Background
While I have a technical background, my career has been spent working with corporate boards and management teams. I have seen first-hand how critical leadership are to the success of organizations. Organizations filled with competent people can fail miserably if individuals do not have the right interpersonal skills and humility.
I have worried about governance within EA for a while. In October, I launched the EA Good Governance Project and wrote that "We have not yet experienced a scandal / major problem and have not yet started to think through how to avoid that happening again" . Now, 4 months later, we've had our fair share and people are open to change.
This post is my attempt to put some thoughts together. It has been written in a rather rushed way given recent news, so apologies if some parts are poorly worded.
Introduction
I have structured my thoughts in 4 sections, corresponding to the 4 key ways in which leadership can fail:
1) Bad actor
2) Well-intentioned people with low competence
3) Well-intentioned high-competence people with collective blind spots
4) Right group of people, bad practices
Bad Actors
Much discussion on the forum in recent months has focused on the concept of a bad actor. I think we are focusing far too much on this concept.
The term comes from computer science where hackers are prevalent. However, real life is rarely this black and white. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence (Hanlon's razor).
The bad actor concept can be used, consciously or unconsciously, to justify recruiting board members from within your clique. Many EA boards comprise groups of friends who know each other socially. This limits the competence and diversity of the board. Typically the people you know well are exactly the worst people to provide different perspectives and hold you to account. If they are your friends, you have these perspectives and this accountability already and you can prevent bad actors through referencing, donation history and background checks.
Key takeaway: Break the clique
Competence
There's an old adage: How do you know if someone is not very good at Excel? They will say they are an expert. With Excel, the more you know, the more aware you are of what you don't know. I think leadership is similar. When I had 3-5 years of professional experience, I thought I could lead anything. Now I know better.
Some aspects of leaderships come naturally to people, but many have to be learned by close interaction with role models. When you are a community without experienced figures at the top, this is hard. We should not expect people with less than 10 years of professional experience to be a fully rounded leader. Equally, it's possible to be successful without being a good leader.
I think many of us in the community have historically held EA leaders on a pedestal. They were typically appointed because of their expertise in a particular field. Some of the brightest people I've ever met are within the EA community. However, we then assumed they had excellent people judgment, a sound understanding of conflicts of interest, in-depth knowledge of real estate investments and an appreciation for power dynamics in sexual relationships. It turns out some of them don't. This shouldn't come as a big surprise. It doesn't mean they can't be a valuable contributor to the community and it certainly doesn't make them bad actors.
Key takeaway: We need to elevate the importance of soft skills and learn from models of effective leadership in other communities and organizations
Blind Spots
The more worrying thing though is how those people also believed in their own abilities. In my career, I have met a large number of company CEOs. I truly believe that the difference between a poor CEO and a good CEO is not their own expertise but their ability to harness other people's expertise. This means knowing who to trust on a particular issue and how to get the right decision out of them. We all have blind spots and we all benefit from decision-making that draws on the right expertise at the right moment. Being open to external expertise is good epistemics. Let's not recreate the errors of others simply because we believe we are superior.
We naturally like and find it easier to work with people who are similar to ourselves. It makes life simpler: decision-making is fast, cognitive dissonance is less, and we get our own way more often.
Key takeaway: Recognizing one's own faults is one of the hardest skills to develop
Bad Practices
So how do good leaders get decisions right? They hire people who are different to them. They create the conditions for that person to challenge their views, e.g. by investing time to understand opposing viewpoints, by talking last in discussions if they risk being too dominant. They know when to make a decision
What does this mean for CEOs? CEOs should bring important and difficult questions to the Board for input. They should empower the board by giving them the information and context they require. They should create the right incentives for employees to voice their honest opinions. They should provide the structure for getting decisions made. And they should lead by example.
What does this mean for Board? Boards should understand that they are accountable only to themselves. They should avoid execution (there's a lot of evidence that companies with a single Chairman-CEO underperform). They should talk less during discussions where they are not independent (e.g. they came up with the proposal). They should critically evaluate their own performance and composition.
Key takeaway: Think about how your every interaction promotes cultures for effective decision-making.
Personal Note
I spent a few years earning to give before coming across EA. During that time, I attempted and mostly failed to answer questions about the most effective ways to make the world better. EA provides people with a way to answer those questions and funnel their energy into it. I sincerely believe that EA has had and will have an enormous positive impact. Please don't give up on EA.
What is the main issue in EA governance then, in your view? It strikes me [I'm speaking in a personal capacity, etc.] the challenge for EA is a combination of the fact the resources are quite centralised and that trustees of charities are (as you say) not accountable to anyone. One by itself might be fine. Both together is tricky. I'm not sure where this fits in with your framework, sorry.
There's one big funder (Open Philanthropy), many of the key organisations are really just one organisation wearing different hats (EVF), and these are accountable only to their trustees. What's more, as Buck notes here, all the dramatis personae are quite friendly ("lot of EA organizations are led and influenced by a pretty tightly knit group of people who consider themselves allies"). Obviously, some people will be in favour of centralised, unaccountable decision-making - those who think it gets the right results - but it's not the structure we expect to be conducive to good governance in general.
If power in effective altruism were decentralised, that is, there were lots of 'buyers' and 'sellers' in the 'EA marketplace', then you'd expect competitive pressure to improve governance: poorly run organisations will be wracked by the "gales of creative destruction" as donors go elsewhere.
If leaders in effective altruism were accountable, for instance, if EVF became a membership organisation and the board were elected by its (paying?) members, that would provide a different sort of check and balance. I don't think it's reasonable for individual donors, i.e. Dustin Mosktovitz and Cari Tuna, or cause-specific organisations, to submit their money to the democratic will, but it seems more sensible for central organisations, those that are something like natural monopolies and ostensibly serve the whole community, to have democratic elements.
As it is, the governance structure across EA is, essentially, for its leaders to police themselves - and wait for media stories to break. Particularly in light of recent events, it's unclear if this is the optimal approach. I am reminded of the following passage in Pratchett.
Upvoted. I think there is an assumption lurking in here, though. It seems likely that EVF would be a pale shadow of itself without Open Phil and other big-donor money. I dont member fees can plausibly replace that.
So there seemingly has to be an assumption that the big donors should continue funding EVF even if they strongly disagree with who the demos elects, as opposed to funding whatever the old guard starts up after being deposed. There seems to be some tension with the idea that donors aren't obliged to defer to the democratic will.
Something OpenPhil could do is fund explicit alternatives to core EA orgs. They don't have to be 'competitors' per se, in that there's no market they have to vie for, but they could do the same thing in a different context - events in Europe vs events in North America for example, or longtermist events vs animal welfare events, and be available for the occasional encroachment into the others' remit if someone asks them to. That way you could have multiple organisations with similar competence, and a visible signal if one was consistently doing better than the others, and funding could explicitly follow that signal.
This would be a lot easier the more focused the orgs/the less mission creep they had, since then the comparisons would be a lot higher fidelity. EVF's current structure doesn't seem ideal for this.
This is an interesting idea, but I don't know how feasible or realistic it is. I find it really helpful to think of EA as a marketplace for maximum impact goods and services. Like your local farmers' market, but instead of selling fruit and vegetables, people are offering charities, charity recommendations, and so on. (I've been reflecting on this for a while, and might write it up as a standalone post). The analogy doesn't have to be perfect to be informative. In this framing, what we'd want, presumably, is for there to be lots of competition and choice, so that consumers get a better deal. You don't want there to be just one guy that sells fruit, and only sells oranges, for example.
The challenge for EA is that one buyer dominates the market: Open Philanthropy is, I think, 50+% of total. In effect, you're going to get about as much variety as OP wants, when they do their own 'shopping': if OP wants to buy your fruit, you're in business; if they don't, it's much harder to survive in the market. If they want there to be a greater variety of sellers, they can create demand for them - equivalent to saying "hey, if you start selling apples in the market, we'll buy 10 crates" or whatever. But it's not clear if it's a good use of their money, by their lights, to create a market for products they don't really want and other people may not want. It puts the new vendors in an odd, risky position too if they only exist because they have one, questionably enthusiastic consumer. They could see it as a good use of money: they'd be subsiding the creation of products in the hope of creating demand and bringing other people into the market. Hence, it's not obvious the main buyer in a marketplace would want to creat variety vs just seek out the specific things they want.*
*Mutatis mutandis, there are the same issues if major funders engage in regranting, which is like giving your friends some of your money and asking them to buy stuff in the market. If your friends have the same preferences to you, they'll buy the same stuff, so there's no point. If they buy stuff you'd hate, then you'll think you shouldn't have given them money. Either way, unless you keep giving them money, it's only an artificial spike in consumption.
I'm thinking more about separating existing markets, or perhaps setting up new orgs to catch the overflow from when existing ones expand. Fwiw FTX Foundation explicitly wanted to do this - they had a category for 'competition to existing EA orgs'. This could have been because as a different org they were sceptical of OP's priorities, though this seems unlikely given the substantial overlap between the people involved, so it seems more like a genuine desire for a better marketplace.
This seems too simplistic and worrying if we genuinely think this is how OP think. Most people recognise that there's a wisdom in crowds, and epistemic advantage to a diversity of thoughtful viewpoints.
Ah. I should probably have flagged I'm pointing to an ideal world. As goes (almost) without saying, all this is easier said than done. You could say that EA's challenge is that it has only one mega-donor. It seems much better that it has one than none, but having just one creates distinctive governance challenges compared to if there was no mega-donor but lots of small donors; this latter scenario is a bit closer to a democracy in terms of how power is distributed.
But your comment does rather make my point. In a world where there is only one major donor, that is, effectively a monopsony (a market with single buyer) you could say "look, all this talk about good governance is nice, but it's practically irrelevant; the only question to ask is 'what does the big funder want?'".
I don't think donors can or should be forced to defer to the democratic will. People, qua citizens in their democracy, can be forced to do things, but charity is a necessarily private act. I think it would be good if EVF had some democratic elements and also that someone paid for it to keep going. But, who am I to tell people what they ought to do, a moral philosopher, or something? :)
Why so?
I wrote in this direction a few years ago, and I'm very glad to see you clearly stating these points here.
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