âI think that a panel sounds like a good idea, but Iâd to request that someone plays Devilâs Advocate for the other side, so we are aware of what issues may arise.â
Hi*.
(1) As soon as you write down something formal, bad actors can abuse that process.
Letâs define bad actors as people engaged in activities harmful to the EA movement, and then divide bad actors into the categories of âmaliciousâ and âincompetentâ.
This argument relates to the malicious actors. When dealing with malicious actors, there are generally strong advantages to keeping vague, non-public, commonsense rules. This is because as soon as you have a rigid, public set of rules, there will be loopholes. This is essentially unavoidable; no organisation has ever succeeded in defining a set of rules that rules out every possible imaginable bad behaviour.
Of course, once they go through a loophole, we could modify the rules to close the loophole. But that tends to look, both to internal and external observers, very arbitrary and even like youâre just trying to pick on particular individuals the central âpeople with powerâ donât like. It defeats a lot of the point of having processes in the first place.
(2) Being publicly shamed in front of literally hundreds or thousands of people is something that most human beings find toxic to the point that they would never knowingly risk it. Accordingly, we should expect that most people caught by this will be unknowingly risking it.
This mostly relates to the incompetent actors, who I believe greatly outnumber the malicious actors. Itâs particularly bad if people do actually start skipping steps in the process you described (see below) and jumping straight to community-wide sanctions. The simple fact of the matter is that for every person like Gleb, there are many more people who were incompetent actors, were quietly tapped on the shoulder and told to cease-and-desist, and actually did desist. Of course, we donât hear about those people, which makes it hard to assess their number. Unfortunately, without knowing how many problems were quietly headed off in this way without any drama or fuss we donât actually know that our current process is a bad one.
What happens to an incompetent actor who is shamed in this way? Presumably, they dissociate from the movement. If they found the EA movement in the first place then they probably know other people on the periphery of the movement and some people in the movement. They talk to those other people, who are generally sympathetic. Those other people dissociate. And so on; we get an organic expanding flow of people leaving the movement. I think it would be extremely easy for us to lose entire cities, or even countries in their early stages, in this way, with no meaningful hope of recovery. Of course, those people probably donât lose interest in EA ideas entirely, so they might keep doing a lot of EA things without staying under the EA âbrandâ. Maybe they set up their own movement. And we have fragmented.
I honestly think the above circumstance is just a matter of time; if you have a death penalty then eventually you always end up executing someone innocent. Except that unlike in the analogy, the innocent martyr can actively recruit others in disavowing the community who treated them so poorly.
(3) Nope, other movements donât do this.
If, as I argued above, this example doesnât improve that our process is bad, where else can we look for evidence that its bad? One obvious place would be the reference class of other social movements. If other movements had panels like this and also had fewer problems with bad actors relative to their size, that would be moderately strong evidence in favour of it being a good idea.
Unfortunately, despite the claim in the OP that âthe existence of this would bring us into alignment with other societies, which usually have some document that describes the principles that the society stands for, and has some mechanism for ensuring that those who choose to represent themselves as part of that society abides by those principles.â, I donât think this holds. Itâs not clear to me exactly what Will meant by âsocietiesâ, but the most-often used references for EA are other global social movements like feminism, LGBT rights movement, civil rights movement, animal rights movement, environmentalism, and so on.
Play this game with a friend: write down the set of people who you think best fills the role of the panel Will describes for each of the five movements mentioned above. How many did you agree on? Do you think you would still agree if youâd picked a friend in a different country? What about a friend from a different socio-economic background?
Panels only work if (almost) everybody involved agrees thatâs where authority lies. I think itâs transparently obvious that the five global movements listed above do not agree where global authority lies, even if some subsets (e.g. the German Green youth movement) might agree where local authority lies (the German Green party).
(4) It ossifies our current lack of diversity. Or if we keep fluidly changing it, it may become emblematic of the problems its trying to solve.
I think most people have a strong intuition that any such panel should be as diverse and be as broadly representative of the views of the EA movement at large as is reasonably possible given size constraints. I agree with this intuition. However, I would like to flag up that being as diverse as the EA movement itself, while the correct bar, is really not a very high bar on many metrics. If the EA movement continues to become more diverse and continues to grow rapidly, which I hope it does, then the panel will soon be skewed away from the actual makeup of the EA community in undesirable ways. For instance, suppose a 4th major cause area gains standing in the movement on a par with Global Poverty/âAnimal Rights/âFar Future over the next five years. That area should be represented on the panel, and by default it wouldnât be. So we need to keep changing the makeup of the panel to match the makeup of EA, and the latter isnât something we can measure particularly scientifically so thereâs no obvious Schelling point for people to agree how to do this. Itâs not even obvious what the list of characteristics we should care about ensuring approximate representation in even is.
In many societies that do have such panels, the panels are elected by members of the society. We could do that, but this is extremely messy. It will get political. Some group x will end up feeling unfairly excluded from the inner group of power brokers. At that point you have a powder keg of resentment making to explode.
And then group x has an innocent executed. Goodbye group x.
Perhaps most importantly, all this management of the panel is going to use up a ton of time to do it well at all, and it seems like the main complaint right now is that too much time got spent in the motivating case.
*I donât actually know what I think about this, so I donât know if this qualifies as âDevilâs Advocateâ, more like just âAdvocateâ.
**âsomeone starts engaging in bad activities â bad activities are tolerated for an extended period of time, aggravating many â repeated public complaints start surfacing, but still no action â eventually a coalition of community members gather together to publicly denounce the activitiesâ
As soon as you write down something formal, bad actors can abuse that process.
Bad actors can also abuse informal processes. If a process is informal, the key to winning is generally effective manipulation of public opinion. When rival factions fight to manipulate public opinion, that creates the kind of conflict that leads to bloody schisms.
If, as I argued above, this example doesnât improve that our process is bad, where else can we look for evidence that its bad? One obvious place would be the reference class of other social movements. If other movements had panels like this and also had fewer problems with bad actors relative to their size, that would be moderately strong evidence in favour of it being a good idea.
This seems like a definitional argument to me. EA is a movement, movements donât have panels, therefore EA shouldnât have a panel. Such an argument doesnât touch on the actual consequences of having a panel. If EA is a question, maybe the answer to that question is an âassociationâ rather than a movement, and itâs not unusual for associations to have panels.
In some cases an association will be so closely identified with the area it works in that the two will seem almost synonymous. I understand that in the US, almost everyone who wants a job as an actuary takes exams administered by a group called the Society of Actuaries. This seems like the ideal case for EA. But even if there were multiple competing associations, or not everyone chose to be a part of the main one, I suspect this wouldnât be very bad. (Some thoughts on competition between organizations in this comment.)
Iâm not sure point (2) has much to do with this decision. People would still get gentle suggestions that they were harming the movement if there was a panel. The point is to have a process if gentle suggestions arenât working.
Carl Shulman mentioned the value of transparency in another thread related to this, but it occurs to me that a person subject to disciplinary action might want to keep it private, and that could be reasonable in some cases.
Panels only work if (almost) everybody involved agrees thatâs where authority lies.
I agree that authority is generally something other people grant you, not something you take for yourself. Thatâs part of why Iâm trying to respond to the comments critical of this idea, since this sort of thing works best when almost everyone is on board.
Instead of compelling others to recognize its authority, the panel should work to earn its authority. They should say explicitly that if theyâre not taking your suggestions, youâre free to vote with your feet and set up your own thing.
I think groups generally function better when theyâre able to grant authority this way. I would guess that the scouting movement, which seems to have granted authority to a group called the World Organization of the Scout Movement, functions better than feminism/âanimal rights/âenvironmentalism (though I will grant that the advocacy coming out of the latter three is more compelling).
Very speculatively, I wonder if an âassociationâ is what you want when youâre trying to produce something, and a âmovementâ is what you want when youâre trying to change attitudes in a relatively untargeted way.
I think most people have a strong intuition that any such panel should be as diverse and be as broadly representative of the views of the EA movement at large as is reasonably possible given size constraints. I agree with this intuition.
I think this is mainly desirable because people will be more willing to grant authority to a panel thatâs seen as representative of the entire movement. In terms of the actual decisions being made, I can imagine a panel thatâs entirely unrepresentative of the EA movement (e.g. trained mediators from Japan, where EA has little presence) doing nearly as good of a job.
If a new cause area gains standing in the movement, by definition itâs achieved buy-in from people, which probably includes panel members. And even if none of them are very excited about it, if they have much in common with the EAs Iâve met, they are fair-minded enough for it not to interfere with their work significantly.
In many societies that do have such panels, the panels are elected by members of the society. We could do that, but this is extremely messy. It will get political. Some group x will end up feeling unfairly excluded from the inner group of power brokers. At that point you have a powder keg of resentment making to explode.
The more power the panel has, the more process there needs to be in selecting who will serve. My current guess is that the panelâs powers should be pretty limited. They should see their mission as âfacilitating discussions about effective altruismâ, or something like that, not âdoing the most goodâ.
Play this game with a friend: write down the set of people who you think best fills the role of the panel Will describes for each of the five movements mentioned above. How many did you agree on?
General advice for rapidly growing (for-profit) organizations is to focus on your next order of magnitude growth.
It seems not just reasonable but almost certain that the optimal strategy for EA right now (~1K core members?) is different than the strategy for the environmental movement (~10M core members?).
âI think that a panel sounds like a good idea, but Iâd to request that someone plays Devilâs Advocate for the other side, so we are aware of what issues may arise.â
Hi*.
(1) As soon as you write down something formal, bad actors can abuse that process.
Letâs define bad actors as people engaged in activities harmful to the EA movement, and then divide bad actors into the categories of âmaliciousâ and âincompetentâ.
This argument relates to the malicious actors. When dealing with malicious actors, there are generally strong advantages to keeping vague, non-public, commonsense rules. This is because as soon as you have a rigid, public set of rules, there will be loopholes. This is essentially unavoidable; no organisation has ever succeeded in defining a set of rules that rules out every possible imaginable bad behaviour.
Of course, once they go through a loophole, we could modify the rules to close the loophole. But that tends to look, both to internal and external observers, very arbitrary and even like youâre just trying to pick on particular individuals the central âpeople with powerâ donât like. It defeats a lot of the point of having processes in the first place.
(2) Being publicly shamed in front of literally hundreds or thousands of people is something that most human beings find toxic to the point that they would never knowingly risk it. Accordingly, we should expect that most people caught by this will be unknowingly risking it.
This mostly relates to the incompetent actors, who I believe greatly outnumber the malicious actors. Itâs particularly bad if people do actually start skipping steps in the process you described (see below) and jumping straight to community-wide sanctions. The simple fact of the matter is that for every person like Gleb, there are many more people who were incompetent actors, were quietly tapped on the shoulder and told to cease-and-desist, and actually did desist. Of course, we donât hear about those people, which makes it hard to assess their number. Unfortunately, without knowing how many problems were quietly headed off in this way without any drama or fuss we donât actually know that our current process is a bad one.
What happens to an incompetent actor who is shamed in this way? Presumably, they dissociate from the movement. If they found the EA movement in the first place then they probably know other people on the periphery of the movement and some people in the movement. They talk to those other people, who are generally sympathetic. Those other people dissociate. And so on; we get an organic expanding flow of people leaving the movement. I think it would be extremely easy for us to lose entire cities, or even countries in their early stages, in this way, with no meaningful hope of recovery. Of course, those people probably donât lose interest in EA ideas entirely, so they might keep doing a lot of EA things without staying under the EA âbrandâ. Maybe they set up their own movement. And we have fragmented.
I honestly think the above circumstance is just a matter of time; if you have a death penalty then eventually you always end up executing someone innocent. Except that unlike in the analogy, the innocent martyr can actively recruit others in disavowing the community who treated them so poorly.
(3) Nope, other movements donât do this.
If, as I argued above, this example doesnât improve that our process is bad, where else can we look for evidence that its bad? One obvious place would be the reference class of other social movements. If other movements had panels like this and also had fewer problems with bad actors relative to their size, that would be moderately strong evidence in favour of it being a good idea.
Unfortunately, despite the claim in the OP that âthe existence of this would bring us into alignment with other societies, which usually have some document that describes the principles that the society stands for, and has some mechanism for ensuring that those who choose to represent themselves as part of that society abides by those principles.â, I donât think this holds. Itâs not clear to me exactly what Will meant by âsocietiesâ, but the most-often used references for EA are other global social movements like feminism, LGBT rights movement, civil rights movement, animal rights movement, environmentalism, and so on.
Play this game with a friend: write down the set of people who you think best fills the role of the panel Will describes for each of the five movements mentioned above. How many did you agree on? Do you think you would still agree if youâd picked a friend in a different country? What about a friend from a different socio-economic background?
Panels only work if (almost) everybody involved agrees thatâs where authority lies. I think itâs transparently obvious that the five global movements listed above do not agree where global authority lies, even if some subsets (e.g. the German Green youth movement) might agree where local authority lies (the German Green party).
(4) It ossifies our current lack of diversity. Or if we keep fluidly changing it, it may become emblematic of the problems its trying to solve.
I think most people have a strong intuition that any such panel should be as diverse and be as broadly representative of the views of the EA movement at large as is reasonably possible given size constraints. I agree with this intuition. However, I would like to flag up that being as diverse as the EA movement itself, while the correct bar, is really not a very high bar on many metrics. If the EA movement continues to become more diverse and continues to grow rapidly, which I hope it does, then the panel will soon be skewed away from the actual makeup of the EA community in undesirable ways. For instance, suppose a 4th major cause area gains standing in the movement on a par with Global Poverty/âAnimal Rights/âFar Future over the next five years. That area should be represented on the panel, and by default it wouldnât be. So we need to keep changing the makeup of the panel to match the makeup of EA, and the latter isnât something we can measure particularly scientifically so thereâs no obvious Schelling point for people to agree how to do this. Itâs not even obvious what the list of characteristics we should care about ensuring approximate representation in even is.
In many societies that do have such panels, the panels are elected by members of the society. We could do that, but this is extremely messy. It will get political. Some group x will end up feeling unfairly excluded from the inner group of power brokers. At that point you have a powder keg of resentment making to explode.
And then group x has an innocent executed. Goodbye group x.
Perhaps most importantly, all this management of the panel is going to use up a ton of time to do it well at all, and it seems like the main complaint right now is that too much time got spent in the motivating case.
*I donât actually know what I think about this, so I donât know if this qualifies as âDevilâs Advocateâ, more like just âAdvocateâ.
**âsomeone starts engaging in bad activities â bad activities are tolerated for an extended period of time, aggravating many â repeated public complaints start surfacing, but still no action â eventually a coalition of community members gather together to publicly denounce the activitiesâ
Bad actors can also abuse informal processes. If a process is informal, the key to winning is generally effective manipulation of public opinion. When rival factions fight to manipulate public opinion, that creates the kind of conflict that leads to bloody schisms.
This seems like a definitional argument to me. EA is a movement, movements donât have panels, therefore EA shouldnât have a panel. Such an argument doesnât touch on the actual consequences of having a panel. If EA is a question, maybe the answer to that question is an âassociationâ rather than a movement, and itâs not unusual for associations to have panels.
In some cases an association will be so closely identified with the area it works in that the two will seem almost synonymous. I understand that in the US, almost everyone who wants a job as an actuary takes exams administered by a group called the Society of Actuaries. This seems like the ideal case for EA. But even if there were multiple competing associations, or not everyone chose to be a part of the main one, I suspect this wouldnât be very bad. (Some thoughts on competition between organizations in this comment.)
I think itâs pretty normal for professional associations, at least, to have a disciplinary process. Hereâs the CFA institute on how they deal with ethics violations for instance.
Iâm not sure point (2) has much to do with this decision. People would still get gentle suggestions that they were harming the movement if there was a panel. The point is to have a process if gentle suggestions arenât working.
Carl Shulman mentioned the value of transparency in another thread related to this, but it occurs to me that a person subject to disciplinary action might want to keep it private, and that could be reasonable in some cases.
I agree that authority is generally something other people grant you, not something you take for yourself. Thatâs part of why Iâm trying to respond to the comments critical of this idea, since this sort of thing works best when almost everyone is on board.
Instead of compelling others to recognize its authority, the panel should work to earn its authority. They should say explicitly that if theyâre not taking your suggestions, youâre free to vote with your feet and set up your own thing.
I think groups generally function better when theyâre able to grant authority this way. I would guess that the scouting movement, which seems to have granted authority to a group called the World Organization of the Scout Movement, functions better than feminism/âanimal rights/âenvironmentalism (though I will grant that the advocacy coming out of the latter three is more compelling).
Very speculatively, I wonder if an âassociationâ is what you want when youâre trying to produce something, and a âmovementâ is what you want when youâre trying to change attitudes in a relatively untargeted way.
I think this is mainly desirable because people will be more willing to grant authority to a panel thatâs seen as representative of the entire movement. In terms of the actual decisions being made, I can imagine a panel thatâs entirely unrepresentative of the EA movement (e.g. trained mediators from Japan, where EA has little presence) doing nearly as good of a job.
If a new cause area gains standing in the movement, by definition itâs achieved buy-in from people, which probably includes panel members. And even if none of them are very excited about it, if they have much in common with the EAs Iâve met, they are fair-minded enough for it not to interfere with their work significantly.
The more power the panel has, the more process there needs to be in selecting who will serve. My current guess is that the panelâs powers should be pretty limited. They should see their mission as âfacilitating discussions about effective altruismâ, or something like that, not âdoing the most goodâ.
General advice for rapidly growing (for-profit) organizations is to focus on your next order of magnitude growth.
It seems not just reasonable but almost certain that the optimal strategy for EA right now (~1K core members?) is different than the strategy for the environmental movement (~10M core members?).
Thanks so much for the detailed comment! Exactly what I was looking for!