I agree with most of your points, but strongly disagree with number 1 and surprised to have heard over time that so many people thought this point was daft.

I don't disagree that "existential risk" is being employed in a very different sense, so we agree there, in the two instances, but the broader point, which I think is valid, is this:

There is a certain hubris in claiming you are going to "build a flourishing future" and "support ambitious projects to improve humanity's long-term prospects" (as the FFF did on its website) only to not exist 6 months later and for reasons of fraud to boot. 

Of course, the people who sank untold hours into existential risk research aren't to blame, and it isn't an argument against x-risk/longtermist work, but it does show that EA, as a community missed something dire and critical and importantly something that couldn't be closer to home for the community.  And in my opinion that does shed light on how successful one should expect the longer term endeavours of the community to be.

Hi John,


Thank you for your response, and more generally thank you for having been consistently willing to engage with criticism on the forum.


We’re going to respond to your points in the same format that you made them in for ease of comparison.
 

Should EA be distinctive for its own sake or should it seek to be as good as possible? If EA became more structurally similar to e.g. some environmentalist movements in some ways, e.g. democratic decision-making, would that actually be a bad thing in itself? What about standard-practice transparency measures? To what extent would you prefer EA to be suboptimal in exchange for retaining aspects that would otherwise make it distinctive?
 

In any case, we’re honestly a little unsure how you reached the conclusion that our reforms would lead EA to be “basically the same as standard forms of left-wing environmentalism”, and would be interested in you spelling this out a bit. We assume there are aspects of EA you value beyond what we have criticised, such as an obsessive focus on impact, our commitment to cause-prioritisation, and our willingness to quantify (which is often a good thing, as we say in the post), etc., all of which are frequently lacking in left-wing environmentalism. 
 

1. But why, as you say, was so little attention paid to the risk FTX posed? One of the points we make in the post is that the artificial separation of individual “risks” like this is frequently counterproductive. A simple back-casting or systems-mapping exercise (foresight/systems-theoretical techniques) would easily have revealed EA’s significant exposure and vulnerability (disaster risk concepts) to a potential FTX crash. The overall level of x-risk is presumably tied to how much research it gets, and the FTX crash clearly reduced the amount of research that will get done on x-risk any time soon. 
   
   These things are related, and must be treated as such. 
   
   Complex patterns of causation like this are just the kind of thing we are advocating for exploring, and something you have confidently dismissed in the recent past, e.g. in the comments on your recent climate post.
    
2. We agree that the literature does not all point in one direction; we cited the two sources we cited because they act as recent summaries of the state of the literature as a whole, which includes findings in favour of the positive impacts of e.g. gender and age diversity.
   
   We concede that “essentially all dimensions” was an overstatement: sloppy writing on our part, of which we are sure there is more of in the manifesto, for which we apologise. Thank you for highlighting this. 
   
   On another note, equating “criticising diversity” in any form with “career suicide” seems like something of an overstatement.
    
3. We agree that there is a balance to be struck, and state this in the post. The issue is that EA uses seemingly neutral terms to hide orthodoxy, is far too far towards one end of the value-alignment spectrum, and actively excludes many valuable people and projects because they do not conform to said orthodoxy.
   
   This is particularly visible in existential risk, where EA almost exclusively funds TUA-aligned projects despite the TUA’s surprisingly poor academic foundations (inappropriate usage of forecasting techniques, implicit commitment to outdated or poorly-supported theoretical frameworks, phil-of-sci considerations about methodological pluralism, etc.) as well as the generally perplexed and unenthusiastic reception it gets in non-EA Existential Risk Studies.
    
4. Unfortunately, you are not in the best position to judge whether EA is hostile to criticism. You are a highly orthodoxy-friendly researcher (this is not a criticism of you or your work, by the way!) at a core EA organisation with significant name-recognition and personal influence, and your critiques are naturally going to be more acceptable.
   
   We concede that we may have neglected the role of the seniority of the author in the definition of “deep” critique: it surely plays a significant role, if only due to the hierarchy/deference factors we describe. On examples of chilled works, the very point we are making is the presence of the chilling effect: critiques are not published *because* of the chilling effect, so of course there are few examples to point to.
   
   If you want one example in addition to Democratising Risk, consider our post? The comments also hold several examples of people who did not speak up on particular issues because they feared losing access to EA funding and spaces.
    
5. We are not arguing that general intelligence is completely nonexistent, but that the conception commonplace within EA is highly oversimplified: to say that factors in intelligence are correlated does not mean that everything can be boiled down to a single number. There are robust critiques of the g concept that are growing over time (e.g.  here) as well as factors that are typically neglected (see the Emotional Intelligence paper we cited). Hence, calling monodimensional intelligence a “central finding of psychological science”, implying it to be some kind of consensus position, is somewhat courageous,
   
   In fact, this could be argued to represent the sort of ideologically-agreeable overconfidence we warn of with respect to EAs discussing subjects in which they have no expertise.
   
   Our post also mentions other issues with intelligence based-deference: how being smart doesn’t mean that someone should be deferred to on all topics, etc.
    
6. We are not arguing that every aspect of EA thought is determined by the preferences of EA donors, so the fact that e.g. preventing wars does not disproportionately appeal to the ultra-wealthy is orthogonal.
   
   We concede that we may have neglected cultural factors: in addition to the “hard” money/power factors, there is also the “softer” fact that much of EA culture comes from upper-middle-class Bay Area tech culture, which indirectly causes EA to support things that are popular within that community, which naturally align with the interests of tech companies.*
   
   We are glad that you agree on the spokesperson point: we were very concerned to see e.g. 80kH giving uncritical positive coverage to the crypto industry given the many harms it was already know to be doing prior to the FTX crash, and it is encouraging to hear signals that this sort of thing may be less common going forward.
    
7. We agree that getting climate people to think in EA terms can be difficult sometimes, but that is not necessarily a flaw on their part: they may just have different axioms to us. In other cases, we agree that there are serious problems (which we have also struggled with at times) but it is worth reminding ourselves that, as we note in the post, we too can be rather resistant to the inputs of domain-experts. Some of us, in particular, considered leaving EA at one point because it was so (at times, frustratingly) difficult to get other EAs to listen to us when we talked about our own areas of expertise. We’re not perfect either is all we’re saying. 
   
   Whilst we agree with you that we shouldn’t only take Rockstrom etc. as “the experts”, and do applaud your analysis that existential catastrophe from climate change is unlikely, we don’t believe your analysis is particularly well-suited to the extremes we would expect for GCR/x-risk scenarios. It is precisely when such models fall down, when civilisational resilience is less than anticipated, when cascades like in RIchards et al. 2021 occur etc., that the catastrophes we are worried about are most likely to happen. X-risk studies relatively low probability unprecedented scenarios that are captured badly by economic models etc. (as with TAI being captured badly by the markets), and we feel your analysis demands certain levels of likelihood and confidence from climate x-risk that is (rightfully, we think) not demanded of e.g. AI or biorisk. 
   
   We should expect IPCC consensus not to capture x-risk concerns, because (hopefully) the probabilities are low enough for it not to be something they majorly consider, and, as Climate Endgame points out, there has thus far not been lots of x-risk research on climate change. 
   
   Otherwise, there have been notable criticisms of much of the climate economics field, especially its more optimistic end (e.g. this paper), but we concur that it is not something that needs to be debated here.
    
8. We did not say that differential technological development had not been subjected to peer review, we said that it has not been subjected to “significant amounts of rigorous peer review and academic discussion”, which is true; apologies if it implied something else. This may not be true forever: we are very excited about the discussion of the current Sandbrink et al 2022 pre-print, for instance. All we were noting here is that important concepts in EA are often in their academic infancy (as you might expect from a movement with new-ish concepts) and thus often haven’t been put to the level of academic scrutiny that is often made out internally.
    
9. You assume incorrectly, and apologies if this is also an issue with our communication. We never advocated for opening up the vote to anyone who asked, so fears in this vein are fortunately unsupported. We agree that defining “who gets a vote” is a major crux here, but we suggest that it is a question that we should try to answer rather than using it as justification for dismissing the entire concept of democratisation. In fact, it seems like something that might be suitable for consensus-building tools, e.g. pol.is.
   
   Committing to and fulfilling the Giving Pledge for a certain length of time, working at an EA org, doing community-building work, donating a certain amount/fraction of your income, active participation at an EAG, as well as many others that EAs could think of if we put some serious thought into the problem as a community, are all factors that could be combined to define some sort of boundary.
   
   Given a somewhat costly signal of alignment it becomes unlikely that someone would go “deep cover” in EA in order to have a very small chance of being randomly selected to become one among multiple people in a sortition assembly deliberating on broad strategic questions about the allocation of a certain proportion of one EA-related fund or another.
    
10. We are puzzled as to how you took “collaborative, mission-oriented work” to refer exclusively to for-profit corporations. Naturally, e.g. Walmart could never function as a cooperative, because Walmart’s business model relies on its ability to exploit and underpay its workers, which would not be possible if those workers ran the organisation. There are indeed corporations (most famously Mondragon) that function of co-operative lines, as well as the Free Open-Source Software movement, Wikipedia, and many other examples.
    
    Of most obvious relevance, however, is social movements like EA. If one wants a movement to reliably and collaboratively push for certain types of socially beneficial changes in certain ways and avoid becoming a self-perpetuating bureaucracy, it should be run collaboratively by those pushing for those changes in those certain ways and avoid cultivating a managerial elite – cf. the Iron Law of Institutions we mentioned, and more substantively the history of social movements; essentially every Leninist political party springs to mind.
     

As we say in the post, this was overwhelmingly written before the FTX crash, and the problems we describe existed long before it. The FTX case merely provides an excellent example of some of the things we were concerned about, and for many people shattered the perhaps idealistic view of EA that stopped so many of the problems we describe from being highlighted earlier.
 

Finally, we are not sure why you are so keen to repeatedly apply the term “left wing environmentalism”. Few of us identify with this label, and the vast majority of our claims are unrelated to it.
 

* We actually touch on it a little: the mention of the Californian Ideology, which we recommend everyone in EA reads.

'it is career suicide to criticise diversity'  This seems seriously hyperbolic to me, though I agree that if your down diversity, a non-negligible number of people will disapprove and assume you are right-wing/racist, and that could have career consequences.  What's your best guess as to the proportion of academics who have had their careers seriously damaged for criticizing diversity in the fairly mild way you suggest here (i.e. that as a very generic thing, it does not improve accuracy of group decision-making), relative to those who have made such criticisms? 

Strong agree with most of these points; the OP seems to not... engage on the object-level of some of its changes. Like, not proportionally to how big the change is or how good the authors think it is or anything?

EDIT: Oh! It was rockstrom, but the actual quote is: "The richest one percent must reduce emissions by a factor [of] 30, while the poorest 50% can actually increase emissions by a factor [of] 3" from Johan Rockström at #COP26: 10 New Insights in Climate Science | UN Climate Change. There he is talking about fair and just carbon emissions adjustments. The other insights he listed have economic implications as well, if you're interested. The accompanying report is available here.

The quote is:

"Action on climate change is a matter of intra- and intergenerational justice, because climate change impacts already have affected and continue to affect vulnerable people and countries who have least contributed to the problem (Taconet et al., Reference Taconet, Méjean and Guivarch2020). Contribution to climate change is vastly skewed in terms of wealth: the richest 10% of the world population was responsible for 52% of cumulative carbon emissions based on all of the goods and services they consumed through the 1990–2015 period, while the poorest 50% accounted only for 7% (Gore, Reference Gore2020; Oswald et al., Reference Oswald, Owen, Steinberger, Yannick, Owen and Steinberger2020).

A just distribution of the global carbon budget (a conceptual tool used to guide policy) (Matthews et al., Reference Matthews, Tokarska, Nicholls, Rogelj, Canadell, Friedlingstein, Thomas, Frölicher, Forster, Gillett, Ilyina, Jackson, Jones, Koven, Knutti, MacDougall, Meinshausen, Mengis, Séférian and Zickfeld2020) would require the richest 1% to reduce their current emissions by at least a factor of 30, while per capita emissions of the poorest 50% could increase by around three times their current levels on average (UNEP, 2020). Rich countries' current and promised action does not adequately respond to the climate crisis in general, and, in particular, does not take responsibility for the disparity of emissions and impacts (Zimm & Nakicenovic, Reference Zimm and Nakicenovic2020). For instance, commitments based on Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement are insufficient for achieving net-zero reduction targets (United Nations Environment Programme, 2020)."

Whether 1.5 is really in reach anymore is debatable. We're approaching an El Nino year, it could be a big one, we could see more heat in the atmosphere then, let's see how close we get to 1.5 GAST then. It won't be a true GAST value, I suppose, but there's no way we're stopping at 1.5 according to Peter Carter:

"This provides more conclusive evidence that limiting to 1.5C is impossible, and only immediate global emissions decline can possibly prevent a warming of 2C by 2050"

and goes on from there.... He prefers CO2e and radiative forcing rather than the carbon budget approach as mitigation assessment measures. It's worth a viewing as well.

There's quite a lot to unpack in just these two sources, if you're interested.

Then there's Al Gore at the World Economic Forum, who drops some truth bombs: "Are we going to be able to discuss... or putting the oil industry in charge of the COP ... we're not going to disguise it anymore"

OLD:I believe it was Rockstrom, though I'm looking for the reference, who said that citizens of developed countries needed to cut their per capita carbon production by 30X, while in developing countries people could increase it by 3X. That's not a quote, but I think the numbers are right.

That is a counterpoint to the analysis made by some climate economists.

When I find the reference I'll share it, because I think he was quoting an analysis from somewhere else, and that could be useful to your analysis given the sources you favor, even if you discount Rockstrom.

I like this comment.

I feel that EAs often have isolated demands for rigour (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) when it comes to criticisms.

I think the ideal way to read criticisms is to steelman as you read.

I think this post would have been significantly better as a series, partly so people could focus on/vote on the parts independently.

Well stated. This post's heart is in the right place, and I think some of its proposals are non-accidentally correct. However, it seems that many of the post's suggestions boil down to "dilute what it means to be EA to just being part of common left-wing thought". Here's a sampling of the post's recommendations which provoke this:

• EAs should increase their awareness of their own positionality and subjectivity, and pay far more attention to e.g. postcolonial critiques of western academia
• EAs should study other ways of knowing, taking inspiration from a range of academic and professional communities as well as indigenous worldviews
• EAs should not assume that we must attach a number to everything, and should be curious about why most academic and professional communities do not
• EA institutions should select for diversity
• Previous EA involvement should not be a necessary condition to apply for specific roles, and the job postings should not assume that all applicants will identify with the label “EA”
• EA institutions should hire more people who have had little to no involvement with the EA community providing that they care about doing the most good
• EA institutions and community-builders should promote diversity and inclusion more, including funding projects targeted at traditionally underrepresented groups
• Speaker invitations for EA events should be broadened away from (high-ranking) EA insiders and towards, for instance:
  • Subject-matter experts from outside EA
  • Researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders from outside of our elite communities
    • For instance, we need a far greater input from people from Indigenous communities and the Global South
• EAs should consider the impact of EA’s cultural, historical, and disciplinary roots on its paradigmatic methods, assumptions, and prioritisations
• Funding bodies should within 6 months publish lists of sources they will not accept money from, regardless of legality
  • Tobacco?
  • Gambling?
  • Mass surveillance?
  • Arms manufacturing?
  • Cryptocurrency?
  • Fossil fuels?
• Within 5 years, EA funding decisions should be made collectively
• EA institutions should be democratised within 3 years, with strategic, funding, and hiring policy decisions being made via democratic processes rather than by the institute director or CEO
• EAs should make an effort to become more aware of EA’s cultural links to eugenic, reactionary and right-wing accelerationist politics, and take steps to identify areas of overlap or inheritance in order to avoid indirectly supporting such views or inadvertently accepting their framings

(Edited.)

This seems bordering on strawmanning. We should try to steelman their suggestions. It seems fine that some may be incompatible or all together would make us indistinguishable from the left (which I wouldn't expect to happen anyway; we'd probably still care far more about impact than the left on average), since we wouldn't necessarily implement them all or all in the same places, and there can be other ways to prevent issues.

Furthermore, overly focusing on specific suggestions can derail conversations too much into the details of those suggestions and issues with them over the problems in EA highlighted in the post. It can also discourage others from generating and exploring other proposals. It may be better to separate these discussions, and this one seems the more natural one to start with. This is similar to early broad cause area research for a cause (like 80,000 Hours profiles), which can then be followed by narrow intervention (and crucial consideration) research in various directions.

As a more specific example where I think your response borders on a strawman: in hiring non-EA experts and democratizing orgs, non-EAs won't necessarily make up most of the org, and they are joining an org with a specific mission and set of values, so will often self-select for at least some degree of alignment, and may also be explicitly filtered during hiring for some degree of alignment. This org can remain an EA org. There is a risk that it won't, but there are ways to mitigate such risks, e.g. requiring supermajorities for certain things, limiting the number of non-EAs, ensuring the non-EAs aren't disproportionately aligned in any particular non-EA directions by hiring them to be ideologically diverse, retaining (or increasing) the power of a fairly EA-aligned board over the org so that it can step in if it strays too far from EA. There are also other ways to involve non-EA experts so that they wouldn't get voting rights, e.g. as contractors or collaborators.

Or, indeed, some orgs should be democratized and others should hire more non-EA experts, but none need do both.

Portions of this reform package sound to my ears like the dismantling of EA and its replacement with a new movement, Democratic Altruism ("DA")

I like the choice to distill this into a specific cluster.

I think this full post definitely portrays a very different vision of EA than what we have, and than what I think many current EAs want. It seems like some particular cluster of this community might be in one camp, in favor of this vision.

If that were the case, I would also be interested in this being experimented with, by some cluster. Maybe even make a distinct tag, "Democratic Altruism" to help organize conversation on it. People in this camp might be most encouraged to directly try some of these proposals themselves. 

I imagine there would be a lot of work to really put forward a strong idea of what a larger "Democratic Altruism" would look like, and also, there would be a lengthy debate on its strengths and weaknesses.

Right now I feel like I keep on seeing similar ideas here being argued again and again, without much organization.

(That said, I imagine any name should come from the group advocating this vision)

I strongly downvoted this response.

The response says that EA will not change "people in EA roles [will] ... choose not to", that making constructive critiques is a waste of time "[not a] productive ways to channel your energy" and that the critique should have been better "I wish that posts like this were clearer" "you should try harder" "[maybe try] politely suggesting".

This response seems to be putting all the burden of making progress in EA onto those  trying to constructively critique the movement, those who are putting their limited spare time into trying to be helpful, and removing the burden away from those who are actively paid to work on improving this movement. I don’t think you understand how hard it is to write something like this, how much effort must have gone into making each of these critiques readable and understandable to the EA community. It is not their job to try harder, or to be more polite. It is our job, your job, my job, as people in EA orgs, to listen and to learn and to consider and if we can to do better.

Rather than saying the original post should be better maybe the response should be that those reading the original post should be better at considering the issues raised.

I cannot think of a more dismissive or disheartening response. I think this response will actively dissuade future critiques of EA (I feel less inclined to try my had at critical writing seeing this as the top response) and as such make the community more insular and less epistemically robust. Also I think this response will make the authors of this post feel like their efforts are wasted an unheard. 

I think the criticism of the theory of change here is a good example of an isolated demand for rigour (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/), which I feel EAs often apply when it comes to criticisms.

It’s entirely reasonable to express your views on an issue on the EA forum for discussion and consideration, rather than immediately going directly to relevant stakeholders and lobbying for change. I think this is what almost every EA Forum post does and I have never before seen these posts criticised as ‘complaining’.

One thing I think this comment ignores is just how many of the suggestions are cultural, and thus do need broad communal buy in, which I assume is why they sent this publicly. Whilst they are busy, I'd be pretty disappointed if the core EAs didn't read this and take the ideas seriously (ive tried tagging dome on twitter), and if you're correct that presenting such a detailed set of ideas on the forum is not enough to get core EAs to take the ideas seriously I'd be concerned about where there was places for people to get their ideas taken seriously. I'm lucky, I can walk into Trajan house and knock on peoples doors, but others presumably aren't so lucky, and you would hope that a forum post that generated a lot of discussion would be taken seriously. Moreover, if you are concerned with the ideas presented here not getting fair hearing, maybe you could try raising salient ideas to core EAs in your social circles?

I think all your specific points are correct, and I also think you totally miss the point of the post.

You say you though about these things a lot. Maybe lots of core EAs have though about these things a lot. But what core EAs have considered or not is completely opaque to us. Not so much because of secrecy, but because opaque ness is the natural state of things. So lots of non core EAs are frustrated about lots of things. We don't know how our community is run or why. 

On top of that, there are actually consequences for complaining or disagreeing too much. Funders like to give money to people who think like them. Again, this requires no explanation. This is just the natural state of things. 

So for non core EA, we notice things that seem wrong, and we're afraid to speak up against it, and it sucks. That's what this post is about.

And course it's naive and shallow and not adding much to anyone who has already though about this for years. For the authors this is the start of the conversation, because they, and most of the rest of us, was not invited to all the previous conversations like this.  

I don't agree with everything in the post. Lots of the suggestions seems nonsensical in the way you point out. But I agree with then notion of  "can we please talk about this".  Even just to acknowledge that some of these problems do exist. 

It's much easier to build support for a solution if there is a common knowledge that the problem exists. When I started organising in the field of AI Safety, I was focusing on solving problems that wasn't on the map for most people. This caused lots of misunderstandings which made it harder to get funded. 

• I’ll generically note that if you want to make a project happen, coming up with the idea for the project is usually a tiny fraction of the effort required. Also, very few projects have been made to happen by someone having the idea for them and writing it up, and then some other person stumbling across that writeup and deciding to do the project.

This is correct. But projects have happened because there is a widespread knowledge of a specific problem, and then someone else deciding to design their own project to solve that problem. 

This is why it is valuable to have an open conversation to create a shared understanding of what are the current problems EA should focus on. This include discussions about cause prioritisation, but also discussion about meta/community issues.

In that spirit I want to point out that it seems to me that core EAs has no understanding of what things look like (what information is available, etc) from a non core EA perspective, and vise versa. 

I think this comment reads as though it’s almost entirely the authors’ responsibility to convince other EAs and EA orgs that certain interventions would help maximise impact, and that it is barely the responsibility of EAs and EA orgs to actively seek out and consider interventions which might help them maximise impact. I disagree with this kind of view.

If that's your goal, I think you should try harder to understand why core org EAs currently don't agree with your suggestions, and try to address their cruxes. For this ToC, "upvotes on the EA Forum" is a useless metric--all you should care about is persuading a few people who have already thought about this all a lot. I don't think that your post here is very well optimized for this ToC. 

... I think the arguments it makes are weak (and I've been thinking about these arguments for years, so it would be a bit surprising if there was a big update from thinking about them more.)

If you and other core org EAs have thoroughly considered many of the issues the post raises, why isn't there more reasoning transparency on this? Besides being a good practice in general (especially when the topic is how the EA ecosystem fundamentally operates), it would make it a lot easier for the authors and others on the forum to deliver more constructive critiques that target cruxes. 

As far as I know, the cruxes of core org EAs are nowhere to be found for many of the topics this post covers.

Some things that I might come to regret about my comment:

• I think it's plausible that it's bad for me to refer to disagreeing with arguments without explaining why.
• I've realized that some commenters might not have seen these arguments before, which makes me think that there is more of an opportunity for me to explain why I think these arguments are wrong. (EDIT I'm less worried about this now, because other commenters have weighed in making most of the object-level criticisms I would have made.)
• I was not very transparent about my goal with this comment, which is generally a bad sign. My main goal was to argue that posts like this are a kind of unhealthy way of engaging with EA, and that readers should be more inclined to respond with "so why aren't you doing anything" when they read such criticisms.

I strongly disagree with this response, and find it bizarre.  

I think assessing this post according to a limited number of possible theories of change is incorrect, as influence is often diffuse and hard to predict or measure.  

I agree with freedomandutility's description of this as an "isolated demand for [something like] rigor".
 

There seem to have been a lot of responses to your comment, but there are some points which I don’t see being addressed yet.

I would be very interested in seeing another similarly detailed response from an ‘EA leader’ whose work focusses on community building/community health Put on top as this got quite long, rationale below, but first:

I think at least a goal of the post is to get community input (I’ve seen in many previous forum posts) to determine the best suggestions without claiming to have all the answers. Quoted from the original post (intro to 'Suggested Reforms'):

Below, we have a preliminary non-exhaustive list of suggestions for structural and cultural reform that we think may be a good idea and should certainly be discussed further.

It is of course plausible that some of them would not work; if you think so for a particular reform, please explain why! We would like input from a range of people, and we certainly do not claim to have all the answers!

In fact, we believe it important to open up a conversation about plausible reforms not because we have all the answers, but precisely because we don’t.

This suggests to me that instead of trying to convince the ‘EA leadership’ of any one particular change, they want input from the rest of the community.

From a community building perspective, I can (epistemic status: brainstorming, but plausible) see that a comment like yours can be harmful, and create more negative perception of EA than the post itself. Perhaps new/newer/potential/(and even existing) EAs will read the original post, and they may skim this post/read parts/even read the comments first (I don’t think very many people will have read all 84 minutes and the comments on long posts sometimes point to key/interesting sections). A top post: yours, highly upvoted.

Impressions that they can potentially draw from your response (one or more of the below):

• There is an EA leadership (you saying it, as a self-confessed EA leader, is likely more convincing in confirming something like this than some anonymous people saying it), which runs counter to a lot of the other messaging within EA. This sounds very in-groupy (particularly as you refer to it as a ‘social cluster’ rather than e.g. a professional cluster)
• If the authors of this post are asking for community opinion on which changes are good after giving concerns, the top (for a while at least) comment being criticising this for a lack of theory of change suggests a low regard of the EA leadership to the opinions of the EA community overall (regardless of agreement to any specific element of the original post)
• Unless I am very high up and in the core EA group, I am unlikely to be listened to
• While EA is open to criticism in theory, it is not open to changing based on criticism as the leadership has already reasoned about this as much as they are going to

I am not saying that any of the above is true, or that it is absolute (i.e. someone would be led to believe in one of these things absolutely instead of it being on a sliding scale). But if I was new to EA, it is plausible that this comment would be far more likely to put me off continuing engaging than anything written in the actual post itself. Perhaps you can see how this may be perceived this way, even if it was not intended this way?

I also think some of the suggestions are likely more relevant and require more thought from people actively working in e.g. community building strategy, than someone who is CTO of an AI alignment research organisation (from your profile)/a technical role more generally, at least in terms of considerations that are required in order to have greatest impact in their work.

I think that's particularly true of some of the calls for democratization. The Cynic's Golden Rule ("He who has the gold, makes the rules") has substantial truth both in the EA world and in almost all charitable movements. In the end, if the people with the money aren't happy with the idea of random EAs spending their money, it just isn't going to happen. And to the extent there is a hint of cutting off or rejecting donors, that would lead to a much smaller EA to the extent it was followed. In actuality, it wouldn't be -- someone is going to take the donor's money in almost all cases, and there's no EA High Council to somehow cast the rebel grantee from the movement.

Speaking as a moderate reform advocate, the flipside of this is that the EA community has to acknowledge the origin of power and not assume that the ecosystem is somehow immune to the Cynic's Golden Rule. The people with power and influence in 2023 may (or may not) be wise and virtuous, but they are not in power (directly) because they are wise and virtuous. They have power and influence in large part because it has been granted to them by Moskovitz and Tuna (or their delegates, or by others with power to move funding and other resources). If Moskovitz and Tuna decided to fire Open Phil tomorrow and make all their spending decisions based on my personal recommendations, I would become immensely powerful and influential within EA irrespective of how wise and virtuous I may be. (If they are reading, this would be a terrible idea!!)

"If elites haven't already thought of/decided to implement these ideas, they're probably not very good. I won't explain why. " 

"Posting your thoughts on the EA Forum is complaining, but I think you will fail if you try to do anything different. I won't explain why, but I will be patronising." 

"Meaningful organisational change  comes from the top down, and you should be more polite in requesting it. I doubt it'll do anything, though." 

Do you see any similarities between your response here and the problems highlighted by the original post, Buck? 

The tone policing, dismissing criticism out of hand, lack of any real object-level engagement, pretending community responsibility doesn't exist, and patronisingly trying to shut down others is exactly the kind of chilling effect that this post is drawing attention to. 

The fact that a comment from a senior community member has led to deference from other community members, leading to it becoming the top-voted comment, is not a surprise. But support for such weak critiques (using vague dismissals that things are 'likely net-negative' or just stating his own opinion with little to no justifications) is pretty low, however. 

And the wording is so patronising and impolite, too. What a perfect case study in the kinds of behaviours EA should no longer tolerate.

Interesting that another commenter has the opposite view, and criticises this post for being persuasive instead of explanatory!

May just be disagreement but I think it might be a result of a bias of readers to focus on framing instead of engaging with object level views, when it comes to criticisms.

One irony is that it's often not that hard to change EA orgs' minds. E.g. on the forum suggestion, which is the one that most directly applies to me: you could look at the posts people found most valuable and see if a more democratic voting system better correlates with what people marked as valuable than our current system. I think you could probably do this in a weekend, it might even be faster than writing this article, and it would be substantially more compelling.^[1]

(CEA is actually doing basically this experiment soon, and I'm >2/3 chance the results will change the front page somehow, though obviously it's hard to predict the results of experiments in advance.)

1. ^{^}

   If anyone reading this actually wants to do this experiment please DM me – I have various ideas for what might be useful and it's probably good to coordinate so we don't duplicate work

Relatedly, I think a short follow-up piece listing 5-10 proposed specific action items tailored to people in different roles in the community would be helpful. For example, I have the roles of (1) low-five-figure donor, and (2) active forum participant. Other people have roles like student, worker in an object-level organization, worker in a meta organization, object-level org leader, meta org leader, larger donor, etc.  People in different roles have different abilities (and limitations) in moving a reform effort forward.

I think "I didn't walk away with a clear sense of what someone like me should do if I agree with much/all of your critique" is helpful/friendly feedback. I hesitant to even mention it because the authors have put so much (unpaid!) work into this post already, and I don't want to burden them with what could feel like the expectation of even more work. But I think it's still worth making the point for future reference if for no other reason.

I think it’s fairly easy for readers to place ideas on a spectrum and identify trade offs when reading criticisms, if they choose to engage properly.

I think the best way to read criticisms is to steelman as you read, particularly via asking whether you’d sympathise with a weaker version of the claim, and via the reversal test.

For context, I'm definitely in the social cluster of powerful EAs, though don't have much actual power myself except inside my org (and my ability to try to persuade other EAs by writing posts etc); I arguably had more power when I was actively grantmaking on the EAIF but I no longer do this. 

Can you clarify this statement? I'm confused about a couple of things:

• Why is only "arguable" that you had more power when you were an active grantmaker?
• Do you mean you don't have much power, or that you don't use much power?