Spot on in your analysis but I don’t know if it’s fixable. I have suggested many times on this forum that we need to bake moral anti-realism into the core of the movement (which as you state probably does nothing). Ironically I think one of the core (but maybe not so novel) lessons of uppercase EA is that decentralization breeds fanaticism in a social movement if it financially exists in a larger extremely unequal society (even if the members are insanely thoughtful and bayesian). Some form of centralization is required to conform evolutionary value drift into something closer to ideal reflection.
There are many paths, but unfortunately all of them require state capacity and culture. We would need some sort of political system to enforce the financial regulations that stops the gravity of the wealth-weighted dominant aesthetics from consuming the meta idea of ea (lower case ea). And probably a bunch of other things. But this is hard, there are 3 camps of main resistance.
(1) the pure
Those who believe counting is not politics but math.
(2) the pragmatic
Those who believe decentralization is good for the movement
(3) the de jure
Those who believe decentralization is good for their career, usually because it continues the default out status quo of who current has power
Together this coalition is sizable. I’m not sure exactly how much and maybe a vocal minority but I’d reckon at least 30%. Let’s assume the rest of the movement is at least weakly in favor of centralization. But I think that 30% is more like a 50-70 percent in the hubs of oxford, dc, sf (just speculating here). These parts of the movement have not just money but better organization as well. The remaining 70% are spread throughout the world and It’s not clear how they might at current coordinate to force some sort of constitution.
Your functional path 5s are good ideas, but again who exactly is doing or paying for them? maybe you can convince someone rich right now, or maybe you can go build these projects, but there is nothing legally or politically forced and the Egregore will eat it up all the same. Anything short of a real politically binding set of laws and delineation between members and non members seems like window dressing to me. But increasingly I think even if this would get passed I wonder if the ea infra is best left as is and new young people try to just start a more functionally agnostic version of the movement. That’s at least some of the essence of post-rats, though they never meant for that to be a big tent idea.
Thanks for this. I want to make sure I’m understanding you correctly, so let me try to paraphrase.
You’re saying the discovery problem I describe is real but is a symptom of something deeper: EA has no formal governance, so whoever controls the money controls the priorities, and there’s no institutional mechanism to resist that. The three groups you identify (people who think EA is just math, people who think decentralization is strategically good, and people who benefit from the status quo) form a coalition that blocks any structural reform, and they’re concentrated in the places where power actually lives. So any solution I propose, like scouts or green-teaming or seed grants, will just get absorbed by the same dynamics that created the problem, unless there’s something closer to a binding political structure that constrains how money translates into agenda-setting power.
And your most pessimistic read is that this might not be fixable from inside EA at all, and that the better move might be starting something new that builds in those structural safeguards from the beginning.
Is that roughly right? And if so, do you think there’s any version of reform that works short of formal governance, or is your view that anything less is window dressing?
Yes I think you mostly captured it and quite well. But I think there is something a little more too, which is that EA meme actually is more epistemically humble than you think. There is EA the meme and EA the group. The EA meme has leaked into much of mainstream policy and economics. It’s in the water. The EA group has not.
Let’s say (referring to your other comment here), you do get a rich funder to fund work on applying alternate moral systems, in a ratio such that we, we being the current people and groups who you think compose ea (who is that?), in tandem with this new funding, are riding the perfect part of the curve where the marginal efficiency of exploration and exploitation (of our moral values) is equivalent.
Taking a specific example, let’s say this founder funds EA of biodiversity. Based on some (evolving) metric of biodiversity, this new group finds the best interventions for preserving biodiversity. Let’s say their current best cause areas after all of this debate are saving the coral reefs and preserving indigenous languages and culture.
In what sense are they any longer part of EA? Would you expect this subgroup to then post to the EA forums and go to EAG? More likely is they just become their own thing or the people get absorbed into the existing biodiversity or climate movements.
So then are we still properly exploring/exploiting? or do we now need a new group? Again, who is we?
We is some effort-status-capital-talent weighted aggregation of all the people who care to engage in the spaces and network of other people who would self describe as ea. It’s a very ephemeral thing driven by subliminal status games and hidden incentives.
I’m definitely not sure this is futile. I still try to push towards you vision, and others have too.
I think this is less futile than you’re suggesting. You’re right that in a decentralized system without formal governance, power defaults to capital. But the argument doesn’t require democratizing EA. It requires convincing some of the people with capital that broader epistemic empowerment is in their interest, measured by their own goals.
At least some of the people with money and power in EA are genuinely trying to do the most good they can. Alexander Berger is publicly writing about the streetlight problem and acknowledging costly false negatives. EA’s own frameworks would instantly recognize pure exploitation with zero exploration as a failure mode in any other system. The ask isn’t “share power because it’s fair.” It’s “you’re leaving impact on the table, by your own criteria, and the fix is cheap relative to the cost of what you’re missing.”
That’s not a constitutional reform. It’s one or two funders deciding that discovery infrastructure is worth building. Which is, admittedly, Path 1 again. But if the argument is strong enough, Path 1 is all it takes.
Spot on in your analysis but I don’t know if it’s fixable. I have suggested many times on this forum that we need to bake moral anti-realism into the core of the movement (which as you state probably does nothing). Ironically I think one of the core (but maybe not so novel) lessons of uppercase EA is that decentralization breeds fanaticism in a social movement if it financially exists in a larger extremely unequal society (even if the members are insanely thoughtful and bayesian). Some form of centralization is required to conform evolutionary value drift into something closer to ideal reflection.
There are many paths, but unfortunately all of them require state capacity and culture. We would need some sort of political system to enforce the financial regulations that stops the gravity of the wealth-weighted dominant aesthetics from consuming the meta idea of ea (lower case ea). And probably a bunch of other things. But this is hard, there are 3 camps of main resistance.
(1) the pure
Those who believe counting is not politics but math.
(2) the pragmatic
Those who believe decentralization is good for the movement
(3) the de jure
Those who believe decentralization is good for their career, usually because it continues the default out status quo of who current has power
Together this coalition is sizable. I’m not sure exactly how much and maybe a vocal minority but I’d reckon at least 30%. Let’s assume the rest of the movement is at least weakly in favor of centralization. But I think that 30% is more like a 50-70 percent in the hubs of oxford, dc, sf (just speculating here). These parts of the movement have not just money but better organization as well. The remaining 70% are spread throughout the world and It’s not clear how they might at current coordinate to force some sort of constitution.
Your functional path 5s are good ideas, but again who exactly is doing or paying for them? maybe you can convince someone rich right now, or maybe you can go build these projects, but there is nothing legally or politically forced and the Egregore will eat it up all the same. Anything short of a real politically binding set of laws and delineation between members and non members seems like window dressing to me. But increasingly I think even if this would get passed I wonder if the ea infra is best left as is and new young people try to just start a more functionally agnostic version of the movement. That’s at least some of the essence of post-rats, though they never meant for that to be a big tent idea.
Thanks for this. I want to make sure I’m understanding you correctly, so let me try to paraphrase.
You’re saying the discovery problem I describe is real but is a symptom of something deeper: EA has no formal governance, so whoever controls the money controls the priorities, and there’s no institutional mechanism to resist that. The three groups you identify (people who think EA is just math, people who think decentralization is strategically good, and people who benefit from the status quo) form a coalition that blocks any structural reform, and they’re concentrated in the places where power actually lives. So any solution I propose, like scouts or green-teaming or seed grants, will just get absorbed by the same dynamics that created the problem, unless there’s something closer to a binding political structure that constrains how money translates into agenda-setting power.
And your most pessimistic read is that this might not be fixable from inside EA at all, and that the better move might be starting something new that builds in those structural safeguards from the beginning.
Is that roughly right? And if so, do you think there’s any version of reform that works short of formal governance, or is your view that anything less is window dressing?
Yes I think you mostly captured it and quite well. But I think there is something a little more too, which is that EA meme actually is more epistemically humble than you think. There is EA the meme and EA the group. The EA meme has leaked into much of mainstream policy and economics. It’s in the water. The EA group has not.
Let’s say (referring to your other comment here), you do get a rich funder to fund work on applying alternate moral systems, in a ratio such that we, we being the current people and groups who you think compose ea (who is that?), in tandem with this new funding, are riding the perfect part of the curve where the marginal efficiency of exploration and exploitation (of our moral values) is equivalent.
Taking a specific example, let’s say this founder funds EA of biodiversity. Based on some (evolving) metric of biodiversity, this new group finds the best interventions for preserving biodiversity. Let’s say their current best cause areas after all of this debate are saving the coral reefs and preserving indigenous languages and culture.
In what sense are they any longer part of EA? Would you expect this subgroup to then post to the EA forums and go to EAG? More likely is they just become their own thing or the people get absorbed into the existing biodiversity or climate movements.
So then are we still properly exploring/exploiting? or do we now need a new group? Again, who is we?
We is some effort-status-capital-talent weighted aggregation of all the people who care to engage in the spaces and network of other people who would self describe as ea. It’s a very ephemeral thing driven by subliminal status games and hidden incentives.
I’m definitely not sure this is futile. I still try to push towards you vision, and others have too.
However the question isn’t can it be done, but is it the best path. I now lean in the direction that it is better to just start a new movement. I have tried to flesh parts of generative visions.
I think this is less futile than you’re suggesting. You’re right that in a decentralized system without formal governance, power defaults to capital. But the argument doesn’t require democratizing EA. It requires convincing some of the people with capital that broader epistemic empowerment is in their interest, measured by their own goals.
At least some of the people with money and power in EA are genuinely trying to do the most good they can. Alexander Berger is publicly writing about the streetlight problem and acknowledging costly false negatives. EA’s own frameworks would instantly recognize pure exploitation with zero exploration as a failure mode in any other system. The ask isn’t “share power because it’s fair.” It’s “you’re leaving impact on the table, by your own criteria, and the fix is cheap relative to the cost of what you’re missing.”
That’s not a constitutional reform. It’s one or two funders deciding that discovery infrastructure is worth building. Which is, admittedly, Path 1 again. But if the argument is strong enough, Path 1 is all it takes.