I think a significant part of the whole project of effective altruism has always been telling people how to spend money that we don’t own, so that the money is more effective at improving the world.
Seems reasonable to me for EAs to suggest ways of spending EA donor money that they think would be more effective at improving the world, including if they think that would be via giving more power to random EAs. Now whether that intervention would be more effective is a fair thing to debate.
As you touch on in the post, there are many weaker versions of some suggestions that could be experimented with at a a small scale, using EA Funds or some funding from Open Phil, and trying out a few different definitions of the ‘EA community’ - eg—EAG acceptance, Forum karma, etc, and using different voting models, eg—quadratic voting, one person one vote, uneven votes etc, veto power for Open Phil.
I think a significant part of the whole project of effective altruism has always been telling people how to spend money that we don’t own, so that the money is more effective at improving the world.
Seems reasonable to me for EAs to suggest ways of spending EA donor money that they think would be more effective at improving the world, including if they think that would be via giving more power to random EAs. Now whether that intervention would be more effective is a fair thing to debate.
As you touch on in the post, there are many weaker versions of some suggestions that could be experimented with at a a small scale, using EA Funds or some funding from Open Phil, and trying out a few different definitions of the ‘EA community’ - eg—EAG acceptance, Forum karma, etc, and using different voting models, eg—quadratic voting, one person one vote, uneven votes etc, veto power for Open Phil.