Thanks for raising these points, John! I hadn’t considered the “cash prize for criticism” idea before, but it does seem like it’s worth more consideration.
I agree that CEA could do better on the front of generating criticisms from outside the organization, as well as making it easier for staff to criticize leadership. This is one of the key things that we have been working to improve since I took up the Interim Executive Director role in early 2019. Back in January/February, we did a big push on this, logging around 100 hours of user interviews in a few weeks, and sending out surveys to dozens of community members for feedback. Since then, we’ve continued to invest in getting feedback, e.g. staff regularly talk to community members to get feedback on our projects (though I think we could do more); similarly, we reach out to donors and advisors to get feedback on how we could improve our projects; we also have various (including anonymous) mechanisms for staff to raise concerns about management decisions. Together, I think these represent more than 0.1% of CEA’s staff time. None of this is to say that this is going as well as we’d like—maybe I’d say one of CEA’s “known weaknesses” is that I think we could stand to do more of this.
I agree that more of this could be public and transparent also—e.g. I’m aware that our mistakes page (https://centreforeffectivealtruism.org/our-mistakes) is incomplete. We’re currently nearing the end of our search for a new CEO, and one of the things that I think they’re likely to want to do is to communicate more with the community, and solicit the community’s thoughts on future plans.
(I was the interim director of CEA during Leaders Forum, and I’m now the executive director.)
I think that CEA has a history of pushing longtermism in somewhat underhand ways (e.g. I think that I made a mistake when I published an “EA handbook” without sufficiently consulting non-longtermist researchers, and in a way that probably over-represented AI safety and under-represented material outside of traditional EA cause areas, resulting in a product that appeared to represent EA, without accurately doing so). Given this background, I think it’s reasonable to be suspicious of CEA’s cause prioritisation.
(I’ll be writing more about this in the future, and it feels a bit odd to get into this in a comment when it’s a major-ish update to CEA’s strategy, but I think it’s better to share more rather than less.) In the future, I’d like CEA to take a more agnostic approach to cause prioritisation, trying to construct non-gameable mechanisms for making decisions about how much we talk about different causes. An example of how this might work is that we might pay for an independent contractor to try to figure out who has spent more than two years full time thinking about cause prioritization, and then surveying those people. Obviously that project would be complicated—it’s hard to figure out exactly what “cause prio” means, it would be important to reach out through diverse networks to make sure there aren’t network biases etc.
Anyway, given this background of pushing longtermism, I think it’s reasonable to be skeptical of CEA’s approach on this sort of thing.
I think you’re probably right that there are some biases here. How the invite process worked this year was that Amy Labenz, who runs the event, draws up a longlist of potential attendees (asking some external advisors for suggestions about who should be invited). Then Amy, Julia Wise, and I voted yes/no/maybe on all of the individuals on the longlist (often adding comments). Amy made a final call about who to invite, based on those votes. I expect that all of this means that the final invite list is somewhat biased by our networks, and some background assumptions we have about individuals and orgs.
Given this, I think that it would be fair to view the attendees of the event as “some people who CEA staff think it would be useful to get together for a few days” rather than “the definitive list of EA leaders”. I think that we were also somewhat loose about what the criteria for inviting people should be, and I’d like us to be a bit clearer on that in the future (see a couple of paragraphs below). Given this, I think that calling the event “EA Leaders Forum” is probably a mistake, but others on the team think that changing the name could be confusing and have transition costs—we’re still talking about this, and haven’t reached resolution about whether we’ll keep the name for next year.
I also think CEA made some mistakes in the way we framed this post (not just the author, since it went through other readers before publication.) I think the post kind of frames this as “EA leaders think X”, which I expect would be the sort of thing that lots of EAs should update on. (Even though I think it does try to explicitly disavow this interpretation (see the section on “What this data does and does not represent”, I think the title suggests something that’s more like “EA leaders think these are the priorities—probably you should update towards these being the priorities”). I think that the reality is more like “some people that CEA staff think it’s useful to get together for an event think X”, which is something that people should update on less.
We’re currently at a team retreat where we’re talking more about what the goals of the event should be in the future. I think that it’s possible that the event looks pretty different in future years, and we’re not yet sure how. But I think that whatever we decide, we should think more carefully about the criteria for attendees, and that will include thinking carefully about the approach to cause prioritization.