Some of the attempts within EA to solve this seem to be to push even more towards just being a professional network. I think that’s dangerously wrong, because it doesn’t remove the informal networks and their power. It just makes access to them harder, and people more desperate to get in.
For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy the informal structure. It usually doesn’t. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control and make available some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least responsible to the needs of the group at large. [...]
… an elite refers to a small group of people who have power over a larger group of which they are part, usually without direct responsibility to that larger group, and often without their knowledge or consent. [...] Elites are nothing more, and nothing less, than groups of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities. They would probably maintain their friendship whether or not they were involved in political activities; they would probably be involved in political activities whether or not they maintained their friendships. It is the coincidence of these two phenomena which creates elites in any group and makes them so difficult to break.
These friendship groups function as networks of communication outside any regular channels for such communication that may have been set up by a group. If no channels are set up, they function as the only networks of communication. [...]
Some groups, depending on their size, may have more than one such informal communications network. [...] In a Structured group, two or more such friendship networks usually compete with each other for formal power. This is often the healthiest situation, as the other members are in a position to arbitrate between the two competitors for power and thus to make demands on those to whom they give their temporary allegiance.
I love that definition of elites, and can definitely see how it corresponds to to how money, power, and intellectual leadership in EA revolves around the ancient core orgs like CEA, OpenPhil, and 80k.
However, the sections of Doing EA Better that called for more accountability structures in EA left me a bit frightened. The current ways don’t seem ideal, but I think there are innumerable ways how formalization of power can make institutions more rather than less molochian, and only a few that actually significantly improve the way things are done. Specifically, i see two types of avenues for formalizing power in EA that would essentially make things worse:
Professional(TM) EA might turn into the outer facade of what is actually still run by the now harder to reach and harder to get into traditional elite. That’s the concern I already pointed towards in the post above.
The other way things could go wrong was if we built something akin to modern-day democratic nation states: Giant sluggish egregores of paperwork that reliably produce bad compromises nobody would ever have agreed to from first principles, via a process that is so time-consuming and ensnaring to our tribal instincts that nobody has energy left to have the important truth-seeking debates that could actually solve the problems at hand.
Personally, the types of solutions I’m most excited about are ones that enable thousands of people to coordinate decentralizedly around the same shared goal without having to vote or debate everything out. I think there are some organizations out there that have solved information flows and resource allocation way more efficiently than not only hierarchical technocratic organizations like traditional corporations, socialist economies, or the central parts of present-day EA, but also more efficiently than modern democracies.
For example, in regards to collective decisionmaking, I’m pretty excited about some things that happen in new social movements, the organizations that Frederic Laloux described (see above, or directly on https://reinventingorganizationswiki.com/en/cases/), or the Burning Man community.
A decisionmaking process that seems to work in these types of decentralized organizations is the Advice Process. It is akin to how many things are already done in EA, and might deserve to be the explicit ideal we aspire to.
“The general principle is that anyone should be able to make any decision regarding Burning Nest.
Before a decision is made, you must ask advice from those who will be impacted by that decision, and those who are experts on that subject.
Assuming that you follow this process, and honestly try to listen to the advice of others, that advice is yours to evaluate and the decision yours to make.”
Of course, this ideal gets a bit complicated if astronomical stakes, infohazards, the unilateralist’s curse, and the fact that EA is spread out over a variety of continents and legal entities enter the gameboard.
I don’t have a clear answer yet for how to make EA at large more Advice Process-ey, and maybe what we currently have actually is the best we can get. But, I’m currently bringing the way EA Berlin works closer and closer to this. And as I’ve already learned, this works way better when people trust each other, and when they trust me to trust them. The Advice Process is basically built on top of the types of high-trust networks that can only emerge if people with similar values are also allowed to interact in non-professional ways.
Therefore, if we optimize away from making the personal/professional overlap work, we might rob ourselves of the possibility to implement mechanisms like the Advice Process that might help us solve a bunch of our coordination problems, but require large high-trust networks to work effectively. Other social movements have innovated on decisionmaking processes before EA. It would just be too sad if we wouldn’t hold ourselves to higher standards here than copying the established and outdated management practices of pre-startup era 20th century corporations.
(Upvoted.)
Somewhat relevant counterpoint:
I partially agree.
I love that definition of elites, and can definitely see how it corresponds to to how money, power, and intellectual leadership in EA revolves around the ancient core orgs like CEA, OpenPhil, and 80k.
However, the sections of Doing EA Better that called for more accountability structures in EA left me a bit frightened. The current ways don’t seem ideal, but I think there are innumerable ways how formalization of power can make institutions more rather than less molochian, and only a few that actually significantly improve the way things are done. Specifically, i see two types of avenues for formalizing power in EA that would essentially make things worse:
Professional(TM) EA might turn into the outer facade of what is actually still run by the now harder to reach and harder to get into traditional elite. That’s the concern I already pointed towards in the post above.
The other way things could go wrong was if we built something akin to modern-day democratic nation states: Giant sluggish egregores of paperwork that reliably produce bad compromises nobody would ever have agreed to from first principles, via a process that is so time-consuming and ensnaring to our tribal instincts that nobody has energy left to have the important truth-seeking debates that could actually solve the problems at hand.
Personally, the types of solutions I’m most excited about are ones that enable thousands of people to coordinate decentralizedly around the same shared goal without having to vote or debate everything out. I think there are some organizations out there that have solved information flows and resource allocation way more efficiently than not only hierarchical technocratic organizations like traditional corporations, socialist economies, or the central parts of present-day EA, but also more efficiently than modern democracies.
For example, in regards to collective decisionmaking, I’m pretty excited about some things that happen in new social movements, the organizations that Frederic Laloux described (see above, or directly on https://reinventingorganizationswiki.com/en/cases/), or the Burning Man community.
A decisionmaking process that seems to work in these types of decentralized organizations is the Advice Process. It is akin to how many things are already done in EA, and might deserve to be the explicit ideal we aspire to.
Here’s a short description written by Burning Nest, a UK-based Burning Man-style event:
Of course, this ideal gets a bit complicated if astronomical stakes, infohazards, the unilateralist’s curse, and the fact that EA is spread out over a variety of continents and legal entities enter the gameboard.
I don’t have a clear answer yet for how to make EA at large more Advice Process-ey, and maybe what we currently have actually is the best we can get. But, I’m currently bringing the way EA Berlin works closer and closer to this. And as I’ve already learned, this works way better when people trust each other, and when they trust me to trust them. The Advice Process is basically built on top of the types of high-trust networks that can only emerge if people with similar values are also allowed to interact in non-professional ways.
Therefore, if we optimize away from making the personal/professional overlap work, we might rob ourselves of the possibility to implement mechanisms like the Advice Process that might help us solve a bunch of our coordination problems, but require large high-trust networks to work effectively. Other social movements have innovated on decisionmaking processes before EA. It would just be too sad if we wouldn’t hold ourselves to higher standards here than copying the established and outdated management practices of pre-startup era 20th century corporations.