The EA community does not own its donors' money

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I saw Cremer's post and seriously considered this proposal. Unfortunately I came to the conclusion that the parenthetical point about who comprises the "EA community" is, as far as I can tell, a complete non-starter.

My co-founder from Asana, Justin Rosenstein, left a few years ago to start oneproject.org, and that group came to believe sortition (lottery-based democracy) was the best form of governance. So I came to him with the question of how you might define the electorate in the case of a group like EA. He suggests it's effectively not possible to do well other than in the case of geographic fencing (i.e. where people have invested in living) or by alternatively using the entire world population. 

I have not myself come up with a non-geographic strategy that doesn't seem highly vulnerable to corrupt intent or vote brigading. Given that the stakes are the ability to control large sums of money, having people stake some of their own (i.e. become "dues-paying" members of some kind) does not seem like a strong enough mitigation. For example, a hostile takeover almost happened to the Sierra Club in SF in 2015 (albeit for reasons I support!).

There is a serious, live question of what defines an EA right now. Are they longtermists? Do they include animals in the circle of moral concern? Shrimp? I'm not sure how you could establish a clear membership criteria without first answering these questions, and that feels backwards.  I do think you could have separate pools of money based on separate worldviews, but you'd probably have to cut pretty narrowly which defeats the point.

As an example, the a top-rated fund at GWWC is the one for Climate Change: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/charities/founders-pledge-climate-change-fund

Working on climate change is certainly important, but I see that as fairly suggestive evidence that a more democratric approach would be dilutive to EA principles (i.e. neglectedness in this case) and result in more popular cause selection.

I agree with some of the points of this post, but I do think there is a dynamic here that is missing, that I think is genuinely important. 

Many people in EA have pursued resource-sharing strategies where they pick up some piece of the problems they want to solve, and trust the rest of the community to handle the other parts of the problem. One very common division of labor here is 

I will go and do object-level work on our core priorities, and you will go and make money, or fundraise from other people in order to fund that work

I think a lot of this type of trade has happened historically in EA. I have definitely forsaken a career with much greater earning potential than I have right now in order to contribute to EA infrastructure and to work on object-level problems. 

I think it is quite important to recognize that in as much as a trade like this has happened, this gives the people who have done object level work a substantial amount of ownership over the funds that other people have earned, as well as the funds that other people have fundraised (I also think this applies to Open Phil, though I think the case here is bunch messier and I won't go into my models of the game theory here in-detail). Since the person who owns the funds has the ability to defect at basically any time on the arrangement and just do direct work themselves, the person who has been doing the object-level work so far has no ability to defect in the same way, and so this trade relies on the person doing object-level work trusting the person who made money to keep their future promise to act in both parties best interest.

My current guess is that the majority of EAs impact is downstream of trades like this, so taking this into account is a pretty huge deal in my books. For example, I think me being able to specialize into building infrastructure for the community, while trusting that I get to maintain some ability to direct the EA portfolio, was I think a huge multiplier on my impact in the world. 

That means that I do think that a lot of the funds that have been raised within EA, though definitely not all of them, are meaningfully owned by the people who have forsaken direct control over that money in order to pursue our object-level priorities, and not the people in whose bank account the money is technically located. 

To make the case clearer, I think there are many people who have forsaken a path in industry where they could have been quite successful entrepreneurs who could make many millions of dollars, and they do not currently have direct control over millions of dollars. 

Overall I think the current balance of funds not reflecting this is a mistake, and I think in the world where this trade is working well, people who we think are responsible for a lot of the biggest positive impact would have been given hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for that impact, and the ownership over the funds would be more clear. I am somewhat optimistic that more things like this will happen in the future as things like impact-certificates might take off more, which try to make this whole situation less fuzzy and more concrete.

Historically EA had a culture of the people running successful EA organizations not really being allowed to get rich from them running them (partially for valid signaling and grifter-related reasons), but this does mean that the current balance of funds does not reflect the fair and tacitly-agreed on allocation of funds, and this is a pretty precarious situation.

However, this does not mean that I think the money should be straightforwardly democratically allocated. I think the balance of funds and other sources of power in EA should roughly represent the balance of past positive impact that people have achieved (which includes the positive impact from making and fundraising money). I think given the heavy-tailedness of impact this also represents a very non-democratic allocation of funds, but it does meaningfully differ from putting the ownership clearly in the hands of the donors. 

Of course, there are many donors who feel like they have not participated in any trade like this, though I think in most of those situations, I think it's then the right call to charge a substantial surcharge on the literal cost of labor of someone doing object-level work, so that over time the cost for buying the altruistic impact does not just reflect the marginal cost of labor, but also (at least) the counterfactual cost of the people doing object-level work having abstained from a financially lucrative career. 

As a concrete example of what this line of reasoning leads you to, you can take a look at the Lightcone Infrastructure salary policy. Our salary policy is that "we will pay you whatever we think you could have made in industry, minus 30%". This compensation structure means we will pay many people salaries quite substantially above what they need to live. The 30% number is trying to find a roughly fair split of sacrifice between the donor and the worker, where the donor is paying 70% of market rate of the worker, and the worker is giving up 30% of their salary,  together making progress towards the shared goal. This number is skewed towards the donor because salary doesn't really capture most of the variance in income, since income is heavy-tailed and "salary" is anchored on the median outcome, and also because donors are selected from the pool of people who got lucky in the entrepreneurial lottery, and the balance they pay needs to also account for all the people who tried to make money for EA and failed. 

My guess is the 70/30 split here is fairer, though still overall skewed quite a bit against the workers, but it's at least an attempt to make the actual allocation of funds reflect the fair allocation better. 

I think this means overall that saying that "the EA community does not own its donors' money" is pretty inaccurate, though of course is still tracking something important. I do indeed think that many people who have done highly impactful work in the EA community have a quite strong and direct claim of ownership over the funds that have been made by various entrepreneurs who did earning-to-give, as well as various megadonors and pots of funds like Open Philanthropy's endowment. I think in an ideal world this balance of funds and power would be made more explicit by having something like impact-certificate markets with evaluations from current donors, but we are pretty far from that, and in the meantime I do really care about not wrongly enshrining the meme that ignores all the past trades of division-of-labor that have happened (and are happening on a daily level). 

Great post.  I strongly agree with the core point.

Regarding the last section: it'd be an interesting experiment to add a "democratic" community-controlled fund to supplement the existing options.  But I wouldn't want to lose the existing EA funds, with their vetted expert grantmakers.  I personally trust (and agree with) the "core EAs" more than the "concerned EAs", and would be less inclined to donate to a fund where the latter group had more influence.  But by all means, let a thousand flowers bloom -- folks could then direct their donations to the fund that's managed as they think best.

[ETA: Just saw that Jason has already made a similar point.]

Thanks for writing this. On the one hand, I think these calls for democracy are caused by a lack of trust in EA orgs to spend the money as they see fit. On the other hand, that money comes from donors. If you don't agree with a certain org or some actions of an org in the past, just don't donate to them. (This sounds so obvious to me that I'm probably missing something.)  Whether somebody else (who might happen to have a lot of money) agrees with you is their decision, as is where they allocate their money to.

In addition, EA is about "doing the most good", not "doing what the majority believes to be the most good", probably because the majority isn't always right. I think it's good that EA Funds are distributed in a technocratic way, rather than a democratic way, although I agree that more transparency would help people at least understand the decision processes behind granting decisions and allow for them to be criticized and improved.

Of course, it is not impossible that the reformers could find significant donors who agree with their democratic grantmaking philosophy.

As far as EA Funds, I support empowering EAs by giving them options. You could give to the current funds (with some moderate reforms), or you could give to a fund in each cause area with strongly democratic processes. "I want to defer to expert fund managers rather than to a democratic process" is a valid donor preference, as is the converse.

I am also skeptical of democratizing EA funding decisions because I share your concerns about effective implementation, but want to note that EA norms around this are somewhat out of step with norms around priority setting in other fields, particularly global health. In recent years, global health funders have taken steps to democratize funding decisions. For instance, the World Health Organization increasingly emphasizes the importance of fair decision-making processes; here's a representative title:  "Priority Setting for Universal Health Coverage: We Need Evidence-Informed Deliberative Processes, Not Just More Evidence on Cost-Effectiveness."

Plausibly the increased emphasis on procedural approaches to priority setting is misguided, but there has been a decent amount of philosophical and empirical work on this. At a minimum, it seems like funders should engage with this literature before determining whether any of these approaches are worth considering.

So I disagree with this post on the object level, but I more strongly object to...something about the tone, or the way in which you're making this critique? 

First, the title: 'The EA community does not own its donors' money'. idk - I bite the bullet and say that while the EA community of course does not legally own its donors' money, the world at large does morally  have claim to the wealth that, through accidents of history, happens to be pooled in the hands of a few. I legally own the money in my bank account, but I don't feel like I have some deep moral right to it or something. Some of it comes from my family. Some of it does come from hard work... but there are lots of people who work really hard but are still poor because they happen to have been born in a poorer country, or lacked other opportunities that I had. That's why I give away a lot of my money - I don't think I have "claim" to all my money, just because it happens to be in my bank account. 

Second, the headings: 'How would this happen?' and 'Can you demand ten billion dollars?' If someone has proposed a new way of doing things, it's reasonable to ask for details. But the fact that details don't already exist - at an early stage! -  should not be grounds for critique. Compare:

"Can you demand that slave owners free their slaves?"
"What, are you just going to make people hire women for the same jobs as men?"

 You are allowed to say 'the world is suboptimal as it is; it would be better if it were different' without having a detailed theory of change for how you get there! You can come up with that when you have more support for the broad proposal - many hands make light work! 

Much as I am sympathetic to many of the points in this post, I don't understand the purpose of the section, "Can you demand ten billion dollars?". As I understand the proposal to democratise EA it's just that: a proposal about what, morally, EA ought to do. It certainly doesn't follow that any particular person or group should try to enforce that norm. So pointing out that it would be a bad idea to try to use force to establish this is not a meaningful criticism of the proposal.

Strongly upvoted.

I endorse basically everything here.

In general, I'm very unconvinced that raising EA bureaucracy and more democratically driven funding/impact decisions would be net positive.

I've wanted to write something similar myself, and you've done a great job with it! Thanks!

I feel that there's an illusion of control that a lot of people have when it comes to imagining ways that EA could be different, and the parts of this post that I quote below do a good job of explaining how that control is so illusory. 

EA is a genie out of its bottle, so to speak. There's no way to guarantee that people won't call themselves EAs or fund EA-like causes in the ways that they want rather than the way you might want them to. This is in part a huge strength, because it allows a lot of funding and interest, but it's also a big weakness.

I feel this especially acutely when people lament how entangled EA was with SBF. It's possible to imagine a version of EA that was less officially exuberant about him, but very hard imo to imagine a version that refuses to grant any influence whatsoever to a person who credibly promises billions of dollars of funding. Avoiding a situation like the FTX/SBF one is hard not just because the central EA orgs can be swayed by funding but also, as the quotes below point out, because there will almost always be EAs who (rightly) will care more about their project getting funded than about complying with whatever regime of central control is created. 

Say you can't convince  Moskovitz and OpenPhil leadership to turn over their funds to community deliberation.

You could try to create a cartel of EA organizations to refuse OpenPhil donations. This seems likely to fail - it would involve asking tens, perhaps hundreds, of people to risk their livelihoods. It would also be an incredibly poor way of managing the relationship between the community and its most generous funder--and very likely it would decrease the total number of donations to EA organizations and causes. 

...

Let's say a new donor did begin funding EA organizations, and didn't want to abide by these rules. Perhaps they were just interested in donating to effective bio orgs. Would the community ask that all EA-associated organizations turn down their money? Obviously they shouldn't - insofar as they are not otherwise unethical - organizations should accept money and use it to do as much good as possible. Rejecting a potential donor simply because they do not want to participate on a highly unusual funding system seems clearly wrong headed.

One analogy on my mind is that EA is fundamentally Protestant as opposed to Catholic when it comes to governance. (I think a lot of people make this analogy but not for governance). One of the defining features of Catholicism is submission to the Pope and church hierarchy. In Catholicism's view, it is not enough to do and believe the right things on one's own; instead one has to do them as part of the bigger institution. This is a matter insisted on by the Catholic Church, and nobody who wants to become or stay Catholic is surprised by it. As a result, Catholics have been strongly selected for being coordinated in their belief and action. By contrast, Protestants almost by definition do not share this view, and so nearly-universal coordination across them is rare, even when they share important fundamentals of belief. 

The interesting feature that I have in mind is that, in this analogy, Catholicism's success at coordination is limited only to those  who submit to the coordination in the first place. Moreover, the insistence on coordination plays a big role in limiting broader coordination: many Protestants do not want to become Catholics precisely because it would mean giving up control and being coordinated. 

Reading back to EA, I would predict from this analogy that coordination attempts won't work very well, even among those who really believe in the importance of EA. Coordination attempts might dominate for centuries, like Catholicism did. But even in Catholicism's case the coordination failed eventually despite the huge amount of effort and dogma that went into sustaining the belief in its authority. Even with an extremely motivated attempt at central coordination (and one that succeeded for centuries), many religious upstarts with wildly divergent beliefs are all able to call themselves Christian and act in the world and receive funding in the name of Christianity. My prediction is that EA will not be able to fare any better at preventing upstart Martin Luthers or Joseph Smiths or Sam Bankman-Frieds from doing all sorts of things in its name. 

I do not mean to make any claim about whether EA should be more or less centrally controlled on the margin. The analogy does make it seem to me that a version of EA that would not accept SBF money would have to be centrally controlled to a nearly impossible degree.

Thanks for writing this Nick, I'm sympathetic and strongly upvoted (to declare a small COI, I work at Open Philanthropy). I will add two points which I don't see as conflicting with your post but which hopefully complement it.

Firstly, if you're reading this post you probably have "EA resources". 

You can donate your own money to organisations that you want to. While you can choose to donate to e.g. a CEA managed EA Fund (e.g. EA Infrastructure Fund,  EA Animal Welfare Fund) or to a GiveWell managed fund, you can equally choose to donate ~wherever you want, including to individual charitable organisations. Extremely few of us have available financial resources within two orders of magnitude of Open Philanthropy's core donors, but many of us are globally and historically rich.

It's more difficult to do well, but many of you can donate your time, or partially donate your time through e.g. taking a lower salary to do direct work on pressing and important problems than your market value in another domain.

Secondly, and more personally, I just don't think of most of my available resources as being deservedly "mine". However badly my life goes, save civilizational catastrophe, I will not die because of lack of access to low-cost medication. I will not be slaughtered painfully and then processed into a chicken nugget, or a fish cake, or shrimp paste. My relative wealth is not deserved, and justice  calls me to use it well to make the world better.  

Warren Buffet's giving pledge letter explores a similar theme:
 

My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest. Both my children and I won what I call the ovarian lottery. (For starters, the odds against my 1930 birth taking place in the U.S. were at least 30 to 1. My being male and white also removed huge obstacles that a majority of Americans then faced.)

My luck was accentuated by my living in a market system that sometimes produces distorted results, though overall it serves our country well. I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions. In short, fate’s distribution of long straws is wildly capricious.

The reaction of my family and me to our extraordinary good fortune is not guilt, but rather gratitude.Were we to use more than 1% of my claim checks on ourselves, neither our happiness nor our well-being would be enhanced. In contrast, that remaining 99% can have a huge effect on the health and welfare of others.

I nodded vigorously the entire time I read this post. Thank you.

This post and headline conflate several issues:

1. Whether democratic control of resources will result in an efficient allocation towards doing the most good
2. Whether democratic control of resources will attract or deter contributions from wealthy people
3. Whether donors have a moral claim to their wealth

It seems many of the comments express agreement with 1) and 2), while ignoring 3).

I would hope that a majority of the EA community would agree that there aren't good reasons for someone to claim ownership to billions of dollars. Perhaps there are those that disagree. If many disagree, in my mind that would mark a significant change in the EA community. See Derek Parfit's comments on this to GWWC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTUrwO9-B_I&t=6m25s. The headline "The EA community does not own its donors' money" may be true in a strictly legal sense, but the EA community, in that some of it prioritizes helping the worst off, has a much stronger moral claim to donors money than do the donors.

It's entirely fair and reasonable to point out the practical difficulties and questionable efficiencies involved with implementing a democratic voting mechanism to allocate wealth. But I think it would be a mistake to further make some claim that major donors ought to be entitled to some significant control over how their money is spent. It's worth keeping those ideas separate.

I think a significant part of the whole project of effective altruism has always been telling people how to spend money that we don’t own, so that the money is more effective at improving the world.

Seems reasonable to me for EAs to suggest ways of spending EA donor money that they think would be more effective at improving the world, including if they think that would be via giving more power to random EAs. Now whether that intervention would be more effective is a fair thing to debate.

As you touch on in the post, there are many weaker versions of some suggestions that could be experimented with at a a small scale, using EA Funds or some funding from Open Phil, and trying out a few different definitions of the ‘EA community’ - eg - EAG acceptance, Forum karma, etc, and using different voting models, eg - quadratic voting, one person one vote, uneven votes etc, veto power for Open Phil.

A number of recent proposals have detailed EA reforms. I have generally been unimpressed with these - they feel highly reactive and too tied to attractive sounding concepts (democratic, transparent, accountable) without well thought through mechanisms.

[...]

Why more democratic decision making would be better has gone largely unargued. To the extent it has been, "conflicts of interest" and "insularity" seem like marginal problems compared to basically having a deep understanding of the most important questions for the future/global health and wellbeing.

Agree. Mood affiliation is not a reliable path to impact. 

“ But, as with other discourse, these proposals assume that because a foundation called Open Philanthropy is interested in the "EA Community" that the "EA Community" has/deserves/should be entitled to a say in how the foundation spends their money.”

I think the claim of entitlement here is both an uncharitable interpretation and irrelevant to the object level claim of “more democratic decision making would be more effective at improving the world”.

I think these proposals can be interpreted as “here is how EA could improve the long-term effectiveness of its spending”, in a similar way to how EA has spent years telling philanthropists “here is how you could improve the effectiveness of your spending”.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to pay too much attention to the difference in framing between “EA should do X” and “EA would be better at improving the world if it did X”.

Definitely agree with this post. 

That said, I suspect that the underlying concern here is one of imbalance of power. As I've seen from the funder's side, there are a number of downsides when a grantee is overly dependent on one particular funder: 1) the funder might change direction in a way that is devastating to the grantee and its employees;  2) the grantee is incentivized to cater solely to that one funder while remaining silent about possible criticisms, all of which can silently undermine the effectiveness of the work. 

I wonder to what extent this happens to the EA movement broadly, given the dominance of Open Phil as a funder (more so due to the implosion of SBF). 

To be sure, Open Phil does a better job than just about any philanthropy at being transparent and welcoming of critique! 

 Even so, folks are still intimidated (hence anonymity for that long "Doing EA Better" post), and it often strikes me that some possible lines of questioning aren't raised at all.  

For example, while I might have missed something, I haven't seen anyone ask why the Regranting Challenge gave $70 million to the Gates Foundation that has a 2021 endowment  of$55 billion, with Gates' net worth over $100 billion and many more billions on the way from Warren Buffett. 

Why is this cause "neglected"? It may well be, of course-- perhaps the folks working on a TB vaccine are doing great work but don't have the internal political capital at Gates to get even 1/1000th of the Gates wealth allocated to their team. And it may just be a matter of framing--a "collaboration" or "joint funding effort" with Gates wouldn't come across the same way as "a grant to Gates," which I guess is irrational on my part. So maybe there's nothing here at all. 

Still...."giving money to Gates" is the kind of thing that would attract some questioning if anyone else did it, and the only criticism of the Regranting Challenge I've seen is from another funder who isn't dependent on future funding here: https://twitter.com/mulagostarr/status/1613911821857230848

In other words, I suspect that some folks have the internal feeling, "I think Open Phil made questionable decisions in one case or another, but it seems too high-risk to speak out despite Open Phil's willingness to consider critiques. I wish there were a way to capture the kinds of insights that are currently being stifled." 

The relative lack of truly honest feedback is something that bothered me as a funder, and it seemed really hard to address! Even anonymous surveys won't tell you what grantees and others really think (most people that have a very specific insight or critique can't say very much without making it obvious which grant they're talking about and who is speaking). 

I've been a part of one unfinished whitepaper and one unsubmitted grant application on mechanisms and platforms in this space, in particular they were interventions aimed at creating distributed epistemics which is I think a very slightly more technical way of describing the value prop of "democracy" without being as much of an applause light. 

The unfinished whitepaper was a slightly convoluted grantmaking system driven by asset prices on a project market, based on the hypothesis that alleviating (epistemic) pressure from elite grantmakers would be good. You kind of need to believe as a premise that wisdom of crowds beats expertise, at least in some weakened form, which I don't think is justified, so I dropped it. 

The unsubmitted grant application was a play at getting more cost effectiveness analysis written as well as streamlining the process by which CEAs are consumed and donation decisions are produced. This isn't as much of a direct democratization play as most of what's discussed in this post, but it's in the genre of alleviating the cognitive bottleneck from an elite few analysts and grantmakers. Nuño pointed out to me that even if this product would be a boon for donors of 2-5 zeroes, the large institutions probably wouldn't use this to drive decisionmaking, (without users inside large institutions, the overall cost in developer hours probably doesn't break even, since large institutions are more important measured in dollars than donors of 2-5 zeroes). 

Again, I think the crux is the premise around the wisdom of crowds. And even if you don't buy that crowds beat silo'd experts even in weakened form, you can still think that the cognitive pressure on a small number of movement leaders is problematic. 

I'd like to thank Nuño, Eli Lifland, Nathan Young, Ashley Lin, Hazelfire, and David Reinstein for advancing the discussion with me and giving me some of the ideas in this comment (half of them encouraged me and half of them discouraged me, but I won't tell you which is which). 

I want to push back a bit on my own intuition, which is that trying to build out collective (or market-based) decision-making for EA funding is potentially impractical and/or ineffective. Most EAs respect the power of the "wisdom of crowds", and many advocate for prediction markets. Why exactly does this affinity for markets stop at funding? It sounds like most think collective decision-making for funding is not feasible enough to consider, and that's 100% fair, but were it easy to implement, would it be ineffective? 

Again, my intuition is to trust the subject matter experts, to rely on the institutions that we've built for this specific task. But I invest in index funds, I believe that past performance is no guarantee of future results, and I trust that aggregate markets are typically more accurate than most experts. Have EA organizations proved that they are essentially super-forecasters, that they consistently "beat the EA market" in terms of ROI? Perhaps this metaphor is doomed -- these EA orgs are also market-makers as well. Who better to place bets than those with insider knowledge?

At the very least, this experiment seems ripe for running if it hasn't been already. It's far beyond me to figure out how to structure it, I'll leave that to those like Nuno, who laid out a potential path. But we're making a rather large assumption that the collective is by default ineffective.

EDIT: someone pointed out that I'm conflicting prediction markets w/ collective decision making. I want to clarify that my comment is referring to market-based decision making (basically prediction markets), which I view as a subset of collective decision making. Maybe my EA vocab is off though.

Thanks for writing this, I've wanted to write something like this for a while, but could never frame it right.

I often think that rather than making decisions the community could have more scope to vet decisions in parallel and suggest changes. Eg if there was an automatic hidden forum post for every grant then you could comment there about that grant. Systems like this could allow information to build up before someone took it to the granted in question.

"Also - I'm using scare quotes here because I am very confused who these proposals mean when they say EA community. Is it a matter of having read certain books, or attending EAGs, hanging around for a certain amount of time, working at an org, donating a set amount of money, or being in the right Slacks?"

It is of course a relevant question who this community is supposed to consist of, but at the same time, this question could be asked whenever someone refers to the community as a collective agent doing something, having a certain opinion, benefitting from something etc. For example, you write "They may be interested in community input for their funding, via regranting for example, or invest in the Community". If you can't define the community, you cannot clearly say that someone invested in it. You later speak of "managing the relationship between the community and its most generous funder", but it seems hard to say how this relationship is currently managed if the community is so hard to define.

I notice that you quoted:

The big funding bodies (OpenPhil, EA Funds, etc.) should be disaggregated into smaller independent funding bodies within 3 years

This feels like a totally seperate proposal right? Evaluated separately a world like 'Someone who I trust about as much as I trust Holden or Alex (for independent reasons) is running an independent org which allocates funding' seems pretty good. Specifically it seems more robust to 'conflict-of-interest' style concerns whilst keeping grant decisions in the hands of skilled grantmakers. (Maybe a smaller version of this proposal is splitting up Holden and Alex's arms of OP although they seem independent enough that I'm not too bothered about this)

I think we could start talking about how feasible it is to construct an organisation like this and whether major funders like Holden would want to funnel money towards it but at the very least it hasn't been ruled out by any of the reasoning above

I have written this post on the Effective Altruism governance and democratization. 

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KjahfX4vCbWWvgnf7/effective-altruism-governance-still-a-non-issue

I hope it helps to frame the issue.