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I saw Cremer’s post and seriously considered this proposal. Unfortunately I came to the conclusion that the parenthetical point about who comprises the “EA community” is, as far as I can tell, a complete non-starter.
My co-founder from Asana, Justin Rosenstein, left a few years ago to start oneproject.org, and that group came to believe sortition (lottery-based democracy) was the best form of governance. So I came to him with the question of how you might define the electorate in the case of a group like EA. He suggests it’s effectively not possible to do well other than in the case of geographic fencing (i.e. where people have invested in living) or by alternatively using the entire world population.
I have not myself come up with a non-geographic strategy that doesn’t seem highly vulnerable to corrupt intent or vote brigading. Given that the stakes are the ability to control large sums of money, having people stake some of their own (i.e. become “dues-paying” members of some kind) does not seem like a strong enough mitigation. For example, a hostile takeover almost happened to the Sierra Club in SF in 2015 (albeit for reasons I support!).
There is a serious, live question of what defines an EA right now. Are they longtermists? Do they include animals in the circle of moral concern? Shrimp? I’m not sure how you could establish a clear membership criteria without first answering these questions, and that feels backwards. I do think you could have separate pools of money based on separate worldviews, but you’d probably have to cut pretty narrowly which defeats the point.
As an example, the a top-rated fund at GWWC is the one for Climate Change: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/charities/founders-pledge-climate-change-fund
Working on climate change is certainly important, but I see that as fairly suggestive evidence that a more democratric approach would be dilutive to EA principles (i.e. neglectedness in this case) and result in more popular cause selection.
I have a long track record of being funny, thank you very much! https://twitter.com/moskov/status/1556349357879808000