As someone who’s been around the scene for a while, happy to try providing some takes here:
1. In general, I agree this area is important, and improvement here could be beneficial. That said, it’s tough to do well (as with most important things).
2. My take is that the EA/rationalists nonprofit scene, before ~2019 or so, didn’t have the best senior operations/management talent. One primary reason is that funding was tight and precarious. Setting up a 501(c)(3) and managing it is a major pain. The EA/rationality scene attracted a bunch of young people with research-type skills. These people typically really dislike doing operations and don’t have great networks of experienced manager types. Over time, the funding situation and the EA-adjacent talent pool have both improved a lot. (But of course, we still have bottlenecks here).
3. I think it’s easy to compare EA orgs with either top tech companies, top political organizations, or whatever one could imagine being really amazing and then be underwhelmed in comparison. I’d encourage critics to try to find more reasonable comparisons. EA orgs typically offer much lower salaries and are less prestigious than top tech companies. They’re very different from political groups. I’m legitimately curious here. I’m not sure what examples are best for us to emulate. Many EA groups look up to 80,000 Hours and Open Philanthropy as examples of well-run nonprofits.
4. One tractable question could be—“what percentage of a nonprofit’s resources do you think they should dedicate to governance improvements / self-evaluation”? Organizations typically don’t exactly have the choice to be “really good or not”, but they do have the option to just allocate more resources to this sort of thing, if donors approve. I guess few donors would want this to be greater than 20%, but I’m not sure.
5. Related to (3), many non-EA nonprofits seem pretty mediocre to me, likely in large part due to mediocre funding incentives and amounts. I’ve dug to find clever voices in this area and have been underwhelmed. I think the median organization in the US is just not that great when it comes to governance, and I could easily imagine nonprofits being worse than average businesses.
6. This might be a nitpick, but the 80k accounting issue, specifically, didn’t actually seem terrible to me? Like, out of all the mistakes they point out on that page, that doesn’t seem the biggest to me. Plus, I can’t think of other orgs with mistakes pages that are better than that. (Most orgs don’t even have any mistakes pages)
7. I’m a board member of two EA nonprofits and run an EA nonprofit (QURI). I’ve dug for great resources or advisors for nonprofit management (maybe 2-4 solid weeks total, plus more for narrow skills), and have yet to be very impressed. Some EAs have been trying to invent their own patterns from scratch (i.e. Mistakes pages), due to this lack of being able to find great outside experience. There’s a bunch of bad managerial consultants and materials out there—I’m sure there is some great stuff too, but at least I don’t feel like I’ve been able to discern it yet.
8. I’d love it if we could find ways to be more honest about these situations. Like, “from 2014 to 2016, our organization was only able to get C+ talent to be in charge of our bookkeeping. Given our many constraints at the time, we thought this was a reasonable move.”. However, given cultural norms, it’s unclear how we can say things like this without invading someone’s privacy or similar. I think if you have conversations with organization leaders, they will generally be honest about their organization’s limitations, but it’s awkward to discuss publicly online.
I hope this doesn’t sound too much like I’m giving excuses for these organizations. I’m trying to provide a better model for why these challenges exist.
I intend to spend a fair bit more time at this point investigating issues of governance. Doing so of course, means that I’ll spend less time doing object-level tasks in the near term.
If people reading this are interested in helping, more posts/work on this topic could be great.
I agree with this substantively, agree that it’s a bit unreasonable to think EA orgs should be similar to large corporations, but we should aspire to do this well—the status quo for small nonprofits is pretty dismal, and we should at the very least be better than peer organizations, and ideally even better than that. I also think that this is a great area to work with Ian David Moss, who has a lot of experience in the area, and is well connected with other experts.
One possible analogy might be for EA organizations to aspire to something like the structure of a well-run academic department, where there’s typically a distinction between (1) professors who are mostly focused on research, and promoted into decision-making positions (e.g. area head, director of undergrad education, committee chairs, department chair) that they’re not particularly well-trained for, and (2) staff who actually run all the operations, logistics, finances, grants, front offices, websites, etc., and who may not be paid as much as at tech companies, but who enjoy some prestige of working at a university.
As every experienced faculty member knows, without good department staff, everything falls apart.
That’s a good point. I’m not very familiar with academic departments, particularly well-run ones. (I liked FHI, but the greater Oxford bureaucracy had issues).
By chance are there any examples of really good departments? Or writing on how to make a good academic department? I imagine this is a niche topic, but it seems like an important one.
Ozzie—I don’t know of any good writings about what makes for a good, high-functioning academic department.
I’m speaking mostly from personal experience of having worked in a dozen academic departments in several countries over the last few decades. Generally speaking, there seems to be less variance in the quality of ‘support staff’ (e.g. front office, finance, etc) than in the quality of faculty leadership. Most staff seem ‘pretty good’ or better. Staff typically have their own hiring protocols, promotion processes, and job security norms, quite separate from tenure-track faculty. Staff often switch between departments, since running grant finance oversight for a psych department isn’t that different from running it for a physics department (for example). Also, staff typically don’t need to have much intellectual, emotional, or social investment in the ‘cause area’ or research topics that a department addresses; they often seem to feel rewarded simply by being paid well, having reasonable job security, being respected by faculty and students, getting along with other staff, and being associated with a generally prestigious organization.
So, I think it’s useful for EA organizations to spend a fair amount of time and effort thinking about how to recruit and retain great staff. Maybe they have already; I don’t know.
As someone who’s been around the scene for a while, happy to try providing some takes here:
1. In general, I agree this area is important, and improvement here could be beneficial. That said, it’s tough to do well (as with most important things).
2. My take is that the EA/rationalists nonprofit scene, before ~2019 or so, didn’t have the best senior operations/management talent. One primary reason is that funding was tight and precarious. Setting up a 501(c)(3) and managing it is a major pain. The EA/rationality scene attracted a bunch of young people with research-type skills. These people typically really dislike doing operations and don’t have great networks of experienced manager types. Over time, the funding situation and the EA-adjacent talent pool have both improved a lot. (But of course, we still have bottlenecks here).
3. I think it’s easy to compare EA orgs with either top tech companies, top political organizations, or whatever one could imagine being really amazing and then be underwhelmed in comparison. I’d encourage critics to try to find more reasonable comparisons. EA orgs typically offer much lower salaries and are less prestigious than top tech companies. They’re very different from political groups. I’m legitimately curious here. I’m not sure what examples are best for us to emulate. Many EA groups look up to 80,000 Hours and Open Philanthropy as examples of well-run nonprofits.
4. One tractable question could be—“what percentage of a nonprofit’s resources do you think they should dedicate to governance improvements / self-evaluation”? Organizations typically don’t exactly have the choice to be “really good or not”, but they do have the option to just allocate more resources to this sort of thing, if donors approve. I guess few donors would want this to be greater than 20%, but I’m not sure.
5. Related to (3), many non-EA nonprofits seem pretty mediocre to me, likely in large part due to mediocre funding incentives and amounts. I’ve dug to find clever voices in this area and have been underwhelmed. I think the median organization in the US is just not that great when it comes to governance, and I could easily imagine nonprofits being worse than average businesses.
6. This might be a nitpick, but the 80k accounting issue, specifically, didn’t actually seem terrible to me? Like, out of all the mistakes they point out on that page, that doesn’t seem the biggest to me. Plus, I can’t think of other orgs with mistakes pages that are better than that. (Most orgs don’t even have any mistakes pages)
7. I’m a board member of two EA nonprofits and run an EA nonprofit (QURI). I’ve dug for great resources or advisors for nonprofit management (maybe 2-4 solid weeks total, plus more for narrow skills), and have yet to be very impressed. Some EAs have been trying to invent their own patterns from scratch (i.e. Mistakes pages), due to this lack of being able to find great outside experience. There’s a bunch of bad managerial consultants and materials out there—I’m sure there is some great stuff too, but at least I don’t feel like I’ve been able to discern it yet.
8. I’d love it if we could find ways to be more honest about these situations. Like, “from 2014 to 2016, our organization was only able to get C+ talent to be in charge of our bookkeeping. Given our many constraints at the time, we thought this was a reasonable move.”. However, given cultural norms, it’s unclear how we can say things like this without invading someone’s privacy or similar. I think if you have conversations with organization leaders, they will generally be honest about their organization’s limitations, but it’s awkward to discuss publicly online.
I hope this doesn’t sound too much like I’m giving excuses for these organizations. I’m trying to provide a better model for why these challenges exist.
I intend to spend a fair bit more time at this point investigating issues of governance. Doing so of course, means that I’ll spend less time doing object-level tasks in the near term.
If people reading this are interested in helping, more posts/work on this topic could be great.
I agree with this substantively, agree that it’s a bit unreasonable to think EA orgs should be similar to large corporations, but we should aspire to do this well—the status quo for small nonprofits is pretty dismal, and we should at the very least be better than peer organizations, and ideally even better than that. I also think that this is a great area to work with Ian David Moss, who has a lot of experience in the area, and is well connected with other experts.
Ozzie—this was a good and constructive post.
One possible analogy might be for EA organizations to aspire to something like the structure of a well-run academic department, where there’s typically a distinction between (1) professors who are mostly focused on research, and promoted into decision-making positions (e.g. area head, director of undergrad education, committee chairs, department chair) that they’re not particularly well-trained for, and (2) staff who actually run all the operations, logistics, finances, grants, front offices, websites, etc., and who may not be paid as much as at tech companies, but who enjoy some prestige of working at a university.
As every experienced faculty member knows, without good department staff, everything falls apart.
That’s a good point. I’m not very familiar with academic departments, particularly well-run ones. (I liked FHI, but the greater Oxford bureaucracy had issues).
By chance are there any examples of really good departments? Or writing on how to make a good academic department? I imagine this is a niche topic, but it seems like an important one.
Ozzie—I don’t know of any good writings about what makes for a good, high-functioning academic department.
I’m speaking mostly from personal experience of having worked in a dozen academic departments in several countries over the last few decades. Generally speaking, there seems to be less variance in the quality of ‘support staff’ (e.g. front office, finance, etc) than in the quality of faculty leadership. Most staff seem ‘pretty good’ or better. Staff typically have their own hiring protocols, promotion processes, and job security norms, quite separate from tenure-track faculty. Staff often switch between departments, since running grant finance oversight for a psych department isn’t that different from running it for a physics department (for example). Also, staff typically don’t need to have much intellectual, emotional, or social investment in the ‘cause area’ or research topics that a department addresses; they often seem to feel rewarded simply by being paid well, having reasonable job security, being respected by faculty and students, getting along with other staff, and being associated with a generally prestigious organization.
So, I think it’s useful for EA organizations to spend a fair amount of time and effort thinking about how to recruit and retain great staff. Maybe they have already; I don’t know.