This is a special post for quick takes by huw. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
An idea that's been percolating in my head recently, probably thanks to the EA Community Choice, is more experiments in democratic altruism. One of the stronger leftist critiques of charity revolves around the massive concentration of power in a handful of donors. In particular, we leave it up to donors to determine if they're actually doing good with their money, but people are horribly bad at self-perception and very few people would be good at admitting that their past donations were harmful (or merely morally suboptimal).
It seems clear to me that Dustin & Cari are particularly worried about this, and Open Philanthropy was designed as an institution to protect them from themselves. However, (1) Dustin & Cari still have a lot of control over which cause areas to pick, and sort of informally defer to community consensus on this (please correct me if I have the wrong read on that) and (2) although it was intended to, I doubt it can scale beyond Dustin & Cari in practice. If Open Phil was funding harmful projects, it's only relying on the diversity of its internal opinions to diffuse that; and those opinions are subject to a self-selection effect in applying for OP, and also an unwillingness to criticise your employer.
If some form of EA were to be practiced on a national scale, I wonder if it could take the form of an institution which selects cause areas democratically, and has a department of accountable fund managers to determine the most effective way to achieve those. I think this differs from the Community Choice and other charity elections because it doesn't require donors to think through implementation (except through accountability measures on the fund managers, which would come up much more rarely), and I think members of the public (and many EAs!) are much more confident in their desired outcomes than their desired implementations; in this way, it reflects how political elections take place in practice.
In the near-term, EA could bootstrap such a fund. Donors could contribute to a centralised pool of funds (perhaps with approval-voted restrictions on which causes they do not want their money going to), and the community could vote on the overall cause area allocation. Each of us would benefit from the centralisation of funds (efficiency) and expertise, and we could have a genuine accountability mechanism for bad funding allocations. This would provide a much stronger signal on cause prioritisation than we have today.
I would have a lot less concern about more central control of funding within EA if there was more genuine interest within those funding circles for broad exploration and development of evidence from new ideas within the community. Currently, I think there are a handful of (very good) notions about areas that are the most promising (anthropogenic short-term existential or major risks like AI, nuclear weapons, pandemics/bioweapons, animal welfare, global health, and development) that guide the 'spotlight' under which major funders are looking. This spotlight is not just about these important areas—it’s also shaped by strong intuitions and priors about the value of prestige and the manner in which ideas are presented. While these methodologies have merit, they can create an environment where the kinds of thinking and approaches that align with these expectations are more likely to receive funding. This incentivizes pattern-matching to established norms rather than encouraging genuinely new ideas.
The idea of experimenting with a more democratic distribution of funding, as you suggest, raises an interesting question: would this approach help incentivize and enable more exploration within EA? On one hand, by decentralizing decision-making and involving the broader community in cause area selection, such a model could potentially diversify the types of projects that receive funding. This could help break the current pattern-matching incentives, allowing for a wider array of ideas to be explored and tested, particularly those that might not align with the established priorities of major funders.
However, there are significant challenges to consider. New and unconventional ideas often require deeper analysis and nuanced understanding, which may not be easily accessible to participants in a direct democratic process. The reality is that many people, even within the EA community, might not have the time or expertise to thoroughly evaluate novel ideas. As a result, they may default to allocating funds toward causes and approaches they are already familiar with, rather than taking the risk on something unproven or less understood.
In light of this, a more 'republican' system, where the community plays a role in selecting qualified assessors who are tasked with evaluating new ideas and allocating funds, might offer a better balance. Such a system would allow for informed decision-making while still reflecting the community’s values and priorities. These assessors could be chosen based on their expertise and commitment to exploring a wide range of ideas, thereby ensuring that unconventional or nascent ideas receive the consideration they deserve. This approach could combine the benefits of broad community input with the depth of analysis needed to make wise funding decisions, potentially leading to a richer diversity of projects being supported and a more dynamic, exploratory EA ecosystem.
Ultimately, while direct democratic funding models have the potential to diversify funding, they also risk reinforcing existing biases towards familiar ideas. A more structured approach, where the community helps select knowledgeable assessors, might strike a better balance between exploration and empirical rigor, ensuring that new and unconventional ideas have a fair chance to develop and prove their worth.
EDIT:
I wanted to clarify that I recognize the 'republic' nature in your proposal, where fund managers have the discretion to determine how best to advance the selected cause areas. My suggestion builds on this by advocating for even greater flexibility for these representatives. Specifically, I propose that the community selects assessors who would have broader autonomy not just to optimize within established areas but to explore and fund unconventional or emerging ideas that might not yet have strong empirical support. This could help ensure a more dynamic and innovative approach to funding within the EA community.
I like this also, I can imagine a system with a few mainstream assessors (or coalitions thereof) representing the major causes in the movement, and then small-scale ones who get access to better funding to develop smaller causes.
Although, I think both suffer from that same domination of the majority. Ultimately, if there aren’t people in the community willing to vote for the newer causes, they won’t get funded under either system.
IIRC, defining "the community" has been an issue in prior discussions. What Manifund did for CC seems reasonable given the sums involved and that it isn't clearly a recurrent thing. If you get into voters controlling thousands of Other People's Money on a recurring basis, you're likely to get people trying to meet the requirements for a vote just to get money flowing to their favorite causes (whether effective or not). If you tenure existing community members and make a high standard for newbies to get voting rights, you're creating a two-tier community at risk of stagnation.
Those problems may not be insurmountable, but they are at least moderately formidable in my view. Still, I like to see experiments!
you're likely to get people trying to meet the requirements for a vote just to get money flowing to their favorite causes (whether effective or not)
What’s the problem with this?
I am not sure there is such thing as an ‘ineffective cause’. After all, EA is a question. If a naïve voter wanted to send their money to a narrow cause in a rich country (ex. US cancer research), then either they actually want something broader (lives saved, suffering reduced) and it’s up to us to campaign & educate them as to their ‘real’ preferences, or they truly desire something that narrow. In the latter case, I am not sure it is up to you and I to tell them that they’re wrong, even if we vehemently disagree.
But I can see how that problem would practically restrict who donates to the pool. Some constraints that might work without creating a two-tiered system:
Minimum required donation to vote (maybe even requiring a % pledge with some track record)
Selecting from a pre-defined list of causes (including broader causes such as ‘reduce suffering’ or ‘reduce human suffering’)
Allowing donors to restrict their donation (ex. “I want to reduce suffering, but I am neutral within that”)
For the EA community: People who are already dead-set on US cancer research (or whatever) go through the motions of EAness to get their vote, diluting the truthseeking nature of the community. And expending mentorships, EAG slots, etc. on people who are going through the motions to get a vote is not a good use of limited resources.
For the donors: The problem is that the donors will always have the option of the existing system -- e.g., deferring to OpenPhil, or to SFF, or EA Funds, picking recipients themselves, etc. To get anywhere, you've got to persuade the donors that your method will produce better results than the status quo. I think there's a strong argument that the collective wisdom of the EA community could theoretically do that, and a less clear argument that it could practically do that. But the argument that a community of 50% current EAs and 50% join-for-predetermined-pet-causes-folks could do so seems a lot weaker to me!
Maybe it works better under particularly strong versions of "some form of EA were to be practiced on a national scale"? But you'd have to convert at least large swaths of donors to the democratic system first. Otherwise, EA-aligned donors see their monies siphoned off for opera etc. and get nothing in return for their preferred causes from non-participating donors. Across the history of philanthropy, I suspect the percentage of donors who would be happy to hand over control to the demos is . . . low. So I'm struggling to see a viable theory of change between "bootstrapping" and national adoption.
People who are already dead-set on US cancer research (or whatever) go through the motions of EAness to get their vote, diluting the truthseeking nature of the community.
Again, I know my take on this is a bit unorthodox, but it’s important to remember that we’re not bridging is-ought. If someone truly believes that funding the opera is the highest moral good, and then they determine the most effective way to do so, they are practicing truthseeking. But if they truly believed that preventing suffering was the highest moral good and still voted to fund the opera, then they would (probably) not be truthseeking. I think this distinction is important—both ‘failure modes’ produce the same outcome by very different means!
Whether it is bad to expend those resources depends on how you define EA. If EA is truly cause-neutral, then there’s no problem. But I think you and I agree that Actually Existing EA does generally prefer ‘reduce suffering’ as a cause (and is cause-neutral within that), and in this sense it would be a shame if resources were spent on other things. Hence, a bootstrapped version of democratic altruism would probably restrict itself to this and let people choose within it.
That's valid -- I do not have a brain scanner so cannot reliably distinguish someone who merely went through the motions to vote for opera vs. someone who seriously considered the world's most pressing problems and honestly decided that opera was at the top of the list.
In theory, EA principles are cause-neutral, so one could apply them to the belief that the greatest good is introducing people to the Flying Spaghetti Monster and being touched by his noodle-y appendage. And I guess I want opera people to do opera as effectively as possible (my hesitation is based on lack of clarity on what that even means in the opera context)? I'm just not interested in funding either of those, nor am I interested in providing strong incentives for people with those goals to join the existing EA community in significant numbers. They are welcome to start the Effective Opera or Effective FSM movements, though!
For the donors, I don’t have a lot to add, but I’ll re-state my point.
Donors today at least claim to be worried about having outsized power in a way that could cause them to get their causes or allocations ‘wrong’. As you note, the wisdom of the crowd could solve this. If these donors don’t want things going off course, they could pre-specify a list of subcauses they’re interested in funding, or even a broader area, or this should keep those benefits while mitigating most of the harms.
It seems like some of the biggest proponents of SB 1047 are Hollywood actors & writers (ex. Mark Ruffalo)—you might remember them from last year’s strike.
I think that the AI Safety movement has a big opportunity to partner with organised labour the way the animal welfare side of EA partnered with vegans. These are massive organisations with a lot of weight and mainstream power if we can find ways to work with them; it’s a big shortcut to building serious groundswell rather than going it alone.
See also Yanni’s work with voice actors in Australia—more of this!
I don't know anything about Nakasone in particular, but it should be of interest (and concern)—especially after Situational Awareness—that OpenAI is moving itself closer to the U.S. military-industrial complex. The article itself specifically mentions Nakasone's cybersecurity experience as a benefit of having him on the board, and that he will be placed on OpenAI's board's Safety and Security Committee. None of this seems good for avoiding an arms race.
OpenAI taking security more seriously seems good, and also I expect is good for reducing race dynamics (the less that US adversaries are able to hack US labs, the less tight I expect a race to be).
Microsoft have backed out of their OpenAI board observer seat, and Apple will refuse a rumoured seat, both in response to antitrust threats from US regulators, per Reuters.
I don’t know how to parse this—I think it’s likely that the US regulators don’t care much about safety in this decision, and nor do I think it meaningfully changes Microsoft’s power over the firm. Apple’s rumoured seat was interesting, but unlikely to have any bearing either.
Lina Khan (head of the FTC) said she had P(doom)=15%, though I haven't seen much evidence it has guided her actions, and she suggested this made her an optimist, suggesting maybe she hadn't really thought about it.
Greg Brockman is taking extended leave, and co-founder John Schulman has left OpenAI for Anthropic, per The Information.
For whatever good the board coup did, it’s interesting to observe that it largely concentrated Sam Altman’s power within the company, as almost anyone else who could challenge or even share it is gone.
An idea that's been percolating in my head recently, probably thanks to the EA Community Choice, is more experiments in democratic altruism. One of the stronger leftist critiques of charity revolves around the massive concentration of power in a handful of donors. In particular, we leave it up to donors to determine if they're actually doing good with their money, but people are horribly bad at self-perception and very few people would be good at admitting that their past donations were harmful (or merely morally suboptimal).
It seems clear to me that Dustin & Cari are particularly worried about this, and Open Philanthropy was designed as an institution to protect them from themselves. However, (1) Dustin & Cari still have a lot of control over which cause areas to pick, and sort of informally defer to community consensus on this (please correct me if I have the wrong read on that) and (2) although it was intended to, I doubt it can scale beyond Dustin & Cari in practice. If Open Phil was funding harmful projects, it's only relying on the diversity of its internal opinions to diffuse that; and those opinions are subject to a self-selection effect in applying for OP, and also an unwillingness to criticise your employer.
If some form of EA were to be practiced on a national scale, I wonder if it could take the form of an institution which selects cause areas democratically, and has a department of accountable fund managers to determine the most effective way to achieve those. I think this differs from the Community Choice and other charity elections because it doesn't require donors to think through implementation (except through accountability measures on the fund managers, which would come up much more rarely), and I think members of the public (and many EAs!) are much more confident in their desired outcomes than their desired implementations; in this way, it reflects how political elections take place in practice.
In the near-term, EA could bootstrap such a fund. Donors could contribute to a centralised pool of funds (perhaps with approval-voted restrictions on which causes they do not want their money going to), and the community could vote on the overall cause area allocation. Each of us would benefit from the centralisation of funds (efficiency) and expertise, and we could have a genuine accountability mechanism for bad funding allocations. This would provide a much stronger signal on cause prioritisation than we have today.
What's the best prior art on this?
I would have a lot less concern about more central control of funding within EA if there was more genuine interest within those funding circles for broad exploration and development of evidence from new ideas within the community. Currently, I think there are a handful of (very good) notions about areas that are the most promising (anthropogenic short-term existential or major risks like AI, nuclear weapons, pandemics/bioweapons, animal welfare, global health, and development) that guide the 'spotlight' under which major funders are looking. This spotlight is not just about these important areas—it’s also shaped by strong intuitions and priors about the value of prestige and the manner in which ideas are presented. While these methodologies have merit, they can create an environment where the kinds of thinking and approaches that align with these expectations are more likely to receive funding. This incentivizes pattern-matching to established norms rather than encouraging genuinely new ideas.
The idea of experimenting with a more democratic distribution of funding, as you suggest, raises an interesting question: would this approach help incentivize and enable more exploration within EA? On one hand, by decentralizing decision-making and involving the broader community in cause area selection, such a model could potentially diversify the types of projects that receive funding. This could help break the current pattern-matching incentives, allowing for a wider array of ideas to be explored and tested, particularly those that might not align with the established priorities of major funders.
However, there are significant challenges to consider. New and unconventional ideas often require deeper analysis and nuanced understanding, which may not be easily accessible to participants in a direct democratic process. The reality is that many people, even within the EA community, might not have the time or expertise to thoroughly evaluate novel ideas. As a result, they may default to allocating funds toward causes and approaches they are already familiar with, rather than taking the risk on something unproven or less understood.
In light of this, a more 'republican' system, where the community plays a role in selecting qualified assessors who are tasked with evaluating new ideas and allocating funds, might offer a better balance. Such a system would allow for informed decision-making while still reflecting the community’s values and priorities. These assessors could be chosen based on their expertise and commitment to exploring a wide range of ideas, thereby ensuring that unconventional or nascent ideas receive the consideration they deserve. This approach could combine the benefits of broad community input with the depth of analysis needed to make wise funding decisions, potentially leading to a richer diversity of projects being supported and a more dynamic, exploratory EA ecosystem.
Ultimately, while direct democratic funding models have the potential to diversify funding, they also risk reinforcing existing biases towards familiar ideas. A more structured approach, where the community helps select knowledgeable assessors, might strike a better balance between exploration and empirical rigor, ensuring that new and unconventional ideas have a fair chance to develop and prove their worth.
EDIT:
I wanted to clarify that I recognize the 'republic' nature in your proposal, where fund managers have the discretion to determine how best to advance the selected cause areas. My suggestion builds on this by advocating for even greater flexibility for these representatives. Specifically, I propose that the community selects assessors who would have broader autonomy not just to optimize within established areas but to explore and fund unconventional or emerging ideas that might not yet have strong empirical support. This could help ensure a more dynamic and innovative approach to funding within the EA community.
I like this also, I can imagine a system with a few mainstream assessors (or coalitions thereof) representing the major causes in the movement, and then small-scale ones who get access to better funding to develop smaller causes.
Although, I think both suffer from that same domination of the majority. Ultimately, if there aren’t people in the community willing to vote for the newer causes, they won’t get funded under either system.
IIRC, defining "the community" has been an issue in prior discussions. What Manifund did for CC seems reasonable given the sums involved and that it isn't clearly a recurrent thing. If you get into voters controlling thousands of Other People's Money on a recurring basis, you're likely to get people trying to meet the requirements for a vote just to get money flowing to their favorite causes (whether effective or not). If you tenure existing community members and make a high standard for newbies to get voting rights, you're creating a two-tier community at risk of stagnation.
Those problems may not be insurmountable, but they are at least moderately formidable in my view. Still, I like to see experiments!
What’s the problem with this?
I am not sure there is such thing as an ‘ineffective cause’. After all, EA is a question. If a naïve voter wanted to send their money to a narrow cause in a rich country (ex. US cancer research), then either they actually want something broader (lives saved, suffering reduced) and it’s up to us to campaign & educate them as to their ‘real’ preferences, or they truly desire something that narrow. In the latter case, I am not sure it is up to you and I to tell them that they’re wrong, even if we vehemently disagree.
But I can see how that problem would practically restrict who donates to the pool. Some constraints that might work without creating a two-tiered system:
For the EA community: People who are already dead-set on US cancer research (or whatever) go through the motions of EAness to get their vote, diluting the truthseeking nature of the community. And expending mentorships, EAG slots, etc. on people who are going through the motions to get a vote is not a good use of limited resources.
For the donors: The problem is that the donors will always have the option of the existing system -- e.g., deferring to OpenPhil, or to SFF, or EA Funds, picking recipients themselves, etc. To get anywhere, you've got to persuade the donors that your method will produce better results than the status quo. I think there's a strong argument that the collective wisdom of the EA community could theoretically do that, and a less clear argument that it could practically do that. But the argument that a community of 50% current EAs and 50% join-for-predetermined-pet-causes-folks could do so seems a lot weaker to me!
Maybe it works better under particularly strong versions of "some form of EA were to be practiced on a national scale"? But you'd have to convert at least large swaths of donors to the democratic system first. Otherwise, EA-aligned donors see their monies siphoned off for opera etc. and get nothing in return for their preferred causes from non-participating donors. Across the history of philanthropy, I suspect the percentage of donors who would be happy to hand over control to the demos is . . . low. So I'm struggling to see a viable theory of change between "bootstrapping" and national adoption.
Again, I know my take on this is a bit unorthodox, but it’s important to remember that we’re not bridging is-ought. If someone truly believes that funding the opera is the highest moral good, and then they determine the most effective way to do so, they are practicing truthseeking. But if they truly believed that preventing suffering was the highest moral good and still voted to fund the opera, then they would (probably) not be truthseeking. I think this distinction is important—both ‘failure modes’ produce the same outcome by very different means!
Whether it is bad to expend those resources depends on how you define EA. If EA is truly cause-neutral, then there’s no problem. But I think you and I agree that Actually Existing EA does generally prefer ‘reduce suffering’ as a cause (and is cause-neutral within that), and in this sense it would be a shame if resources were spent on other things. Hence, a bootstrapped version of democratic altruism would probably restrict itself to this and let people choose within it.
That's valid -- I do not have a brain scanner so cannot reliably distinguish someone who merely went through the motions to vote for opera vs. someone who seriously considered the world's most pressing problems and honestly decided that opera was at the top of the list.
In theory, EA principles are cause-neutral, so one could apply them to the belief that the greatest good is introducing people to the Flying Spaghetti Monster and being touched by his noodle-y appendage. And I guess I want opera people to do opera as effectively as possible (my hesitation is based on lack of clarity on what that even means in the opera context)? I'm just not interested in funding either of those, nor am I interested in providing strong incentives for people with those goals to join the existing EA community in significant numbers. They are welcome to start the Effective Opera or Effective FSM movements, though!
For the donors, I don’t have a lot to add, but I’ll re-state my point.
Donors today at least claim to be worried about having outsized power in a way that could cause them to get their causes or allocations ‘wrong’. As you note, the wisdom of the crowd could solve this. If these donors don’t want things going off course, they could pre-specify a list of subcauses they’re interested in funding, or even a broader area, or this should keep those benefits while mitigating most of the harms.
Yeah this could be a huge problem. Very hard to gatekeep too, the options I can think of (forum activity etc.) seem awkward at best.
It seems like some of the biggest proponents of SB 1047 are Hollywood actors & writers (ex. Mark Ruffalo)—you might remember them from last year’s strike.
I think that the AI Safety movement has a big opportunity to partner with organised labour the way the animal welfare side of EA partnered with vegans. These are massive organisations with a lot of weight and mainstream power if we can find ways to work with them; it’s a big shortcut to building serious groundswell rather than going it alone.
See also Yanni’s work with voice actors in Australia—more of this!
We've invited the Voice Actors association to our next advocacy event :)
OpenAI appoints Retired U.S. Army General Paul M. Nakasone to Board of Directors
I don't know anything about Nakasone in particular, but it should be of interest (and concern)—especially after Situational Awareness—that OpenAI is moving itself closer to the U.S. military-industrial complex. The article itself specifically mentions Nakasone's cybersecurity experience as a benefit of having him on the board, and that he will be placed on OpenAI's board's Safety and Security Committee. None of this seems good for avoiding an arms race.
OpenAI taking security more seriously seems good, and also I expect is good for reducing race dynamics (the less that US adversaries are able to hack US labs, the less tight I expect a race to be).
Microsoft have backed out of their OpenAI board observer seat, and Apple will refuse a rumoured seat, both in response to antitrust threats from US regulators, per Reuters.
I don’t know how to parse this—I think it’s likely that the US regulators don’t care much about safety in this decision, and nor do I think it meaningfully changes Microsoft’s power over the firm. Apple’s rumoured seat was interesting, but unlikely to have any bearing either.
Lina Khan (head of the FTC) said she had P(doom)=15%, though I haven't seen much evidence it has guided her actions, and she suggested this made her an optimist, suggesting maybe she hadn't really thought about it.
Greg Brockman is taking extended leave, and co-founder John Schulman has left OpenAI for Anthropic, per The Information.
For whatever good the board coup did, it’s interesting to observe that it largely concentrated Sam Altman’s power within the company, as almost anyone else who could challenge or even share it is gone.