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40% disagree

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.

James HerbertMay 13

Lots of civil society orgs elect their board through a general assembly, and then you have a membership system to decide who can attend the general assembly (probably a membership fee - could also ask people to complete a course or something). This could happen at the national or state level, and then each national/state org could apply to be a member of the international org (CEA). If accepted, the national/state level org could elect delegates for an international assembly, which would then elect the board of CEA.

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Debate Poll: Some Positions In EA Leadership Should Be Elected

by Joseph_Chu

Apr 301 min read 32

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Building effective altruismCommunityPolicyDemocracyDIY Debate WeekEffective altruism culture

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An occasional criticism of EA is that the structure of the community is lacking in democracy, that the main organizations of EA are centralized entities that tend to operate somewhat like a non-profit corporation and its subsidiaries.

One way to change this would be to start to operate more like an association, with a membership who can elect leaders to positions within EA orgs. Many charitable organizations, such as service clubs like Rotary Club and Lions Club, operate in this manner.

Given the already existing structure of EA, I'm not sure how exactly this would look like for us. Perhaps a parallel "Society of Effective Altruists" could exist alongside CEA. Or Perhaps CEA could itself restructure to have certain positions on either the executive or the board reserved for elections, to give a sense of representation to the wider EA community.

How the membership would work is also debatable. For instance, would voting members be required to pay a membership fee? Or maybe people with enough EA Forum karma and/or who work or volunteer at any EA affiliated organization could count?

These are questions, but they seem to be questions that have never really been asked. Some past discussions have mentioned "we should have more democracy in EA" but rarely offer concrete proposals for how that would work, so in the interest of furthering the debate, I've made this poll.

Some Positions In EA Leadership Should Be Elected

disagree

agree

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Neel NandaApr 3017

100% disagree

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

JasonApr 3010

I think that depends a lot on the specifics of the organization in question. For example: I think defining the electorate is a hard problem if the organization is devoted to spending lots of donor money. In that scenario, there are good reasons for people to seek a vote for reasons other than membership in the community.

But beyond that, most institutions in civil society do not impose demanding entry requirements. The US Chess Federation grants membership to anyone who pays a fee (and hasn't been banned for misconduct), without any concerns that the checkers crowd will stage a hostile takeover. To join a church with congregationalist governance (where the risk of hostile takeover is greater), you might need to attend a few classes, sign a statement agreeing with some core principles, and attend an interview with a group leader.

It's not clear to me why the techniques that work for the rest of civil society would fail for EA. Most candidates would pass on Forum karma, EAG/EAGx attendance, or other easily verifiable criteria.

James HerbertMay 52

I think it's quite simple for local and national community-building orgs, and maybe also international orgs as well.

Many civil society orgs use a membership model—opt-in, small fee, basic criteria—with a general assembly, which then elects the board. National EA orgs could do the same. National orgs could then send delegates to an international general assembly that would elect the CEA board.

Julia_Wise🔸Apr 3013

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.

GideonFMay 17

70% disagree

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.

Daniel_FriedrichMay 17

~~50% disagree~~ ➔ 0% agree

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".

JasonMay 15

Important characteristics of the ambassador include the community has trust in this person and this person is aligned to the community's interests and concerns. A community vote is ~authoritative on the first question and awfully probative on the second. If someone independent of the community picked the evaluator, in a real sense they wouldn't be the community's ambassador.

You could also do a two-step selection process here; the community selects a committee (and perhaps does approval voting for candidates), and the committee selects the ambassador after more thought. That would allow the more detailed evaluation for finalists while maintaining at least indirect community selection.

James HerbertMay 14

Interesting ideas! What about democratising CEA itself by electing the board? And doing the same for other similar orgs (e.g., the org I work for, EA Netherlands)

Daniel_FriedrichMay 11

Thank you! Democratizing local groups sounds clearly good to me and I assumed it was the norm but I didn't find any data on that.

James HerbertMay 15

That's interesting - my current understanding is that it isn't the norm. It certainly isn't in the UK or the US, which don't really have national organisations despite them being key EA hubs. However, it is the norm in the Nordic and Baltic region, and I believe the Swiss, German, and French national organisations also have national general assemblies (though my impression is that they're less vibrant than those further north).

And if local groups and national orgs should be democratised, why not CEA? I’d argue it plays a similar role at the international level: stewarding the community it serves and providing public goods for it.

Daniel_FriedrichMay 11

My impression is that CEA's goal is to fund the meta cause area and the main goal of local groups is to organize events. While funding is hard to democratize unless you convince some billionaire, democratizing the organizations that run events is trivial. [Edit: Also, while it makes sense to organize local events directly based on the local community's preferences / demand, I think it makes sense to take a more top-down (principles-oriented) approach when it comes to distributing funding, because the "demand-side" here comprises of every person on the planet who appreciates money.]

But now I do realize that in my head, I equated CEA with OpenPhil's wing for the meta cause area, which might not be accurate. I also feel good about democratizing CEA if I imagine it implemented as an indirect democracy (i.e. with local organizations voting, instead of every EA member). This probably moves me towards the middle of the poll - i.e. I would be in favor of this kind of democracy. Indirect democracy would reduce the problem of uninformed voters, the problem of dealing with problems publicly and the problem of disbalance in the level of reflection between the average member and highly-engaged members.

James HerbertMay 52

Yeah, as you conclude in your second paragraph, I wouldn’t describe CEA as simply “funding the meta cause area”. They don’t control major grant budgets (unlike Open Phil or EA Funds (although they have just announced EA Funds will become part of CEA)), and they’re not primarily in the business of choosing which projects get resourced (apart from choosing which EAGx events and national orgs get funding). Instead, their theory of change centres on building community infrastructure that helps two broad groups:

People unfamiliar with EA but who might be interested (via online courses, effectivealtruism.org, media relations, and supporting organisers doing outreach)
People already in the EA community (via EAG(x) events, the Forum, community health, and supporting organisers building communities)

I agree that democratising grant-making feels more experimental than democratising community building, although I do find manifund, participatory budgeting, and other forms of democratised resource allocation to be interesting.

Ben_West🔸May 17

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

JasonMay 12

That's a much different (and more demanding) proposition than the one on which votes have already been cast. One might pose it as a separate question, though.

I don't think the presence of elected people in some national groups materially impacts the poll as written. From the perspective of most voters (who do not live in Nordic countries), I believe there are no elected leaders. Some imprecision is hard to avoid given the practical limitations of the polling tool.

John HuangMay 17

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

Because elections demand participation from many people, they are very expensive in terms of opportunity cost.
Elections demand that the candidates engage in marketing and campaigning. Candidates who spend time on otherwise wasteful activity (campaigning) are more likely to win.
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.
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.

Select by random from membership, say, 10 to 25 panelists.
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.

LarksMay 16

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.

John HuangMay 13

I think you forget the biggest reason to use democracy -- aligning the moral values of some entity with the moral values of its constituency.

Whether you like it or not, people's moral values are different, even in EA. Some put much greater value on animal welfare than others for example. There is no universal or absolute way to say that yes, "my values system" is objectively better than yours.

Democracy is a way to align an organization's moral values with its membership through aggregation. Democracy tends to satisfy more people than less through majority rule.

Your perspective on democracy in contrast is more in tune to Madisonian or Schumpeter-ian justifications of democracy.

LarksMay 24

Thanks for the reply. I'm not sure why we should consider self-identified EAs to be the constituency of EA. Unlike a state, whose objective (some people argue) is to promote the welfare of its citizens, the objective of EA is not to promote the welfare of EAs. And unlike a state, EA does not claim a monopoly on violence over EAs, nor the right to imprison and execute them. If you are contributing, it makes sense to have influence (though where you donate, or where you work, etc.), but it's not clear to me why mere existence should warrant influence.

John HuangMay 21

In my opinion democracy is more likely to be utility maximizing compared to the alternative, oligarchy. In the status quo, the funders provide the moral weights. If your goal is utility maximization, small numbers of funders are more likely to have deviant moral weights compared to the median weights of the public. Their deviancy is less likely to capture maximally satisfactory policy.

A membership-driven democracy is more likely to have moral weights aligned with the rest of the public. Membership implies multitudes and therefore diversity, which can be a huge advantage in decision making. Having dozens of decision makers is assuredly more diverse than the singular vision of a single funder.

Like it or not, funders are also biased towards their self interest and may avoid otherwise effective policies. And perhaps this drives the other primary reason to use democracy - it is possible strategy towards building EA funding that relies less on the big funders and more on smaller donors. Democracy allows small donors to exert influence whereas the status quo is set up for large donors to exert influence.

JWS 🔸May 16

70% agree

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.

MichaelDickensMay 15

40% disagree

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.

James HerbertMay 13

40% agree

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?

calebpMay 13

90% disagree

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.

Joseph_ChuMay 11

I actually wrote the question to be ambiguous as to whether the positions in leadership to be made elected already existed or not, as I wanted to be inclusive to the possibilities of either existing or new positions.

calebpMay 14

Oh right, I’m a bit confused about why you asked this question. It seems unreasonable to say that there are no hypothetical EA orgs that should be democratically elected, but also that result isn’t very decision relevant.

Like I can imagine a fictional “EAs for democratically elected EA orgs” org which should imo be democratically elected, does that mean I should have said yes to this poll? Or should we mostly consider real and highly plausible new orgs?

Joseph_ChuMay 16

I mostly just wanted to put forward a relatively general form of democratization that people could debate the merits of and see with the poll what kind of support such ideas could have within the EA community, to gauge if this is something that merits further exploration.

I probably could have made it even more general, like "There Should Be More Democracy In EA", but that statement seems too vague, and I wanted to include something at least a little more concrete in terms of a proposal.

I was primarily aiming at something in the core of EA leadership rather than yet another separate org. So, when I say new positions, I'm leaning towards them being within existing orgs, although I also mentioned earlier the parallel association idea, which I'll admit has some problems after further consideration.

JosephMay 12

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.

Interest Groups - Codetermination

Chris LeongMay 12

100% disagree

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.

Joseph_ChuMay 17

I agree it shouldn't be decided by poll. I'd consider this poll more a gauge of how much interest or support the idea(s) could have within the EA community, and as a starting point for future discussion if sufficient support exists.

Eli Svoboda🔸Apr 302

40% agree

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

Charlie_GuthmannMay 1-5