Some Positions In EA Leadership Should Be Elected

I don't see a reasonable way to choose the voting population

A model I think is interesting, though I don't favor it as a good fit for an international field / movement like all of EA: When talking to EA groups in Nordic countries (EA Norway, etc), I was surprised at the extent of membership and elections as the basic means of operating any group there. If I understand right, members pay a fee to be members, and the expectation is that everyone will travel to an in-person annual meeting to vote for various leadership roles. This helps address the question of who's involved enough to get a vote.

Coming from a geographically big country, it kind of blew my mind that everyone turns up in person at one location to vote. ("Surely you did it online during covid?" "Not in Sweden!") It's one way of making membership a bit costly, but it does favor members in the city where the voting is held.

I also notice that when I talk to people in some roles there, like the elected community contact person, they often don't have much experience because they were elected less than a year ago.

People with more understanding of this system would probably have more to say about its pros and cons.
 

Some Positions In EA Leadership Should Be Elected

We should also think about why we want democracy. Intra-communal democracy is not an inherent good, and indeed, the EA community is not here for the sake of the EA community, but rather to have positive impact. However, we might think that 'democratising' or whatever we might want to call it may play important ethical or epistemic roles when we think a) diversifying viewpoints is important and b) justification and accountability are important. However, I think none of these are best served by elections. 

For diversifying viewpoints, we may want this because of the epistemic situation we are in might suggest to us that a more 'diverse' (this may only be along certain axes eg expertise, assumptions, political viewpoint/party) decision making body is necessary. I certainly think this is true in a fair few areas EA functions in. However, it isn't clear that elections, which often focus on popularity or consensus actually do that. Maybe we'd be better off doing some sort of deliberately diverse expert elicitation panel, or simply caring more about (relevant forms of) diversity in our hiring. For example, perhaps grantmakers should be making an effort to hire people with experience in conservative policy circles. Or maybe we simply do this by doing CB efforts to have a more pluralsitic 'community'; again. I notbaly think EA (or certain parts of it, for example AI) have got MUCH MUCH better at this the last few years, such that its not actually obvious how much concerted effort is needed. 

Accountability may be another reason. EAs tie lots of our identity to this community, and also much of our professional reputation. As such, we might want to be able to hold representatives accountable. However, it isn't obvious that we can't trust well constructed boards to do this, for example. Otherwise, I could imagine a scenario where a certain designated body (say, all people who have attended 2 EAGs or been employed at a certain list of organisations etc) can petition to remove someone from important leadership roles, and if a supermajority votes to remove them then they are removed. But this doesn't really seem like an election. 

More generally, it just isn't clear to me what sorts of roles we want elected. The two main levers of power in EA are a) money and b) prestige. A lot of prestige is generated by who speaks at EAGs, appears on the 80000 hours podcast etc, and its really unlikely that having an elected person making these decisions would actually change very much, or encourage the sorts of outcomes wanted. Maybe there are better ways to harness the collective wisdom of the community in these decisions, but I think they are unlikely to look like elections. And for grantmaking, there also just appears minimal reason to do elections. The main issue with regards to grantmaking in this vicinity is how few grantmakers there are (although this is maybe better than it was), which creates centralisation and thus likely a sub-optimal tayloring of the landscape to the preferences of existing grantmakers, and tying of reputations to those grantmakers. This problem is not at all solved by elections, and maybe would get worse rather than better; the problem is solved by bringing more money from different sources into EA.

I think the best argument for elections is it would reduce the 'who you know' component of EA. But a) I think this is just a lot better now than it was - as the community has grown, i think much of this has been adjusted and b) its not obvious to me that elections wouldn't optimise for something similar. 

I can see two realistic models for the parallel organization, which I'm not a fan of:

1) A competitor to CEA. Just like CEA, this org would mainly fundraise and fund projects.

I think the problems with selecting members mentioned in this thread are overstated. Any political party faces the same problem. I suspect that in practice, strategically recruiting weakly engaged EAs just isn't a big problem. But it could be either mitigated by requiring members to meet any of the conditions you mentioned (fees, EA org employment, course certificate), or setting a number of votes per regions, e.g. based on similar indicators of the # of engaged members.

Personally, I'm sufficiently satisfied with the general CEA agenda, that I suspect this would be a waste of effort. That's in part because I think highly engaged EAs who dominate these orgs have more philosophically robust views and in part because I don't think this competitor organization would be able to raise more than 10 % of CEA's budget (~80 % of it comes from OpenPhil). So, given the main goal of funding projects, I don't think this org would be sufficiently better to be worth all the costs - and not just costs inherent in the operations, but also the emotional costs of having these debates publicly and the costs of coordinating "who is willing to fund what" which I imagine might already be a nightmare.

2) A union. A soft counter-power to CEA.

If this org's only power were the possibility to strike or produce resolutions, I'm concerned this would artificially inflate unproductive discord. My impression is that unions often produce irrational policies perhaps because they only have quite extreme measures at their disposal, which creates an illusory "us vs. them" aesthetics for relationships that are overall very positive-sum.

However, I have some sympathy for the idea of

3) A community ambassador who would be democratically voted e.g. by all EA Forum members and who's job would be to facilitate the communication between CEA and the community in both directions. I imagine someone at CEA might already effectively hold this job, so perhaps they would be interested in having their choice ratified by the community. Ideally, this community ambassador would collect people's concerns and visit CEA board meetings, in order to be able to integrate both perspectives.

However, I think the cost of this position is non-negligible. Given the power-law distribution of impact among people and given the many rounds of tests, which employees at EA organizations allegedly undergo - a democratic vote would probably yield a much less discerning choice (as most people wouldn't spend more than 30 minutes picking a candidate). I'm not sure to what extent the wisdom of the crowd might apply here.

Because of similar uncertainties and because I wouldn't count this as a "leadership role", I'm voting "moderately disagree".

Given that some positions in EA leadership are already elected, I might suggest changing the wording to something like:

There should be an international body whose power is roughly comparable to CEA whose leadership is elected

In my opinion elections are a mediocre, inefficient leadership selection tool. 

1. Because elections demand participation from many people, they are very expensive in terms of opportunity cost.
2. Elections demand that the candidates engage in marketing and campaigning. Candidates who spend time on otherwise wasteful activity (campaigning) are more likely to win.
3. Because the effective value of voting is usually negative (ie it costs more to participate than you get out of it), participation is oftentimes either rare or mediocre.
4. To look at recent history for example, how effective was voting for leadership selection?  For example, did you know that the Democratic Party actually had primary elections in 2024 where Joe Biden overwhelmingly won candidacy? Months later, Biden was declared insufficiently mentally competent to serve. 

In my opinion, the more effective way to select leadership democratically is using a randomly selected leadership panel. 

1. Select by random from membership, say, 10 to 25 panelists.
2. These 12 panelists will be charged to read resumes, perform candidate interviews, make a final hiring decision, set term limits, and perform annual performance reviews. 

This technique is otherwise known as "sortition" or "lottocracy". It is vastly more efficient than an election. Imagining an election with 100 members, imagine each of the 100 members uses 2 hours of their time to make a decision. That's a net of 200 hours of opportunity cost. With sortition, 10 panelists can devote 20 hours each for the same opportunity cost (10 x 20 hours = 200 hours). Because information gathering and fact finding is a serial task, one person devoting 20 hours to a decision can be far more effective than another devoting only 2 hours. 

Sortition more efficiently uses the time of membership and produces higher quality decisions by orders of magnitude. 

You could argue that sortition is un-democratic. However, philosophers have associated sortition with democracy for literally thousands of years since the time of Socrates. Understanding that democracy is about co-equal governance, sortition preserves political equality by giving participants equal probability of being selected to serve. 

Some Positions In EA Leadership Should Be Elected

If we take this literally, then 'some' means 'any at all', and I think that the amount of democratic input is >0 so this should be 100% yes.

Having said that, I think the bar is kind-of acting as a 'how much do you support democratising EA', and in that sense while I do support Cremer-style reforms, I think they're best introduced at a small scale to get a track record.

Some Positions In EA Leadership Should Be Elected

I'm not opposed to the idea in principle, but I can't think of any specific position that should be elected, and I don't know how you would determine who gets to vote.

Some Positions In EA Leadership Should Be Elected

Low confidence currently, but I think it should be investigated further. 

I think the membership association model is promising. In this system, at the national level, the membership meets in a general assembly to elect the board and then the board hires the executive team. This seems to work well amongst Nordic CBG orgs (I have a draft post on the subject with someone from EA Norway). In bigger countries, you might do this at the state level to stop things becoming too unwieldy.

CEA could also have a general assembly, with each national/state org electing delegates.

Of course, the usual arguments in favour/against democratic processes still apply. But it seems like a very reasonable and normal thing to look into. Perhaps this feels weird for EAs living in countries where national orgs are less of a thing, e.g. the UK and the US?

Some Positions In EA Leadership Should Be Elected

I think the way the question is framed is a bit leading. The optimal amount of democratically elected EA leadership is probably non-zero (idk lots of things are non-zero), but I struggled to come up with any examples of currently existing EA leadership positions that I felt should be elected. 

I could potentially see some sort of codetermination model working, in which some members of a board of directors (or some other board) are elected. I think this model comes from unions and labor rights. But the tricky aspect would be figuring out who gets to vote. I recall seeing some discussion about the difficulty of voting in the past: only donors? only people who are EAs? How do we draw the dividing line between who is and isn't an EA? Hopefully some people smarter and more widely read than me have good ideas, because that seems quite... tricky.

I don't actually disagree this strongly. I just don't think this should be decided by poll.

That said, I lean towards starting competing orgs as the best way to deal with any flaws in core organisations.

Some Positions In EA Leadership Should Be Elected

Unconfidently speculate that something valuable could come out of more experimentation here. I admit I like the ethos/optics of a more decentralized EA

By my understanding, there are two main purposes to democracy when it comes to states:

• Allowing the masses to select representatives protects against the mechanisms of state being used to loot or oppress them excessively.
• By aligning legitimacy with latent capability for violence, the need for violent transitions of power can be reduced.

Neither seem very relevant to EA.

The problem is that EA in its current form is a perverted version of the central Idea/question. We are largely a utilitarian group and it's deeply unfair imo that we are using the EA name. I do think EA should be democratic or quasi democratic but I think that requires taking a step back and re-envisioning. Anyway here is my half baked idea. 

I think "EA" should be an umbrella term for a bunch of different sub orgs. The requirements for your sub org to be a part of "EA" should be

(1) You believe that evidence and logic need to be a part of making decisions
(2) You want to make things better/be altruistic. 
(3) (optional) some commitment to not breaking laws/non violence. 

A sub org needs to have 2 things
(1) Moral framework 
(2) Political Framework

e.g. Monarchical dog lovers, Democratic republic utilitarians, technocratic christians, etc. 

Now each sub org will compose of members. Their onboarding process can be largely unique but perhaps there should be some things all members must vow, like a commitment to evidence based reasoning or open mindedness or altruism or something. To stay a member of an EA suborg, you must contribute 1% of yourself every year. This can be some combination of 1% of your money, time, or effort ( donate .5% of your income and volunteer .5% of your time would work). 

Suborgs get to vote for the president every x years. The amount of votes a sub org gets is the product of 

(1) time volunteered
(2) money donated by its members
(3) number of members

This ensures well roundedness in votes and so you can't just pump votes with populism or a single billionare. (i'll get around to how we stop the christians from getting all the votes). How the sub group allocates their votes is of course up to their political system. Maybe one person chooses, maybe the members vote, maybe it is a smart contract. 

The president can appoint judges or accounts or whatever to some term, these people are in charge of auditing orgs financing and claims of bad behavior. Also they appoint the people who run EAG and perhaps also the heads of all the local groups. 

Then there is a house of arts and a house of probabilistic facts. 

The members of the house of arts is voted for by strict democracy, every member of the EA coalition gets one vote (or maybe artists get 3-5, idk). This is a 2 year residency in a house with like 10-20 people who make art about the movment. 

The house of probabilistic facts is a group of technocratically appointed people (i.e. everyone gets 1 vote, college ed get 2, phd 3, stem 5, prof 10). This will be a group of 5-10, they will vote on important facts about the world by submitting their probabilities for the chance of said facts, and either the arithemetic or geometric mean of their guessing will go into a book called the fact book. The can call upon the house of justice to levy voting fines on groups whose facts are "sufficiently far" from their estimate. 

i.e. if they avg that there is a 1% chance of the christian god being real and christians say or are deemed by the house of justice to assign a 100% chance of this, there will be some function that takes the absolute difference f(abs diff) and spits out a number (0,1) that is multiplied to the groups upcoming vote share. This function should be relatively loose such that moderate or major disagreements don't result in almost any punishment. It should be tuned so that only blatant disregard of facts or belief in magic revokes voting power. The whole point of this is both to be on the record as a shared group about science but also to be inclusive to religious and other groups if they want to be involved while still acknowledging our priorities. 

I think the majority of people on this forum would join some form of utilitarian sup group. Which sect of it exactly they would want to throw their weight behind (suffering focused, average, etc.), which political forms will people want to throw their weight behind, and how much fracturing would occur are interesting open questions. But I think that in itself would make this whole ordeal much less of a clusterfuck to those trying to understand what EA exactly is.