I want to push back a bit on my own intuition, which is that trying to build out collective (or market-based) decision-making for EA funding is potentially impractical and/or ineffective. Most EAs respect the power of the “wisdom of crowds”, and many advocate for prediction markets. Why exactly does this affinity for markets stop at funding? It sounds like most think collective decision-making for funding is not feasible enough to consider, and that’s 100% fair, but were it easy to implement, would it be ineffective?
Again, my intuition is to trust the subject matter experts, to rely on the institutions that we’ve built for this specific task. But I invest in index funds, I believe that past performance is no guarantee of future results, and I trust that aggregate markets are typically more accurate than most experts. Have EA organizations proved that they are essentially super-forecasters, that they consistently “beat the EA market” in terms of ROI? Perhaps this metaphor is doomed—these EA orgs are also market-makers as well. Who better to place bets than those with insider knowledge?
At the very least, this experiment seems ripe for running if it hasn’t been already. It’s far beyond me to figure out how to structure it, I’ll leave that to those like Nuno, who laid out a potential path. But we’re making a rather large assumption that the collective is by default ineffective.
EDIT: someone pointed out that I’m conflicting prediction markets w/ collective decision making. I want to clarify that my comment is referring to market-based decision making (basically prediction markets), which I view as a subset of collective decision making. Maybe my EA vocab is off though.
I think that this incorrectly conflates prediction markets and collective decision making.
(Prediction) markets are (theoretically) effective because folks that are able to reliably predict correctly will end up getting more money, and there are incentives in place for correct predictions to be made. It seems that the incentives for correct decision making are far weaker in collective decision making, and I don’t see any positive feedback loop where folks that are better at noticing impactful projects will get their opinions weighted more highly.
I think that if you put those feedback systems in place, it ends up rapidly looking much more like the situation as it is today than what most folks would call collective decision making.
Thanks for the feedback Dan. Maybe I’m using the vocabulary incorrectly—does collective specifically mean 1 person 1 vote? I do specifically avoid saying democratic and mention market-based decision making in the first sentence.
It’s not at all obvious to me that putting market-based feedback systems in place would look like the funding situation today. I think it’s worth pushing back on the assumption that EA’s current funding structure rewards the best performers in terms of asset allocation.
Fair point! I was assuming that by collective decision making you meant much closer to 1 person 1 vote, but if it’s well defined term I’m not sure of the definition.
I haven’t heard much discussion on a market-based feedback system, and I’d be very interested in seeing it tried. Perhaps for legal or technical reasons it wouldn’t work out super well (similar to current prediction markets), but it seems well worth the experiment.
I want to push back a bit on my own intuition, which is that trying to build out collective (or market-based) decision-making for EA funding is potentially impractical and/or ineffective. Most EAs respect the power of the “wisdom of crowds”, and many advocate for prediction markets. Why exactly does this affinity for markets stop at funding? It sounds like most think collective decision-making for funding is not feasible enough to consider, and that’s 100% fair, but were it easy to implement, would it be ineffective?
Again, my intuition is to trust the subject matter experts, to rely on the institutions that we’ve built for this specific task. But I invest in index funds, I believe that past performance is no guarantee of future results, and I trust that aggregate markets are typically more accurate than most experts. Have EA organizations proved that they are essentially super-forecasters, that they consistently “beat the EA market” in terms of ROI? Perhaps this metaphor is doomed—these EA orgs are also market-makers as well. Who better to place bets than those with insider knowledge?
At the very least, this experiment seems ripe for running if it hasn’t been already. It’s far beyond me to figure out how to structure it, I’ll leave that to those like Nuno, who laid out a potential path. But we’re making a rather large assumption that the collective is by default ineffective.
EDIT: someone pointed out that I’m conflicting prediction markets w/ collective decision making. I want to clarify that my comment is referring to market-based decision making (basically prediction markets), which I view as a subset of collective decision making. Maybe my EA vocab is off though.
I think that this incorrectly conflates prediction markets and collective decision making.
(Prediction) markets are (theoretically) effective because folks that are able to reliably predict correctly will end up getting more money, and there are incentives in place for correct predictions to be made. It seems that the incentives for correct decision making are far weaker in collective decision making, and I don’t see any positive feedback loop where folks that are better at noticing impactful projects will get their opinions weighted more highly.
I think that if you put those feedback systems in place, it ends up rapidly looking much more like the situation as it is today than what most folks would call collective decision making.
Thanks for the feedback Dan. Maybe I’m using the vocabulary incorrectly—does collective specifically mean 1 person 1 vote? I do specifically avoid saying democratic and mention market-based decision making in the first sentence.
It’s not at all obvious to me that putting market-based feedback systems in place would look like the funding situation today. I think it’s worth pushing back on the assumption that EA’s current funding structure rewards the best performers in terms of asset allocation.
Fair point! I was assuming that by collective decision making you meant much closer to 1 person 1 vote, but if it’s well defined term I’m not sure of the definition.
I haven’t heard much discussion on a market-based feedback system, and I’d be very interested in seeing it tried. Perhaps for legal or technical reasons it wouldn’t work out super well (similar to current prediction markets), but it seems well worth the experiment.