Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum

Hide table of contents
by James Norris
3 min read 0

1

CommunityEffective altruism cultureNonprofit governanceOpinion
Frontpage

Cross-posted from: https://www.jamesnorris.org/effective-altruism-governance/ 

Note: Written a while back, so some of these issues could have been improved. I don't know the latest on what the community is like or collectively wants. 

- - -

Introduction

I tentatively propose that the effective altruism movement should have a consensual process for determining the policies of the core components of what we could call the EA Network. Everything else would be governed by their respective organizations’ policies. Every item below should have officially determined policies, almost all of which should be publicly available to collaboratively update.

Every year all EA Network members would be able to opt in to vote and change any part of this system using a quadratic voting mechanism in a distributed online organization. 

The EA Network members would be chosen by (a) voluntary opt-in coupled with (b) >50% approval of a poll of 20 randomly selected existing members. Prospective members could go through this process up to 3 times over a 10 year period, but no more. 

Alternatively, the Centre for Effective Altruism could disband as a central governing entity and its projects could become fully independent or evolve in other ways.

EA Culture

  1. Vision
  2. Mission
  3. Values
  4. Definitions
  5. Code of Conduct

Core EA Network

  1. Centre for Effective Altruism (including Community Health & Special Projects)
    • Strategic plan of Centre for Effective Altruism
    • Policies for selection of employees, contractors, and other stakeholders of Centre for Effective Altruism, with a special emphasis on Community Health & Special Projects
  2. Membership access
  3. Funding access and recommendations
    • Recommendations to funders via Centre for Effective Altruism (including Community Health & Special Projects)
    • Selection policies for grantees of Effective Altruism Funds
  4. Event access
  5. Online forum access
    • User access policies and moderation policies of Effective Altruism Forum (guidelines)
  6. Job listings access
    • User access policies and listing policies on 80,000 Hours job board
  7. Fellowships and trainings access
    • Recommendations to participant evaluators via Centre for Effective Altruism (including Community Health & Special Projects)
  8. Websites access
    • Inclusion policies of content on effectivealtruism.org and other core websites, as well as usage of core website domains
  9. Trademark access
    • Guidelines for usage of trademarks and other core assets
  10. Social media account access
    • User access policies and moderation policies of Effective Altruists Facebook group and other accounts
  11. Resources database access
    • User access policies and listing policies on EA Services Directory and EA Mental Health Navigator
  12. Core EA materials mentions
    • Guidelines on the Centre for Effective Altruism’s website on inclusion and exclusion criteria for official mentions on the website, EA Handbook, EA Concepts, etc.
  13. Media guidance material
    • Guidelines on the Centre for Effective Altruism’s website on who says what to whom and in which context

Other EA Governance Thinking

Organizations Contributing to EA Governance

1

0
3

Reactions

0
3

More posts like this

Comments


No comments on this post yet.
Be the first to respond.
Curated and popular this week
LintzA
 ·  · 15m read
 · 
Cross-posted to Lesswrong Introduction Several developments over the past few months should cause you to re-evaluate what you are doing. These include: 1. Updates toward short timelines 2. The Trump presidency 3. The o1 (inference-time compute scaling) paradigm 4. Deepseek 5. Stargate/AI datacenter spending 6. Increased internal deployment 7. Absence of AI x-risk/safety considerations in mainstream AI discourse Taken together, these are enough to render many existing AI governance strategies obsolete (and probably some technical safety strategies too). There's a good chance we're entering crunch time and that should absolutely affect your theory of change and what you plan to work on. In this piece I try to give a quick summary of these developments and think through the broader implications these have for AI safety. At the end of the piece I give some quick initial thoughts on how these developments affect what safety-concerned folks should be prioritizing. These are early days and I expect many of my takes will shift, look forward to discussing in the comments!  Implications of recent developments Updates toward short timelines There’s general agreement that timelines are likely to be far shorter than most expected. Both Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have recently said they expect AGI within the next 3 years. Anecdotally, nearly everyone I know or have heard of who was expecting longer timelines has updated significantly toward short timelines (<5 years). E.g. Ajeya’s median estimate is that 99% of fully-remote jobs will be automatable in roughly 6-8 years, 5+ years earlier than her 2023 estimate. On a quick look, prediction markets seem to have shifted to short timelines (e.g. Metaculus[1] & Manifold appear to have roughly 2030 median timelines to AGI, though haven’t moved dramatically in recent months). We’ve consistently seen performance on benchmarks far exceed what most predicted. Most recently, Epoch was surprised to see OpenAI’s o3 model achi
Dr Kassim
 ·  · 4m read
 · 
Hey everyone, I’ve been going through the EA Introductory Program, and I have to admit some of these ideas make sense, but others leave me with more questions than answers. I’m trying to wrap my head around certain core EA principles, and the more I think about them, the more I wonder: Am I misunderstanding, or are there blind spots in EA’s approach? I’d really love to hear what others think. Maybe you can help me clarify some of my doubts. Or maybe you share the same reservations? Let’s talk. Cause Prioritization. Does It Ignore Political and Social Reality? EA focuses on doing the most good per dollar, which makes sense in theory. But does it hold up when you apply it to real world contexts especially in countries like Uganda? Take malaria prevention. It’s a top EA cause because it’s highly cost effective $5,000 can save a life through bed nets (GiveWell, 2023). But what happens when government corruption or instability disrupts these programs? The Global Fund scandal in Uganda saw $1.6 million in malaria aid mismanaged (Global Fund Audit Report, 2016). If money isn’t reaching the people it’s meant to help, is it really the best use of resources? And what about leadership changes? Policies shift unpredictably here. A national animal welfare initiative I supported lost momentum when political priorities changed. How does EA factor in these uncertainties when prioritizing causes? It feels like EA assumes a stable world where money always achieves the intended impact. But what if that’s not the world we live in? Long termism. A Luxury When the Present Is in Crisis? I get why long termists argue that future people matter. But should we really prioritize them over people suffering today? Long termism tells us that existential risks like AI could wipe out trillions of future lives. But in Uganda, we’re losing lives now—1,500+ die from rabies annually (WHO, 2021), and 41% of children suffer from stunting due to malnutrition (UNICEF, 2022). These are preventable d
Rory Fenton
 ·  · 6m read
 · 
Cross-posted from my blog. Contrary to my carefully crafted brand as a weak nerd, I go to a local CrossFit gym a few times a week. Every year, the gym raises funds for a scholarship for teens from lower-income families to attend their summer camp program. I don’t know how many Crossfit-interested low-income teens there are in my small town, but I’ll guess there are perhaps 2 of them who would benefit from the scholarship. After all, CrossFit is pretty niche, and the town is small. Helping youngsters get swole in the Pacific Northwest is not exactly as cost-effective as preventing malaria in Malawi. But I notice I feel drawn to supporting the scholarship anyway. Every time it pops in my head I think, “My money could fully solve this problem”. The camp only costs a few hundred dollars per kid and if there are just 2 kids who need support, I could give $500 and there would no longer be teenagers in my town who want to go to a CrossFit summer camp but can’t. Thanks to me, the hero, this problem would be entirely solved. 100%. That is not how most nonprofit work feels to me. You are only ever making small dents in important problems I want to work on big problems. Global poverty. Malaria. Everyone not suddenly dying. But if I’m honest, what I really want is to solve those problems. Me, personally, solve them. This is a continued source of frustration and sadness because I absolutely cannot solve those problems. Consider what else my $500 CrossFit scholarship might do: * I want to save lives, and USAID suddenly stops giving $7 billion a year to PEPFAR. So I give $500 to the Rapid Response Fund. My donation solves 0.000001% of the problem and I feel like I have failed. * I want to solve climate change, and getting to net zero will require stopping or removing emissions of 1,500 billion tons of carbon dioxide. I give $500 to a policy nonprofit that reduces emissions, in expectation, by 50 tons. My donation solves 0.000000003% of the problem and I feel like I have f
Relevant opportunities
2
Apply to become a Futurekind AI Facilitator or Mentor (deadline: April 10)
Jay Luong
· · 2m read
0
0
20
Free Habit Change Coaching
John Salter
· · 2m read
0
0
40
Feedback requested: Financial Independence Purpose Planner tool
Rebecca Herbst
· · 5m read
2
2
View more