I’m writing this in response to the recent post about Intentional Insights documenting the many ways in which Gleb and the organisation he runs has acted in ways not representing EA values. Please take this post as representative of the views of the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) on the matter.
As documented in the Open Letter, Intentional Insights have been systematically misleading in their public communications on many occasions, have astroturfed, and have engaged in morally dubious hiring practices. But what’s been most remarkable about this affair is how little Gleb has been willing to change his actions in light of this documentation. If I had been in his position, I’d have radically revised my activities, or quit my position long ago. Making mistakes is something we all do. But ploughing ahead with your plans despite extensive, deep and well-substantiated criticism of them by many thoughtful members of the EA community — who are telling you not just that your plans are misguided but that they are actively harmful — is not ok. It’s the opposite of what effective altruism stands for.
Because of this, we want to have no association with Intentional Insights. We do not consider them a representative of EA, we do not want to have any of CEA’s images or logos (including Giving What We Can) used in any of Intentional Insights’ promotional materials; we will not give them a platform at EAG or EAGx events; and we will encourage local group leaders not to have them speak.
- Someone using the effective altruism brand to solicit “donations” to a company that was not and could not become a non-profit, using text taken from other EA websites
- People engaging in or publicly endorsing ‘ends justify the means’ reasoning (for example involving plagiarism or dishonesty)
- People co-opting the term ‘effective altruism’ to justify activities that they were already doing that clearly wouldn’t be supported by EA reasoning
- Someone making threats of physical violence to another member of the EA community for not supporting their organisation
Problems like these, it seems to me, will only get worse over time. As the community grows, the likelihood of behaviour like this increases, and the costs of behaviour like this increases too, because bad actors taint the whole movement.
At the moment, there’s simply no system set up within the community to handle this. What currently happens is: someone starts engaging in bad activities -> bad activities are tolerated for an extended period of time, aggravating many -> repeated public complaints start surfacing, but still no action -> eventually a coalition of community members gather together to publicly denounce the activities. This, it seems to me, is a bad process. It’s bad for actually preventing inappropriate behaviour, because the response to that behaviour is so slow, and because there’s no real sanction that others in the community can make. It’s bad for the community members who have to spend hundreds of hours of their time documenting the inappropriate behaviour. It’s bad for those who receive the criticism, because they will naturally feel they’ve been ganged up upon, and have not had a ‘fair trial’. And it’s bad for onlookers who, not knowing all the details of the situation, will see a fractious movement engaging in witch hunts.
I think that in the mid to long term the consequences of this could be very great. The default outcome for any social movement is to fizzle or fragment, and we should be looking for ways that this will happen with EA. If the number of examples of bad behaviour continues to grow - which we should expect to see if we let the status quo continue - then this seems like an obvious way in which the EA movement could fail, whether through effective altruism becoming known as a community where people engage in morally dubious activities for the greater good, where the community gets a reputation for being unpleasant, or where the term ‘effective altruism’ has lost the meaning that it currently has and people start using it to refer to any attempt to make a difference that makes at least a passing nod to using data.
People often look to CEA to resolve examples of bad behaviour, but so far we have been coy about doing so. Primarily, we’re worried about overreach: effective altruism is a movement that is much larger than any one organisation, and we have not wanted to create further ‘mob rule’ dynamics by interfering in affairs that people in the community might judge to be none of CEA’s business.
For example, internally we discussed whether we should ban Gleb from the EA Forum, which we help to run, for a three-month period. I think that this response would easily be warranted in light of Intentional Insights’ activities. But, for me, that proposal rang alarm bells of overreach: the EA Forum seems to me to be a community good, and it seems to me that CEA doesn’t have the legitimacy to take that action. But, unfortunately, neither does anyone else.
So I’d like there to exist a more formal process by which we can ensure that people taking action under the banner of effective altruism are acting in accordance with EA values, and strengthening rather than damaging the movement. I think that this is vital if the EA community is going to grow substantially and reach its full potential. If we did this successfully, this process would avoid feelings that EA is run by mob rule, it would ensure that bad behaviour is nipped in the bud, rather than growing to the point where the community spends hundreds of hours dealing with it, and it would give allegedly bad actors a transparent and fair assessment.
To this end, what I’d propose is:
- Creating a set of EA guiding principles
- Creating a community panel that assesses potential egregious violations of those principles, and makes recommendations to the community on the basis of that assessment.
The existence of this would bring us into alignment with other societies, which usually have some document that describes the principles that the society stands for, and has some mechanism for ensuring that those who choose to represent themselves as part of that society abides by those principles.
I’d imagine that, in the first instance, if there was an example of egregious violation of the guiding principles of EA, the community panel would make recommendations to the actor in question. For example, after GiveWell’s astroturfing incident, the organisation self-sanctioned: one of the cofounders was demoted and both cofounders were fined $5000. If the matter couldn't be resolved in this way, then the panel could make recommendations to the rest of the community.
There are a lot of details to be worked out here, but I think that the case for creating something like this is strong. We’re going to try sketching out a proposal, trying to get as much feedback from the community as possible along the way. I’d be interested in people’s thoughts and reactions in the comments below.
Disclosures: I know personally all of the authors of the Open Letter. Jeff Kaufman is a donor to CEA and is married to Julia Wise, an employee of CEA; Greg Lewis is a donor to CEA and has previously volunteered for CEA; Oliver Habryka is an employee of CEA, but worked on the Open Letter on his personal time. I wasn’t involved in any capacity with the creation of the open letter.
Bad actors can also abuse informal processes. If a process is informal, the key to winning is generally effective manipulation of public opinion. When rival factions fight to manipulate public opinion, that creates the kind of conflict that leads to bloody schisms.
This seems like a definitional argument to me. EA is a movement, movements don't have panels, therefore EA shouldn't have a panel. Such an argument doesn't touch on the actual consequences of having a panel. If EA is a question, maybe the answer to that question is an "association" rather than a movement, and it's not unusual for associations to have panels.
In some cases an association will be so closely identified with the area it works in that the two will seem almost synonymous. I understand that in the US, almost everyone who wants a job as an actuary takes exams administered by a group called the Society of Actuaries. This seems like the ideal case for EA. But even if there were multiple competing associations, or not everyone chose to be a part of the main one, I suspect this wouldn't be very bad. (Some thoughts on competition between organizations in this comment.)
I think it's pretty normal for professional associations, at least, to have a disciplinary process. Here's the CFA institute on how they deal with ethics violations for instance.
I'm not sure point (2) has much to do with this decision. People would still get gentle suggestions that they were harming the movement if there was a panel. The point is to have a process if gentle suggestions aren't working.
Carl Shulman mentioned the value of transparency in another thread related to this, but it occurs to me that a person subject to disciplinary action might want to keep it private, and that could be reasonable in some cases.
I agree that authority is generally something other people grant you, not something you take for yourself. That's part of why I'm trying to respond to the comments critical of this idea, since this sort of thing works best when almost everyone is on board.
Instead of compelling others to recognize its authority, the panel should work to earn its authority. They should say explicitly that if they're not taking your suggestions, you're free to vote with your feet and set up your own thing.
I think groups generally function better when they're able to grant authority this way. I would guess that the scouting movement, which seems to have granted authority to a group called the World Organization of the Scout Movement, functions better than feminism/animal rights/environmentalism (though I will grant that the advocacy coming out of the latter three is more compelling).
Very speculatively, I wonder if an "association" is what you want when you're trying to produce something, and a "movement" is what you want when you're trying to change attitudes in a relatively untargeted way.
I think this is mainly desirable because people will be more willing to grant authority to a panel that's seen as representative of the entire movement. In terms of the actual decisions being made, I can imagine a panel that's entirely unrepresentative of the EA movement (e.g. trained mediators from Japan, where EA has little presence) doing nearly as good of a job.
If a new cause area gains standing in the movement, by definition it's achieved buy-in from people, which probably includes panel members. And even if none of them are very excited about it, if they have much in common with the EAs I've met, they are fair-minded enough for it not to interfere with their work significantly.
The more power the panel has, the more process there needs to be in selecting who will serve. My current guess is that the panel's powers should be pretty limited. They should see their mission as "facilitating discussions about effective altruism", or something like that, not "doing the most good".