Effective Altruism aims to do as much good as possible, but this will be hard without democratizing the movement as much as we can. Besides the moral issues this raises, an undemocratic Effective Altruism will also simply be less effective.
Two years ago, I wrote a thesis giving an overview of much of the critique of EA (the full work can be read here).
Now, Bob Jacobs is writing a few pieces highlighting and summarizing some of these critiques that are the most urgent for Effective Altruists to take into consideration if Effective Altruism is to truly succeed at 'doing good better'.
The first of these posts, which is linked here, discusses what I have called the 'democratic critique' and what others have termed the 'institutional critique' of Effective Altruism. Key issues here are the disproportionate influence of a few wealthy investors over the EA movement, lack of global representation and undemocratic mechanisms in the EA Forum.
What follows is the first two paragraphs of Bob's blog post, followed by a link to the full post. Bob is planning on writing more posts, so stay tuned.
Introduction
Effective Altruism (EA) is a social movement that aims to use reason and evidence to help others as much as possible. It encourages people to ask not just “how to do good”, but how to do the most good. This has led members to support things like global health interventions, existential risk reduction, and animal welfare.
I used to be closely involved in the movement, and I still think many of its ideas are worth defending. But as the movement has grown, so have certain structural problems: increasing reliance on large donors, pushback on dissent, and systems that concentrate influence in subtle but significant ways. This post is about those concerns — not to denigrate the movement, but to explore how it might better live up to its own stated values.
Bob Jacobs reached out to me privately after reading this comment. He gave me his permission to share what was said. I won't try to summarize our whole conversation, but I'll give some highlights. We agreed on two concrete ways EA could be reformed:
Bob also talked to me about two concrete ideas I don't have strong opinions on:
As I told Bob, I haven't thought much about the EA Forum's karma system and, honestly, I don't want to. Maybe I'll give it deeper thought if someone else does the hardest part of the work for me first and makes a compelling post about it — including what specific changes they want made.
Workplace democracy and worker co-ops are a topic I'm curious about, but that's also a big topic I barely know anything about. I would have to do a lot more research to form a strong opinion.
In theory, I like the idea of workplace democracy. I like the idea, more generally, of making non-democratic things democratic — like online communities — and of trying to make democratic things more democratic (most obviously, reforming electoral systems to make them more proportional, but also experiments in partial direct democracy like ballot initiatives).
But I haven't thought about or read about the practicalities of workplace democracy or worker co-ops, either for for-profit companies or non-profit organizations. A lot of things sound great in theory but become more complex and thorny when you try them out. (For example, corporate lobbies have been using ballot initiatives to push self-serving legislation. These corporate-backed ballot initiatives can be long and have confusing wording — maybe deliberately. That's not something I anticipated happening when I first heard about ballot initiatives.)