How Democratic Is Effective Altruism — Really?

By Maxim Vandaele @ 2025-04-16T08:29 (+14)

This is a linkpost to https://bobjacobs.substack.com/p/how-democratic-is-effective-altruism

Effective Altruism aims to do as much good as possible, but this will be hard without democratizing the movement as much as we can. Besides the moral issues this raises, an undemocratic Effective Altruism will also simply be less effective.

Two years ago, I wrote a thesis giving an overview of much of the critique of EA (the full work can be read here).

Now, Bob Jacobs is writing a few pieces highlighting and summarizing some of these critiques that are the most urgent for Effective Altruists to take into consideration if Effective Altruism is to truly succeed at 'doing good better'.

The first of these posts, which is linked here, discusses what I have called the 'democratic critique' and what others have termed the 'institutional critique' of Effective Altruism. Key issues here are the disproportionate influence of a few wealthy investors over the EA movement, lack of global representation and undemocratic mechanisms in the EA Forum.

What follows is the first two paragraphs of Bob's blog post, followed by a link to the full post. Bob is planning on writing more posts, so stay tuned.

Introduction

Effective Altruism (EA) is a social movement that aims to use reason and evidence to help others as much as possible. It encourages people to ask not just “how to do good”, but how to do the most good. This has led members to support things like global health interventions, existential risk reduction, and animal welfare.

I used to be closely involved in the movement, and I still think many of its ideas are worth defending. But as the movement has grown, so have certain structural problems: increasing reliance on large donors, pushback on dissent, and systems that concentrate influence in subtle but significant ways. This post is about those concerns — not to denigrate the movement, but to explore how it might better live up to its own stated values.

Link to the full post

Larks @ 2025-04-16T19:22 (+13)

I think it would be good if you could highlight what is new here, vs re-hashing one half of standard arguments (and not covering why people disagree).

Maxim Vandaele @ 2025-04-22T10:05 (+1)

When it comes to reforming EA, what is more important is perhaps not how novel the critique is but rather how much the critic's proposals are engaged with, and it looks like as of now that isn't happening enough yet.

Larks @ 2025-04-22T14:53 (+15)

I don't think it's reasonable to repeatedly post the same content, even after it got hundreds of comments, many of which engaged with various ideas at quite some length. There are reasons why rejected ideas were rejected - you should proactively address them, or otherwise introduce new content if you want to achieve something.

Jason @ 2025-04-23T23:48 (+2)

There are reasons why rejected ideas were rejected 

I don't think it would be accurate to classify most of the ideas here as rejected, at least not without qualification. My recollection is that there was substantial support for many of these propositions in addition to voices in opposition. On the whole, if I had to sum up the prior discussion on these topics in a single word, I would probably choose inconclusive.[1] That there was no real action on these points suggests that those with the ability to most effectively act on them weren't convinced, or that they had more important issues on their plate, but that only tells us the reaction from a small part of the community.

And I think that matters from the standpoint of what we can reasonably expect from someone in Maxim's shoes. If the ideas had been rejected by community consensus on their merits, then the argument that proponents need new arguments/evidence or changed circumstances would be stronger in my book. The prior rejection would be at least some evidence that the ideas were wrong on the merits.

Of course, posting the same ideas every month would just be annoying. But I don't think there's been a ton of discussion on these ideas as of late, and there are a significant number of new people each year (plus some people who may be in a better position to act on the ideas than they were in the past).

  1. ^

    I do recognize that some specific ideas on the topic of democracy appear to have been rejected by community consensus on the merits.

Larks @ 2025-04-24T01:26 (+13)

I agree that what you describe could have been a decent new post. However, I disagree it characterizes what was actually shared here. Consider for the first example (I have editted the formatting):

The reception was… rough. According to her:

It has been the most emotionally draining paper we have ever written. We lost sleep, time, friends, collaborators, and mentors because we disagreed on: whether this work should be published, whether potential EA funders would decide against funding us and the institutions we're affiliated with, and whether the authors whose work we critique would be upset.

While many in the community responded constructively, others reportedly sought to suppress the paper — not on academic grounds, but out of fear that it might alienate funders. The clear implication here is that critique is encouraged, as long as it doesn’t threaten the financial or ideological foundations of the movement.

Somehow the omitted is the idea that... maybe the feedback was negative because the paper wasn't very good. Which would explain everything else... bad work typically shouldn't be published, bad work is evidence that future work will also be low quality which is an argument against funding in the future, and it is reasonable for people subject to low-quality criticism to be annoyed. Yet Bob's post here doesn't even mention this explanation, despite the 161 upvotes, and simply presents hostility and anti-democraticness as the only explanation.

and there are a significant number of new people each year

Eternal September is meant to be descriptive, not a normative ideal!

Jonas Hallgren 🔸 @ 2025-04-16T09:58 (+8)

Some people might find that this post is written from a place of agitation which is fully okay. I think that even if you do there are two things that I would want to point out as really good points:

  1. A dependence on funders and people with money as something that shapes social capital and incentives, therefore thought in itself. We should therefore be quite vary of the effect that has on people, this can definetely be felt in the community and I think it is a great point.
  2. That the karma algorithm could be revisited and that we should think about what incentives are created for the forum through it. 

I think there's a very very interesting project of democratizingthe EA community in a way that makes it more effective. There are lots of institutional design that we can apply to ourselves and I would be very excited to see more work in this direction!

Edit:

Clarification on why I believe it to cause some agitation for some people:

  1. I remember that some of the situation around Cremer being a bit politically loaded and that the emotions were running hot at that time and so citing that specific situation makes it lack a bit of context.
    1. There are some object level things that people within the community disagree with when it comes to these comments that point at deeper issues of epistemics and cause prioritization that is actually difficult to answer.
    2. The post makes it seem more one-sided than that situation was. Elitism in EA is something covered in the in-depth fellowship for example and there's a bunch of back and forth there but it is an issue that you will arrive at different consequences on depending on what modelling assumptions you do.
    3. I don't want to make a value judgement on this here, I just want to point out that specifice piece of Cremer's writing has always felt a bit thorny which makes the references feel a bit inflammatory?
    4. For me it's the vibe that it is written from a perspective of being post EA and something about when leaving something behind you want to get back at the thing itself by pointing out how it's wrong? So it is kind of written from a emotionally framed perspective which makes the epistemics fraught?
  2. There's some sort of degree where the framing of the post in itself pattern matches onto other critiques that have felt bad faith and so it is "inflammatory" that it raises the immune system of people reading it. I do still think it is quite a valuable point, it is just that part of the phrasing makes it come across more like this than it has to be?
    1. I think that might be because of LLMs often liking to argue towards a specific point but I'm not sure? 
      (You've got some writing that is reminiscent of claude so I could spot the use of it: e.g): 

This isn’t just a technical issue. This is a design philosophy — one that rewards orthodoxy, punishes dissent, and enforces existing hierarchies.

I liked the post, I think it made a good point, I strong upvoted it but I wanted to mention it as a caveat.

Maxim Vandaele @ 2025-04-22T10:10 (+1)

Thank you for the constructive reply.

I think there's a very very interesting project of democratizingthe EA community in a way that makes it more effective. There are lots of institutional design that we can apply to ourselves and I would be very excited to see more work in this direction!

As my friend Bob has proposed, one of the most promising proposals is to run an EA organization as a workers' cooperative (see Bob's post about the benefits of cooperatives). It could bring about greater trust in EA organizations and possibly better decision-making by those organizations.

Yarrow @ 2025-04-24T14:29 (+3)

I believe Bob Jacobs is a socialist, although I don't know what version of socialism he supports. "Socialism" is a fraught term and even when people try to clarify what they mean by it, sometimes it still doesn't get less confusing.

I'm inclined to be open-minded towards Bob's critiques of effective altruism, but I get the sense that his critiques of EA and his ideas for reform are going to end up being a microcosm of socialist or left-wing critiques of society at large and socialist or left-wing ideas for reforming society.

My thought on that is summed up in the Beatles' song "Revolution":

You say you got a real solution, well, you know

We'd all love to see the plan

In principle, democracy is good, equality is good, less hierarchy is better than more hierarchy, not being completely reliant on billionaires and centimillionaires is good... But I need to know some more specifics on how Bob wants to achieve those things.

Yarrow @ 2025-04-24T08:09 (+1)

This story might surprise you if you’ve heard that EA is great at receiving criticisms. I think this reputation is partially earned, since the EA community does indeed engage with a large number of them. The EA Forum, for example, has given “Criticism of effective altruism” its own tag. At the moment of writing, this tag has 490 posts on it. Not bad.

Not only does EA allow criticisms, it sometimes monetarily rewards them. In 2022 there was the EA criticism contest, where people could send in their criticisms of EA and the best ones would receive prize money. A total of $120,000 was awarded to 31 of the contest’s 341 entries. At first glance, this seems like strong evidence that EA rewards critiques, but things become a little bit more complicated when we look at who the winners and losers were.


After giving it a look, the EA Criticism and Red Teaming Contest is not what I would describe as being about "criticism of effective altruism", either in terms of what the contest asked for in the announcement post or in terms of what essays ended up winning the prizes. At least not mostly.

When you say "criticism of effective altruism", that makes me think of the sort of criticism that a skeptical outsider would make about effective altruism. Or that it would be about the kind of thing that might make a self-identified effective altruist think less of effective altruism overall, or even consider leaving the movement.

Out of 31 essays that won prizes, only the following four seem like "criticism of effective altruism", based on the summaries:

The essay "Criticism of EA Criticism Contest" by Zvi (which got an honourable mention) points out what I'm pointing out, but I wouldn't count this one because it doesn't actually make criticisms of effective altruism itself.

This is not to say anything about whether the other 27 essays were good or bad, or whether the contest was good or bad. Just that I think this contest was mostly not about "criticisms of EA".