EA - What is effective altruism? How could it be improved? by MichaelPlant

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: What is effective altruism? How could it be improved?, published by MichaelPlant on May 5, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.The EA community has been convulsing since FTX. There's been lots of discontent, but almost no public discussion between community leaders, and little in the way of a constructive suggestions for what could change. In this post, I offer a reconceptualisation of what the EA community is and then use that to sketch some ideas for how to do good better together.I’m writing this purely in my personal capacity as a long-term member of the effective altruism community. I drafted this at the start of 2023, in large part to help me process my own thoughts. The ideas here are still, by my lights, dissatisfyingly underdeveloped. But I’m posting it now, in its current state and with minimal changes, because it's suddenly relevant to topical discussions about how to run the Effective Ventures Foundation and the Centre for Effective Altruism and I don't know if I would ever make time to polish it.[I'm grateful to Ben West, Chana Messinger, Luke Freeman, Jack Lewars, Nathan Young, Peter Brietbart, Sam Bernecker, and Will Troy for their comments on this. All errors are theirs mine]SummaryWe can think of effective altruists as participants in a market for maximum impact activities. It’s much like a local farmers’ market, except people are buying and selling goods and services for how best to help others.Just like people in a market, EAs don’t all share the same goal - a marketplace isn’t an army. Rather, people have different goals, based on their different accounts of what matters. The participants can agree, however, that they all want there to be a marketplace to allow them to meet and trade; this market is useful because people want different things.Presumably, the EA market should function as a free, competitive market. This means lots of choice and debate among the participants. It requires the market administrators to operate a level playing-field.Currently, the EA community doesn’t quite operate like this. The market administrators - CEA, its staff and trustees - are also major market participants, i.e. promoting particular ideas and running key organisations. And the market is dominated by one big buyer (i.e. it’s a ‘monopsony’).I suggest some possible reforms: CEA to have its trustees elected by the community; it should strive to be impartial rather than take a stand on the priorities. I don’t claim this will solve all the issues, but it should help. I'm sure there are other implications of the market model I've not thought of.These reforms seem sensible even without any of EA’s recent scandals. I do, however, explain how they would likely have helped lessened these scandals too.I’ve tried to resist getting into the minutiae of “how would EA be run if modelled on a free market?” and I would encourage readers also to resist this. I want people to focus on the basic idea and the most obvious implications, not get stuck on the details.I’m not very confident in the below. It’s an odd mix of ideas from philosophy, politics, and economics. I wrote it up in the hope others can develop the ideas and I can stop ruminating on the “what should FTX mean for EA?” question.What is EA? A market for maximum-impact altruistic activitiesWhat is effective altruism? It's described by the website effectivealtruism.org as a "research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice". That's all well and good, but it's not very informative if we want to understand the behaviour of individuals in the community and the functioning of the community as a whole.An alternative approach is to think of effective altruists, the people themselves, in economic terms. In this case, we might characterise the effe...