I wholeheartedly agree with this post.

I think there has been a bit of over-reacting to recent events. I don't think the damage is that bad, and to some degree I think we've just been unlucky. Maybe we need to do some things differently (e.g. try to project less of an air of certainty, which many critics seem to perceive) but we should also beware the illusion of control.

That was sad to read :(

You say, in effect, "not that centralised", but, from your description, EA seems highly centralised

Your argument that it's not centralised seems to be that EA is not a single legal entity

These are two examples, but I generally didn't feel like your reply really engaged with Will's description of the ways in which EA is decentralized, nor his attempt to look for finer distinctions in decentralization. It felt a bit like you just said "no, it is centralised!".

democracy has the effect of decentralising power.

I don't agree with this at all. IMO democracy often has the opposite effect, and many decentralized communities (e.g. the open-source community) have zero democracy. But I think this needs me to write a full post...

If we think of centralisation just on a spectrum of 'decision-making power', as you define it above (how few people determine what happens to the whole) EA could hardly be more centralised!

This seems false to me. If the only kind of decision you think matters is funding decisions, then sure, those are somewhat centralised. But that's not everything, and it's far from clear to me why you think that's the only thing that matters?

For example, as Will discusses in the post, even amongst the individual EA orgs:

1. There are many of them, and they are small
2. They basically all do their own strategy and planning

Sure doesn't look like centralized decision-making to me. You could say "For any decision, OP could threaten to refuse to fund an organization unless it made the choice that OP wants, therefore actually OP has the decision-making power". But this seems to me to just not be a good description of reality. OP doesn't behave like that, and in practice most decisions are made in a decentralized fashion.

Yet, de facto, if we think about where power, in fact, resides, it is concentrated in a very small group. If someone sets up an invite-only group called the 'leaders’ forum', it seems totally reasonable for people to say "ah, you guys run the show".

This equivocates between saying that power does resides a small group, and saying that we have created the perception that power resides with a small group. As I already argued, I think the former is false, and Will explicitly agrees with the latter and thinks we should change it.

My overall impression of your post is that it seems to me that you think the non-diversity of funding is bad (which I think we all agree on), but that for some reason funding is the only thing that matters when it comes to whether we describe EA as centralized or not. 

Whereas to me EA looks like a pretty decentralized movement that currently happens to have a dominant funder. Moreover, we're lucky in that our funder doesn't (AFAIK) throw their weight around too much.

I think the average EA might underestimate the extent to which being visible in EA (e.g. speaking at EAG) is seen as a burden rather than an opportunity.

Related: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pDzdb4smpzT3Lwbym/my-model-of-ea-burnout?commentId=Xz2xzWEuLAiHsFWzf

Having read this I'm still unclear what the benefit of your restructuring of CEA is. It's not a decentralising move (if anything it seems like the opposite to me); it might be a legitimising move, but is lack of legitimacy an actual problem that we have?

The main other difference I can see is that it might make CEA more populist in the sense of following the will of the members of the movement more. Maybe I'm as much of an instinctive technocrat as you are a democrat, but it seems far from clear to me that that would be good. Nor that it solves a problem we actually have.

Yes, I think there's a lot of sliding between "decentralised" and "democratic" even though these have pretty much nothing to do with each other.

As a pretty clear example, the open source software community is extremely decentralised but has essentially zero democracy anywhere.

I think this is a place where the centralisation vs decentralisation axis is not the right thing to talk about. It sounds like you want more transparency and participation, which you might get by having more centrally controlled communication systems.

IME decentralised groups are not usually more transparent, if anything the opposite as they often have fragmented communication, lots of which is person-to-person.

I would love the community to be more supportive in ways that would help with that. Things I would like:

• Accept that new projects may be not that great, encourage them to grow and maybe even chip in as well as criticising.
• Accept and even celebrate failure.
• Even more incubator style things. I love what CE does here.

A few thoughts:

• The level of quality and professionalism has risen since the old days which makes it intimidating to contribute your own half-assed thing.
• Doing things does usually require time, and a lot of the early doing was done by students (and still is!). It's much harder to be that involved when you're older without becoming professionally involved. These days we have a lot more non-students!
• I think all Will's stuff about the perceived allocation of responsibility and control has a big impact.

I'm not super convinced that the fundraising situation is tougher? It seems much easier to me than it was. Especially for small things we have a decent range of funders.

I also had this reaction, and I think it was mostly just the phrasing. "Break up OP" suggests that we have the power or right to do that, which we definitely don't. I think if the post said "OP could consider breaking itself up" it wouldn't sound like that.