Note: I had drafted a longer comment before Arepoâs comment, given the overlap I cut parts that they already covered and posted the rest here rather than in a new thread.
...it also presupposes that CEA exists solely to serve the EA community. I view the community as CEAâs team, not its customers. While we often strive to collaborate and to support people in their engagement with EA, our primary goal is having a positive impact on the world, not satisfying community members
I agree with Arepo that both halves of this claim seem wrong. Four of CEAâs five programs, namely Groups, Events, Online, and Community Health, have theories of change that directly route through serving the community. This is often done by quite literally providing them with services that are free, discounted, or just hard to acquire elsewhere. Sure, they are serving the community in order to have a positive impact on the wider world, but thatâs like saying a business provides a service in order to make a profit; true but irrelevant to the question of whether the directly-served party is a customer.
I speculate that whatâs going on here is:
CEA doesnât want to coordinate the community the way any leader or manager would be expected to coordinate their team. That (a) seems like a quick path to groupthink and (b) would be hard given many members do not recognise CEAâs authority.
CEA also doesnât want to feel responsible for making community members happy, because it feels the eternal critics that make up the community (hi!) will be unhappy regardless of what it does.
Iâm sympathetic to both impulses, but if taken too far they leave the CEA <-> EA community relationship at an impasse and make the name âCEAâ a real misnomer. Regardless of preferred language, I hope that CEA will rediscover its purpose of nurturing and supporting the EA community by providing valuable services to its members[1] - a lower bar than âmake these eternal critics happyâ - and I believe the short descriptions of those four teams quoted below already clearly point in that direction.
For me, this makes the served members customers, in the same sense that a parishioner is a customer of their church. Most businesses canât make all prospective customers happy either! But if that fact makes them forget that their continued existence is contingent upon their ability to serve customers, then they are truly lost.
Events: We run conferences like EA Global and support community-organized EAGx conferences...
Groups: We fund and advise hundreds of local effective altruism groups...
Community Health: We aim to prevent and address interpersonal and community problems that can prevent community members and projects from doing their best work.
But if CEA cannot or will not do this, I think it should change its name.
I feel kind of confused about the point you are making here. CEA is the Centre for Effective Altruism, not the Center for Effective Altruists. This is fairly different from many community building organizations; e.g. Berkeley Seniorsâ mission is to help senior citizens in Berkeley per se (rather than advance some abstract idea which seniors residing in Berkeley happen to support).
I canât tell if you
Disagree that CEA differs from many community building organizations in this way
Agree that it differs but disagree that it should
Agree that it differs but feel like this difference is small/âpedantic and not worth highlighting
Agree that it differs but disagree that âcustomer vs. teamâ is a useful way to describe this difference
I am not AGB, but itâs 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 âWell Kept Gardens Die by Pacifismâ, 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 itâs worth, the thing you are describing seems consistent with describing EAs as âteammatesâ (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 donât 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, itâs the central in-person gathering event of the EA community, and itâs 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 âofficial EA-representativeâ 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 doesnât mean I would assign no meaningful constraints.
That being said, I think the âdesirability of empowering an organization to run a centrally controlledâ 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 CEAâs partâthe 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/âcommunity 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 CEAâs own resources and programming decisions in a way that lines up with community preferences.
I donât 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 couldnât or didnât 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 âempower[ed]â 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 donât 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 EAGsâalthough 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, thatâs 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/âafter) 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 CEAâs 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 communityâs preference on cause-area coverage for functions organized by CEA. Or to CEAâs 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 communityâs 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/âattention) that is independent of CEA or any other org. Interoperability or co-existence is impractical, as the expected result would be failure of both/âall 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/âcooperation narrative is pretty convincing.
And many of the reasons Iâm 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 isnât CEAâs own, so Iâm not much less worried that expectations of community control of fora would reduce CEAâs incentives and ability to speak its own message. The examples of topics on which I would defer to CEAâs ability to use its own resources to pursue its own mission donât have good analogues in the Forum context. There are many actors who could pull off running a central forumâthe 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 doesnât 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 didnât 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.
Thatâs fair, I didnât really explain that footnote. Note the original point was in the context of cause prioritisation, and I should probably have linked to this previous comment from Jason which captured my feeling as well:
A name change would be a good start.
By analogy, suppose there were a Center for Medical Studies that was funded ~80% by a group interested in just cardiology. Influenced by the resultant incentives, the CMS hires a bunch of cardiologists, pushes medical students toward cardiology residencies, and devotes an entire instance of its flagship Medical Research Global conference to the exclusive study of topics in cardiology. All those things are fine, but this org shouldnât use a name that implies that it takes a more general and balanced perspective on the field of medical studies, and should make very very clear that it doesnât speak for the medical community as a whole.
It seems possible, though far from obvious, that CEAâs funding base is so narrow itâs forced to focus on that target, in order to ensure the organisationâs survival from that direction. This was something I thought Zach covered nicely:
The reality is that the majority of our funding comes from Open Philanthropyâs Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building Team, which focuses primarily on risks from emerging technologies. While I donât think itâs necessary for us to share the exact same priorities as our funders, I do feel there are some constraints based on donor intent, e.g. I would likely feel it is wrong for us to use the GCRCB teamâs resources to focus on a conference that is purely about animal welfare. There are also practical constraints insofar as we need to demonstrate progress on the metrics our funders care about if we want to be able to successfully secure more funding in the future.
Note: I had drafted a longer comment before Arepoâs comment, given the overlap I cut parts that they already covered and posted the rest here rather than in a new thread.
I agree with Arepo that both halves of this claim seem wrong. Four of CEAâs five programs, namely Groups, Events, Online, and Community Health, have theories of change that directly route through serving the community. This is often done by quite literally providing them with services that are free, discounted, or just hard to acquire elsewhere. Sure, they are serving the community in order to have a positive impact on the wider world, but thatâs like saying a business provides a service in order to make a profit; true but irrelevant to the question of whether the directly-served party is a customer.
I speculate that whatâs going on here is:
CEA doesnât want to coordinate the community the way any leader or manager would be expected to coordinate their team. That (a) seems like a quick path to groupthink and (b) would be hard given many members do not recognise CEAâs authority.
CEA also doesnât want to feel responsible for making community members happy, because it feels the eternal critics that make up the community (hi!) will be unhappy regardless of what it does.
Iâm sympathetic to both impulses, but if taken too far they leave the CEA <-> EA community relationship at an impasse and make the name âCEAâ a real misnomer. Regardless of preferred language, I hope that CEA will rediscover its purpose of nurturing and supporting the EA community by providing valuable services to its members[1] - a lower bar than âmake these eternal critics happyâ - and I believe the short descriptions of those four teams quoted below already clearly point in that direction.
For me, this makes the served members customers, in the same sense that a parishioner is a customer of their church. Most businesses canât make all prospective customers happy either! But if that fact makes them forget that their continued existence is contingent upon their ability to serve customers, then they are truly lost.
As I hope comes across, I do not think this is at all radical. But if CEA cannot or will not do this, I think it should change its name.
Note: Iâm no longer at CEA, thoughts my own.
I feel kind of confused about the point you are making here. CEA is the Centre for Effective Altruism, not the Center for Effective Altruists. This is fairly different from many community building organizations; e.g. Berkeley Seniorsâ mission is to help senior citizens in Berkeley per se (rather than advance some abstract idea which seniors residing in Berkeley happen to support).
I canât tell if you
Disagree that CEA differs from many community building organizations in this way
Agree that it differs but disagree that it should
Agree that it differs but feel like this difference is small/âpedantic and not worth highlighting
Agree that it differs but disagree that âcustomer vs. teamâ is a useful way to describe this difference
Something else?
I am not AGB, but itâs 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 âWell Kept Gardens Die by Pacifismâ, 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 itâs worth, the thing you are describing seems consistent with describing EAs as âteammatesâ (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 donât 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, itâs the central in-person gathering event of the EA community, and itâs 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 âofficial EA-representativeâ 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 doesnât mean I would assign no meaningful constraints.
That being said, I think the âdesirability of empowering an organization to run a centrally controlledâ 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 CEAâs partâthe 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/âcommunity 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 CEAâs own resources and programming decisions in a way that lines up with community preferences.
I donât 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 couldnât or didnât 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 âempower[ed]â 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 donât 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 EAGsâalthough 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, thatâs 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/âafter) 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 CEAâs 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 communityâs preference on cause-area coverage for functions organized by CEA. Or to CEAâs 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 communityâs 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/âattention) that is independent of CEA or any other org. Interoperability or co-existence is impractical, as the expected result would be failure of both/âall 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/âcooperation narrative is pretty convincing.
And many of the reasons Iâm 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 isnât CEAâs own, so Iâm not much less worried that expectations of community control of fora would reduce CEAâs incentives and ability to speak its own message. The examples of topics on which I would defer to CEAâs ability to use its own resources to pursue its own mission donât have good analogues in the Forum context. There are many actors who could pull off running a central forumâthe 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 doesnât 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 didnât 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.
Thatâs fair, I didnât really explain that footnote. Note the original point was in the context of cause prioritisation, and I should probably have linked to this previous comment from Jason which captured my feeling as well:
It seems possible, though far from obvious, that CEAâs funding base is so narrow itâs forced to focus on that target, in order to ensure the organisationâs survival from that direction. This was something I thought Zach covered nicely:
Thanks! That context is helpful.