I suspect one of if not the main targets here is CEA[1], so I wanted to say that fwiw I think CEA’s level of transparency about their scope is about right.
I decided to look for their scope on their website and it was in the first place I looked, where they say (last updated: January 2023):
“We’re excited about supporting the effective altruism community”
“We do not think of ourselves as having or wanting control over the EA community. We believe that a wide range of ideas and approaches are consistent with the core principles underpinning EA, and encourage others to identify and experiment with filling gaps left by our work.”
“Where we are not focusing...This blog post gives more information on areas that we are not planning to focus on (as of March 2021).”
I think beyond this level of transparency, CEA is probably hitting rapidly diminishing returns or taking attention away from more important topics. No matter how transparent any well-known entity is about anything, there will always be a sizeable proportion of people who don’t know about it and don’t look for it and I don’t think CEA should feel responsible for that.
The post is tagged “Criticism of effective altruist organizations”, you focus on “meta organizations”, CEA is a core meta organization, it’s been brought up a couple of times in the comments etc
“I think beyond this level of transparency, CEA is probably hitting rapidly diminishing returns or taking attention away from more important topics.” I would be surprised if this was the case as some pretty basic stuff is missing, e.g. I could not find a recent public budget for CEA.
2021 is outdated when discussing budgets and projects we are not currently working on blog posts. With regards to the budget, I believe this is the legal minimum that has to be made public, though much of the data is combined within an EVF, making it harder to pull out specific details. I think the budget is inherently tied to the scope, as it’s challenging to truly understand where an organisation is allocating its resources without this kind of basic information. For instance, if an organisation spends a large percentage of its resources on a certain area, any cause preference in that area would have a much greater impact on the overall scope of the organisation.
I don’t think those points support your conclusion at all. There are few/no details on specific outcomes they want to achieve over the next 1--2 years, and no clarification of how resources are spent. I think that page provides less detail on scope for CEA than this forum post does for CE, and certainly less than the linked report.
To address your specific quotes.
“We’re excited about supporting the effective altruism community”
This is an aim/desire, not what they are actually doing.
“We do not think of ourselves as having or wanting control over the EA community. We believe that a wide range of ideas and approaches are consistent with the core principles underpinning EA, and encourage others to identify and experiment with filling gaps left by our work.”
Similar. It is something they aim not to do (with arguable effectiveness) and then a call for other people to do things.
“We currently manage the EA Forum, and provide resources and support calls for all EA groups. We’ve also held or supported global and regional conferences in countries including the US, the UK, Singapore, Germany, and Australia.”
This is a good high-level summary of their scope. It would be a great intro to something describing their intended scope.
“Where we are not focusing...This blog post gives more information on areas that we are not planning to focus on (as of March 2021).”
This is an aim/desire, not what they are actually doing.
Similar. It is something they aim not to do (with arguable effectiveness) and then a call for other people to do things.
I quoted these parts because I’ve seen a lot of people accuse them of wanting control of the EA community or having overarching responsibility for it (ah, including yourself incidentally: “If CEA do not want to be driven by the community, I think they should consider whether they should present themselves as representatives of the community”) and it’s relevant to scope.
This is a good high-level summary of their scope. It would be a great intro to something describing their intended scope.
This is over two years old.
What more do you need to know to avoid the bulk of the problems Joey refers to this in this post?
I think that page provides less detail on scope for CEA than this forum post does for CE
Obviously it does. If you’re going to criticize other organizations for something, you better make sure to improve your own org on that metric at the same time. But that seems like a cheap shot to me and the relevant standard is not “Are other meta orgs providing as much transparency as the most transparent meta org.” It’s a question of trade-offs in time and attention (which people on this forum seem to consider only maybe 2% of the time when criticizing someone else for not doing X, despite trade-offs nearly always being a necessary part of the argument). And I do honestly feel like it will never be enough for people who’ve already decided they don’t like CEA.
I suspect one of if not the main targets here is CEA[1], so I wanted to say that fwiw I think CEA’s level of transparency about their scope is about right.
I decided to look for their scope on their website and it was in the first place I looked, where they say (last updated: January 2023):
“We’re excited about supporting the effective altruism community”
“We do not think of ourselves as having or wanting control over the EA community. We believe that a wide range of ideas and approaches are consistent with the core principles underpinning EA, and encourage others to identify and experiment with filling gaps left by our work.”
“We currently manage the EA Forum, and provide resources and support calls for all EA groups. We’ve also held or supported global and regional conferences in countries including the US, the UK, Singapore, Germany, and Australia.”
“Where we are not focusing...This blog post gives more information on areas that we are not planning to focus on (as of March 2021).”
I think beyond this level of transparency, CEA is probably hitting rapidly diminishing returns or taking attention away from more important topics. No matter how transparent any well-known entity is about anything, there will always be a sizeable proportion of people who don’t know about it and don’t look for it and I don’t think CEA should feel responsible for that.
The post is tagged “Criticism of effective altruist organizations”, you focus on “meta organizations”, CEA is a core meta organization, it’s been brought up a couple of times in the comments etc
“I think beyond this level of transparency, CEA is probably hitting rapidly diminishing returns or taking attention away from more important topics.” I would be surprised if this was the case as some pretty basic stuff is missing, e.g. I could not find a recent public budget for CEA.
In two minutes I found income/expenditure for the US and UK entities in 2021 and I think they’ve been a bit busy recently with other priorities.
Edit: Also I thought we were discussing scope.
2021 is outdated when discussing budgets and projects we are not currently working on blog posts. With regards to the budget, I believe this is the legal minimum that has to be made public, though much of the data is combined within an EVF, making it harder to pull out specific details. I think the budget is inherently tied to the scope, as it’s challenging to truly understand where an organisation is allocating its resources without this kind of basic information. For instance, if an organisation spends a large percentage of its resources on a certain area, any cause preference in that area would have a much greater impact on the overall scope of the organisation.
Circling back to say we recently published CEA’s 2023 budget.
Note that we project spending to be substantially under budget.
I don’t think those points support your conclusion at all. There are few/no details on specific outcomes they want to achieve over the next 1--2 years, and no clarification of how resources are spent. I think that page provides less detail on scope for CEA than this forum post does for CE, and certainly less than the linked report.
To address your specific quotes.
This is an aim/desire, not what they are actually doing.
Similar. It is something they aim not to do (with arguable effectiveness) and then a call for other people to do things.
This is a good high-level summary of their scope. It would be a great intro to something describing their intended scope.
This is over two years old.
I quoted these parts because I’ve seen a lot of people accuse them of wanting control of the EA community or having overarching responsibility for it (ah, including yourself incidentally: “If CEA do not want to be driven by the community, I think they should consider whether they should present themselves as representatives of the community”) and it’s relevant to scope.
What more do you need to know to avoid the bulk of the problems Joey refers to this in this post?
Obviously it does. If you’re going to criticize other organizations for something, you better make sure to improve your own org on that metric at the same time. But that seems like a cheap shot to me and the relevant standard is not “Are other meta orgs providing as much transparency as the most transparent meta org.” It’s a question of trade-offs in time and attention (which people on this forum seem to consider only maybe 2% of the time when criticizing someone else for not doing X, despite trade-offs nearly always being a necessary part of the argument). And I do honestly feel like it will never be enough for people who’ve already decided they don’t like CEA.