I think this is a key point of disagreement. Most of the proposed governance changes seem to me like they would have some protective effect against bad actors, but very little effect on promoting good decision-making. I’d be much more on board if people had proposals that I actually thought would help leadership make better decisions, but I don’t think most of the transparency-oriented proposals would actually do that.
(I think actually justifying this statement would be a whole other post so I’ll just state it as an opinion.)
The way I think EA orgs can improve decision-making is by introducing some kind of meaningful competition. At the moment, the umbrella structure, multi-project orgs, and lack of transparency makes that all but impossible.
Split that into a cluster including an org that, say, just runs events and isn’t officially supported by EVF and you have a level playing field and a useful comparison with another org that also started to run events—while having a big enough space of event types that both could semi-cooperate.
If both orgs are also transparent enough that substantial discrepancies between how well they operate are visible, then you have a real possibility of funders reacting to such discrepancies in a way that incentivises the orgs and their staff to perform well. At the moment I just don’t feel like these incentives exist.
I think this is a key point of disagreement. Most of the proposed governance changes seem to me like they would have some protective effect against bad actors, but very little effect on promoting good decision-making. I’d be much more on board if people had proposals that I actually thought would help leadership make better decisions, but I don’t think most of the transparency-oriented proposals would actually do that.
(I think actually justifying this statement would be a whole other post so I’ll just state it as an opinion.)
The way I think EA orgs can improve decision-making is by introducing some kind of meaningful competition. At the moment, the umbrella structure, multi-project orgs, and lack of transparency makes that all but impossible.
Split that into a cluster including an org that, say, just runs events and isn’t officially supported by EVF and you have a level playing field and a useful comparison with another org that also started to run events—while having a big enough space of event types that both could semi-cooperate.
If both orgs are also transparent enough that substantial discrepancies between how well they operate are visible, then you have a real possibility of funders reacting to such discrepancies in a way that incentivises the orgs and their staff to perform well. At the moment I just don’t feel like these incentives exist.