EA - The EA community does not own its donors' money by Nick Whitaker

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: The EA community does not own its donors' money, published by Nick Whitaker on January 18, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.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. I will try to expand my thoughts on these at a later time.Today I focus on one element that seems at best confused and at worst highly destructive: large-scale, democratic control over EA funds.This has been mentioned in a few proposals: It originated (to my knowledge) in Carla Zoe Cremer's Structural Reforms proposal:Within 5 years: EA funding decisions are made collectivelyFirst set up experiments for a safe cause area with small funding pots that are distributed according to different collective decision-making mechanisms(Note this is classified as a 'List A' proposal - per Cremer: "ideas I’m pretty sure about and thus believe we should now hire someone full time to work out different implementation options and implement one of them")It was also reiterated in the recent mega-proposal, Doing EA Better:Within 5 years, EA funding decisions should be made collectivelyFurthermore (from the same post):Donors should commit a large proportion of their wealth to EA bodies or trusts controlled by EA bodies to provide EA with financial stability and as a costly signal of their support for EA ideasAnd:The big funding bodies (OpenPhil, EA Funds, etc.) should be disaggregated into smaller independent funding bodies within 3 years(See also the Deciding better together section from the same post)How would this happen?One could try to personally convince Dustin Moskovitz that he should turn OpenPhil funds over to an EA Community panel, that it would help OpenPhil distribute its funds better.I suspect this would fail, and proponents would feel very frustrated.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. Yet the fact that someone is interested in listening to the advice of some members of a group on some issues does not mean they have to completely surrender to the broader group on all questions. They may be interested in community input for their funding, via regranting for example, or invest in the Community, but does not imply they would want the bulk of their donations governed by the EA community.(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? These details seem incredibly important when this is the set of people given major control of funding, in lieu of current expert funders)So at a basic level, the assumption that EA has some innate claim to the money of its donors is basically incorrect. (I understand that the claim is also normative). But for now, the money possessed by Moskovitz and Tuna, OP, and GoodVentures is not the property of the EA community. So what, then, to do?Can you demand ten billion dollars?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...