EA - Keep EA high-trust by Michael PJ

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: Keep EA high-trust, published by Michael PJ on December 22, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.(Status: not draft amnesty, but posting in that spirit, since it's not as good as I'd want it to be but otherwise I probably won't ever post it)In my experience, EA so far has been a high-trust community. That is, people generally trust other people to behave well and in accordance with the values of the community.Being high-trust is great! It means that you can spend more time getting on with stuff and less time carefully checking each other for bad behaviour. It's also just nicer: It feels good and motivating to be trusted, and it is reassuring to support people you trust to do work.I feel like a lot of posts I've seen recently have been arguing for the community to move to a low-trust regime, particularly with respect to EA organizations. That includes calls for:More transparency ("we need to rigorously scrutinise even your small actions in case you're trying to sneak bad behaviour past us")More elaborate governance ("there is a risk of governance capture and we need to seriously guard against it", "we don't trust the people currently doing governance")Sometimes you have to move to low-trust regimes. It's common that organizations tend to move from high-trust to low-trust as they grow, due to the larger number of actors involved who can't all be assumed to be trustworthy. But I do not think that the EA community actually has the problems that require low-trust, and I think it would be very costly.Specifically, I want to argue:Low-trust regimes are expensive, both in terms of resources and moraleThe people working in current EA orgs are in fact very trustworthyThe EA community should remain high-trust (with checking)Low-trust is costlyLow-trust regimes impose costs in at least three ways:Costlier cooperationCostlier delegationGeneral efficiency taxesThe post Bad Omens in current EA Governance argues that due to the possibility of conflicts of interest we should break up the organisations which currently share ops support through EVF. This is a clear example of 1: if we can't trust people then we can't just share our resources, we have to keep everyone at arm's length. You can read in the comments various people explaining why this would be quite expensive.Similarly, you can't just delegate power to people in a low-trust regime. What if they abuse it? Better to require explicit approval up the chain before they do anything serious like spend some money. But if you can't spend money you often can't do things, and activity ends up being blocked on approval, politics, and perception.When you actually try to get anything done, low-trust regimes typically require lots of paper trails and approvals. Anyone who's worked in a larger organization can testify to how demoralizing and slow this can be. Since any decision can be questioned after the fact, there is no limit to how much "transparency" can be demanded, and how many pointless forms, proposals, reports, or forum posts can end up being produced. I think it is very easy to underestimate how destructive this can be to productivity.Finally, it is plain demoralizing to be in a low-trust regime. High-trust says "Yes, we are on the same team, go and attack the problem with my blessing!". Low-trust says "I guess I have to work with you but I'm expecting you to try and steal from me as soon as you have the opportunity, so I'm keeping an eye on you". Where would you rather work?Current people in EA organisations are trustworthy(Disclaimer: I know quite a lot of people who work in EA organisations, so I'm definitely personally biased towards them.)The FTX debacle has led to a lot of finger-pointing in recent months. A particular pattern has been posts listing large numbers of questions about the behaviour of p...