I can see two realistic models for the parallel organization, which I’m not a fan of:
1) A competitor to CEA. Just like CEA, this org would mainly fundraise and fund projects.
I think the problems with selecting members mentioned in this thread are overstated. Any political party faces the same problem. I suspect that in practice, strategically recruiting weakly engaged EAs just isn’t a big problem. But it could be either mitigated by requiring members to meet any of the conditions you mentioned (fees, EA org employment, course certificate), or setting a number of votes per regions, e.g. based on similar indicators of the # of engaged members.
Personally, I’m sufficiently satisfied with the general CEA agenda, that I suspect this would be a waste of effort. That’s in part because I think highly engaged EAs who dominate these orgs have more philosophically robust views and in part because I don’t think this competitor organization would be able to raise more than 10 % of CEA’s budget (~80 % of it comes from OpenPhil). So, given the main goal of funding projects, I don’t think this org would be sufficiently better to be worth all the costs—and not just costs inherent in the operations, but also the emotional costs of having these debates publicly and the costs of coordinating “who is willing to fund what” which I imagine might already be a nightmare.
2) A union. A soft counter-power to CEA.
If this org’s only power were the possibility to strike or produce resolutions, I’m concerned this would artificially inflate unproductive discord. My impression is that unions often produce irrational policies perhaps because they only have quite extreme measures at their disposal, which creates an illusory “us vs. them” aesthetics for relationships that are overall very positive-sum.
However, I have some sympathy for the idea of
3) A community ambassador who would be democratically voted e.g. by all EA Forum members and who’s job would be to facilitate the communication between CEA and the community in both directions. I imagine someone at CEA might already effectively hold this job, so perhaps they would be interested in having their choice ratified by the community. Ideally, this community ambassador would collect people’s concerns and visit CEA board meetings, in order to be able to integrate both perspectives.
However, I think the cost of this position is non-negligible. Given the power-law distribution of impact among people and given the many rounds of tests, which employees at EA organizations allegedly undergo—a democratic vote would probably yield a much less discerning choice (as most people wouldn’t spend more than 30 minutes picking a candidate). I’m not sure to what extent the wisdom of the crowd might apply here.
Because of similar uncertainties and because I wouldn’t count this as a “leadership role”, I’m voting “moderately disagree”.
However, I think the cost of this position is non-negligible. Given the power-law distribution of impact among people and given the many rounds of tests, which employees at EA organizations allegedly undergo—a democratic vote would probably yield a much less discerning choice (as most people wouldn’t spend more than 30 minutes picking a candidate). I’m not sure to what extent the wisdom of the crowd might apply here.
Important characteristics of the ambassador include the community has trust in this person and this person is aligned to the community’s interests and concerns. A community vote is ~authoritative on the first question and awfully probative on the second. If someone independent of the community picked the evaluator, in a real sense they wouldn’t be the community’s ambassador.
You could also do a two-step selection process here; the community selects a committee (and perhaps does approval voting for candidates), and the committee selects the ambassador after more thought. That would allow the more detailed evaluation for finalists while maintaining at least indirect community selection.
Interesting ideas! What about democratising CEA itself by electing the board? And doing the same for other similar orgs (e.g., the org I work for, EA Netherlands)
That’s interesting—my current understanding is that it isn’t the norm. It certainly isn’t in the UK or the US, which don’t really have national organisations despite them being key EA hubs. However, it is the norm in the Nordic and Baltic region, and I believe the Swiss, German, and French national organisations also have national general assemblies (though my impression is that they’re less vibrant than those further north).
And if local groups and national orgs should be democratised, why not CEA? I’d argue it plays a similar role at the international level: stewarding the community it serves and providing public goods for it.
My impression is that CEA’s goal is to fund the meta cause area and the main goal of local groups is to organize events. While funding is hard to democratize unless you convince some billionaire, democratizing the organizations that run events is trivial. [Edit: Also, while it makes sense to organize local events directly based on the local community’s preferences / demand, I think it makes sense to take a more top-down (principles-oriented) approach when it comes to distributing funding, because the “demand-side” here comprises of every person on the planet who appreciates money.]
But now I do realize that in my head, I equated CEA with OpenPhil’s wing for the meta cause area, which might not be accurate. I also feel good about democratizing CEA if I imagine it implemented as an indirect democracy (i.e. with local organizations voting, instead of every EA member). This probably moves me towards the middle of the poll—i.e. I would be in favor of this kind of democracy. Indirect democracy would reduce the problem of uninformed voters, the problem of dealing with problems publicly and the problem of disbalance in the level of reflection between the average member and highly-engaged members.
Yeah, as you conclude in your second paragraph, I wouldn’t describe CEA as simply “funding the meta cause area”. They don’t control major grant budgets (unlike Open Phil or EA Funds (although they have just announced EA Funds will become part of CEA)), and they’re not primarily in the business of choosing which projects get resourced (apart from choosing which EAGx events and national orgs get funding). Instead, their theory of change centres on building community infrastructure that helps two broad groups:
People unfamiliar with EA but who might be interested (via online courses, effectivealtruism.org, media relations, and supporting organisers doing outreach)
People already in the EA community (via EAG(x) events, the Forum, community health, and supporting organisers building communities)
I agree that democratising grant-making feels more experimental than democratising community building, although I do find manifund, participatory budgeting, and other forms of democratised resource allocation to be interesting.
I can see two realistic models for the parallel organization, which I’m not a fan of:
1) A competitor to CEA. Just like CEA, this org would mainly fundraise and fund projects.
I think the problems with selecting members mentioned in this thread are overstated. Any political party faces the same problem. I suspect that in practice, strategically recruiting weakly engaged EAs just isn’t a big problem. But it could be either mitigated by requiring members to meet any of the conditions you mentioned (fees, EA org employment, course certificate), or setting a number of votes per regions, e.g. based on similar indicators of the # of engaged members.
Personally, I’m sufficiently satisfied with the general CEA agenda, that I suspect this would be a waste of effort. That’s in part because I think highly engaged EAs who dominate these orgs have more philosophically robust views and in part because I don’t think this competitor organization would be able to raise more than 10 % of CEA’s budget (~80 % of it comes from OpenPhil). So, given the main goal of funding projects, I don’t think this org would be sufficiently better to be worth all the costs—and not just costs inherent in the operations, but also the emotional costs of having these debates publicly and the costs of coordinating “who is willing to fund what” which I imagine might already be a nightmare.
2) A union. A soft counter-power to CEA.
If this org’s only power were the possibility to strike or produce resolutions, I’m concerned this would artificially inflate unproductive discord. My impression is that unions often produce irrational policies perhaps because they only have quite extreme measures at their disposal, which creates an illusory “us vs. them” aesthetics for relationships that are overall very positive-sum.
However, I have some sympathy for the idea of
3) A community ambassador who would be democratically voted e.g. by all EA Forum members and who’s job would be to facilitate the communication between CEA and the community in both directions. I imagine someone at CEA might already effectively hold this job, so perhaps they would be interested in having their choice ratified by the community. Ideally, this community ambassador would collect people’s concerns and visit CEA board meetings, in order to be able to integrate both perspectives.
However, I think the cost of this position is non-negligible. Given the power-law distribution of impact among people and given the many rounds of tests, which employees at EA organizations allegedly undergo—a democratic vote would probably yield a much less discerning choice (as most people wouldn’t spend more than 30 minutes picking a candidate). I’m not sure to what extent the wisdom of the crowd might apply here.
Because of similar uncertainties and because I wouldn’t count this as a “leadership role”, I’m voting “moderately disagree”.
Important characteristics of the ambassador include the community has trust in this person and this person is aligned to the community’s interests and concerns. A community vote is ~authoritative on the first question and awfully probative on the second. If someone independent of the community picked the evaluator, in a real sense they wouldn’t be the community’s ambassador.
You could also do a two-step selection process here; the community selects a committee (and perhaps does approval voting for candidates), and the committee selects the ambassador after more thought. That would allow the more detailed evaluation for finalists while maintaining at least indirect community selection.
Interesting ideas! What about democratising CEA itself by electing the board? And doing the same for other similar orgs (e.g., the org I work for, EA Netherlands)
Thank you! Democratizing local groups sounds clearly good to me and I assumed it was the norm but I didn’t find any data on that.
That’s interesting—my current understanding is that it isn’t the norm. It certainly isn’t in the UK or the US, which don’t really have national organisations despite them being key EA hubs. However, it is the norm in the Nordic and Baltic region, and I believe the Swiss, German, and French national organisations also have national general assemblies (though my impression is that they’re less vibrant than those further north).
And if local groups and national orgs should be democratised, why not CEA? I’d argue it plays a similar role at the international level: stewarding the community it serves and providing public goods for it.
My impression is that CEA’s goal is to fund the meta cause area and the main goal of local groups is to organize events. While funding is hard to democratize unless you convince some billionaire, democratizing the organizations that run events is trivial. [Edit: Also, while it makes sense to organize local events directly based on the local community’s preferences / demand, I think it makes sense to take a more top-down (principles-oriented) approach when it comes to distributing funding, because the “demand-side” here comprises of every person on the planet who appreciates money.]
But now I do realize that in my head, I equated CEA with OpenPhil’s wing for the meta cause area, which might not be accurate. I also feel good about democratizing CEA if I imagine it implemented as an indirect democracy (i.e. with local organizations voting, instead of every EA member). This probably moves me towards the middle of the poll—i.e. I would be in favor of this kind of democracy. Indirect democracy would reduce the problem of uninformed voters, the problem of dealing with problems publicly and the problem of disbalance in the level of reflection between the average member and highly-engaged members.
Yeah, as you conclude in your second paragraph, I wouldn’t describe CEA as simply “funding the meta cause area”. They don’t control major grant budgets (unlike Open Phil or EA Funds (although they have just announced EA Funds will become part of CEA)), and they’re not primarily in the business of choosing which projects get resourced (apart from choosing which EAGx events and national orgs get funding). Instead, their theory of change centres on building community infrastructure that helps two broad groups:
People unfamiliar with EA but who might be interested (via online courses, effectivealtruism.org, media relations, and supporting organisers doing outreach)
People already in the EA community (via EAG(x) events, the Forum, community health, and supporting organisers building communities)
I agree that democratising grant-making feels more experimental than democratising community building, although I do find manifund, participatory budgeting, and other forms of democratised resource allocation to be interesting.