EA - A libertarian socialist’s view on how EA can improve by freedomandutility

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A libertarian socialist’s view on how EA can improve, published by freedomandutility on December 30, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Following up on my post criticising liberal-progressive criticisms of EA, I’m bringing you suggestions from further to the left on how EA could improve.In general, libertarian socialism opposes the concentration of power and wealth and aims to redistribute them, either as a terminal goal or an instrumental goal.This post is divided into 3 sections - meta EA, EA interventions and EA Philosophy.Meta EAMost of the interventions I propose are improvements in EA’s institutional design and safeguards, which should, in theory, increase the chances that resources are spent optimally.Whether we are spending resources optimally is near-impossible to measure and evaluate, so we have to rely on theory. Regardless of whether my proposed interventions work or fail, there would be no evidence for it.EA relies on highly-uncertain, vulnerable-to-motivated-reasoning expected value (EV) calculations and is no less vulnerable to motivated reasoning than other ideologies. Because it is not possible to detect suboptimal spending, we should not wait for strong evidence of mistakes or outright fraud and corruption to make improvements, and we should be willing to bear small costs to reap long term benefits.EA priors on the influence of self-serving biases are too weakIn my view, EAs underestimate the influence that self-serving biases play in imprecise, highly uncertain expected value (EV) calculations around decisions such as buying luxurious conference venues, lavish community building expenditure, funding ready meals and funding Ubers, leading to suboptimal allocation of resources.When concerns are raised, I notice that some EAs ask for “evidence” that decisions are influenced by self-serving biases. But that is not how motivated reasoning works - you will rarely find concrete evidence for motivated reasoning. Depending on the strength of self-serving biases, they could influence expected value calculations in ways that justify the most suboptimal, most luxurious purchases, with no evidence of the biases existing.I suggested three improvements to how EV calculations are made in another post:Have two (or more) individuals, or groups, independently calculate the expected value of an intervention and compare resultsIn expected value calculations, identify a theoretical cost at which the intervention would no longer be approximately maximising expected value from the resourcesKeep in mind that EA aims to make decisions that approximately maximise expected value from a set of resources, rather than just make decisions which just have net positive expected valueEAs underestimate the importance of conflicts of interest and the distribution of power inside EAThere is a huge amount of overlap across boards, governance and leadership of key EA organisations, increasing the risk of suboptimal allocation of resources, since in theory, there is a high risk of funders giving too much funding to other organisations with connected leadership.Although I think a certain degree of coordination via events such as the Leaders Summit is good, a greater degree of independence between institutions may help reduce biases and safeguard against misallocation.I would recommend that individuals are only allowed to hold leadership, board or governance positions in one EA organisation each. Beyond reducing risks of bias in funding allocation, this would also help to distribute power at the top of EA, safeguarding against individual irrationality and increasing diversity of thought, which may generate additional benefits.If this seems like a bad idea, try the reversal test: do you think EA orgs should become more integrated?EDIT 1 at 43 upvotes: Another potential ...