How Democratic Is Effective Altruism — Really?

By Maxim Vandaele @ 2025-04-16T08:29 (+9)

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

Jonas Hallgren 🔸 @ 2025-04-16T09:58 (+6)

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.

Larks @ 2025-04-16T19:22 (+2)

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).