralizing tendencies as long as the community retained sizable influence regarding how it is run. And given my desire to incentivize orgs to organize (and funders to fund) top-notch conferences, as well as a default toward the proper response to a conference you don’t like being organizing your own, I am inclined to make the natural-result narrative my starting point .
At the same time, I recognize the coordination work associated with EAGs—although I would specifically emphasize the coordination value of having a bunch of EAs in about the same place at the same time away from their day jobs. To me, that’s the main resource that is necessarily shared, in the sense of being something that can by its nature only happen 2-3 times per year, and is of community origin (rather than a CEA resource). I would take a fairly hard line against CEA actions that I judged to be an unfair or inappropriate grab at that resource. So while I would not impose the same duty you imply, I would assign a choice for CEA between that duty and a duty to run EAGs in an interoperable and cooperative manner.
Under that alternate duty, I would expect CEA to play nice with people and orgs who want to plan their own speakers and events that happen during the days of (or just before/after) the EAG. I would also expect CEA to take reasonable efforts to present its attendees with an option to opt-in to Swapcard with people who are not EAG attendees but are attending one of the other, non-CEA events. Failing to do these kinds of things would constitute a misuse of CEA’s dominant position that deprives other would-be actors the ability to tap into the collective community resource of co-location in space and time, and deprives the individual community members of free choice.
On the other hand, the alternative duty would not generally extend to deferring to the community’s preference on cause-area coverage for functions organized by CEA. Or to CEA’s decisions about who to provide travel grants or admittance to its own events. CEA choosing to de-emphasize cause area X in its own event planning, or employ a higher bar for travel grants for people working in cause area X, does not logically preclude the community from doing these things itself. To the extent the community finds it difficult to perform these functions (or delegate another org to do so), that would update me toward the natural-result narrative and away from viewing CEA as a delegate who primarily exercises the community’s power.
In contrast, my implied model for university groups is that the maximum healthy carrying capacity is usually one group per university due to a limited resource (student interest/attention) that is independent of CEA or any other org. Interoperability or co-existence is impractical, as the expected result would be failure of both/all groups from stretching the resource too thin. Moreover, starting a university group is within the operational capabilities of a number of actors (most non-EA student groups do not receive much in the way of external support, so the barriers to entry are pretty low). This raises the need for coordination among numerous potential actors. Under those circumstances, the empowerment/cooperation narrative is pretty convincing.
And many of the reasons I’m relatively more inclined to give CEA a freer hand on EAGs are lacking with the Forum. There are reasons a variety of conferences would be desirable (even if you want a single flagship conference), while the positive side of the ledger for multiple fora is more marginal. The speech on the Forum isn’t CEA’s own, so I’m not much less worried that expectations of community control of fora would reduce CEA’s incentives and ability to speak its own message. The examples of topics on which I would defer to CEA’s ability to use its own resources to pursue its own mission don’t have good analogues in the Forum context. There are many actors who could pull off running a central forum—the LW code could be forked, servers are fairly cheap, and the moderation lift would be manageable for a relatively small group of volunteers.
A thing you might not know is that I was on the founding team of the EA Global series (and was in charge of EA Global for roughly the first two years of its existence). This of course doesn’t mean I am right in my analysis here, but it does mean that I have a lot of detailed knowledge about the kind of community negotiations that were going on at the time.
I agree with a bunch of the arguments you made, but my sense is that when creating EA Global, CEA leaned heavily on its coordinating role within the community (which I think made sense).
Indeed, CEA took over the EA Summit from Leverage explicitly because both parties thought it was pretty important to have a centralized annual EA conference.
I didn’t know that, and adding in historical facts could definitely move me away from my starting point! For example, they could easily update me more toward thinking that (1) CEA would need to more explicitly disclaim intent to run the semi-official coordinating event, (2) it would need to provide some advance notice and a phase-out to allow other actors to stand up their own conferences that sought to fulfill a centralizing function; and (3) it would have a broader affirmative obligation to cooperate with any actor that wanted to stand up an alternative to EAG.