Site icon From Poverty to Progress

Should the new “Progress Forum” be controlled by one man or the entire Progress movement?

This post is turning out very different than the one that I had originally intended when I started writing it.

A terminology note: I adopted the term “Progress Forum” (Jason’s term) as a courtesy to him to facilitate a common effort to build the technology. I believe that the term “Online hub for the progress movement” is a far better description of what I started the project to create.

More details on the history of this project are below.

The real issue is whether the “Online Hub for the Progress community” should be either:

1) A private monopoly controlled by one person who has a strong conflict of interest in promoting his own content and $1 million fund-raising (Jason Crawford). He can potentially use this technology to boost his progress-based postings and book releases at the expense of all other progress-related content.

2) A free marketplace of ideas focused on the concept of progress, that enables all authors and bloggers writing about progress to equal access to readers interested in reading progress-related content. This will give them the incentive to generate lots of great progress-related content and not having to spend so much time on self-promotion and social media marketing. Win-win.

On the evening of January 13th, Jason Crawford, the CEO of the Roots of Progress charity, declared that the Progress Forum will be under his control with no accountability from the Progress movement. This is despite me inviting him onto this project, which was supposed to be for the entire progress community.

For more information on what the Progress Forum is, see below.

Update: As of today, Jason Crawford is refusing to accept the outcome of any vote by the members on this issue. In addition, he has not disputed one fact in this post. What does that tell you?

Update: Jason Crawford and the Roots of Progress won the vote. As I promised, that concludes the issue as far as I am concerned. Congratulations, Jason! I am leaving up this post as a matter of historical record. I am happy to amend anything if presented with facts that conflict with the post.

If this is what the Progress movement wants, then so be it. But I think we should all think very carefully about how that power will be used.

What is the real issue being discussed here?

I want to make clear that this issue is not about Jason Crawford as a person. Jason has worked hard and the progress movement has benefitted from many of these actions. If anyone deserves a Lifetime Achievement award for building the progress movement, it would be Jason.

But the Progress Forum is not the prize for winning such a Lifetime Achievement award.

Jason Crawford being one of many leaders within the progress movement would be a wonderful thing. He is very intelligent, well-spoken, hard-working, and able to explain complicated issues in a simple way.

The real issue is whether the “Online Hub for the Progress community” should be:

The current incentives are harmful to our growth

Over the last two years, very negative incentives have evolved within the progress movement. Currently, the people who are writing content on progress are forced into a zero-sum competition for readers and funds. The only way to overcome this is to dedicate more-and-more time towards social media marketing self-promotion and fund-raising. This takes away time focusing on research and writing content.

We need a division-of-labor where content writers focus on what they do best and the online hub automatically promotes their content to everyone who is interested in reading progress-related content. This benefits everyone (except the enemies of progress).

I am retired. I do not need any more money. I am not interested in fame, status, fund-raising or selling content. I am lucky. Unfortunately, most people who write progress-related content are not so lucky.

I started this project to create an online hub for the entire progress community to overcome this zero-sum competition. Jason’s power move on January 13th shows that he wants to do the opposite.

Turning over the Progress Forum to the Roots of Progress will only make the negative incentives worse. The negative incentives come from the very centralized nature of our current movement. This comes from the flow of money to only one organization. These negative incentives has led to the following:

I believe that the flow of money is corrupting the progress movement and making it very difficult to grow. The Progress Forum has a real chance of completely changing the dynamic by enabling many other potential leaders to come forward. Unfortunately, this can only happen if the Forum maintains autonomy.

What are the results of these negative incentives?

Take a look at the Roots of Progress website. Jason has raised $500,000, and he has the goal of raising $1 million. There is not one hint as to what that money has been used for or what it will be used for in the future. No transparency. No accountability to any outside the organization.

Currently, I see no evidence that the Roots of Progress donated one dollar to anyone outside the organization in 2021.

Should one not decide what the money will be used for and publish it transparently before raising that kind of money? I would not even dream of doing that. It makes one wonder where the money is actually going.

Also take a look at the Roots of Progress website, Jason’s Twitter account, his media appearances and interviews. How often does Jason actually mention other people in the progress movement (dozens of blogs and other sites) and link to their work?

Is he being a cheerleader for the movement, or is he building his own career as a public intellectual and using fund-raising in the name of the progress movement as a means to do so?

This critical lack of transparency and an image of being the only person doing anything also makes one wonder what donors to the Roots of Progress are being told. I presume that most of them are far too busy to really investigate what is happening within the movement and who else might be making contributions.

Does his control over virtually 100% of the money raised by the progress movement not give him a strong incentive to create the appearance that he is the only one who really matters? Does this not mean that someone who tries to help build the progress movement will actually be viewed as a competitor? Does this not mean that others who want grants or salaries from his organization have to play along with this public image game to get funding?

I have repeatedly questioned Jason in private about the purposes of the money and why he will not mention other people in the movement in public, but he refuses to give a clear answer. He just makes vague statements about developing his own career. And this is from the CEO of an official 501(c)(3) “charity” that is under very strict transparency laws from the federal government and the state of California.

What is the Progress Forum?

While we are still debating both short-term and long-term goals, the Progress Forum is likely going to start out with the functionality of the LessWrong website. We hope that in the long run, the Progress Forum will be far better than LessWrong.

While we were still discussing a long-term vision for this project (until Jason took over), my UX Design included:

This is not pie-in-the-sky thinking. I have been assured by multiple developers on the project, including Jason Crawford that the vast majority of this functionality could be implemented within the confines of cloning LessWrong. We could then add on the rest at a later date.

On January 13th, we were with minutes of a deal between myself, Jason and many key members of the project to make this the focus of the project. Then Jason suddenly declared himself in charge of the Progress Forum forever without any accountability from outside the Roots of Progress organization.

A man who was committed to balanced content would not have done such a thing.

The Progress Forum, if it is anything close to my design, will be a HUGE step up from our current PS slack channel! I for one am so excited about the possibilities. If we do this right, we could radically increase membership in the Progress movement. And this would radically increase our power to promote progress that benefits all of humanity.

Here is a very early and very rough design that I created that might be implemented (whoever gets the governance will ultimately decide).

progress-forum-design-01-11-2021Download

Why does governance matter to us?

The Progress Forum will give those who govern it great power. With the great power of the Progress Forum, however, comes great responsibility. While we have decided to build this Forum for the Progress movement, we have not decided how to govern it.

If you care about growing the progress movement, you should care about who runs the Progress Forum. Depending upon how this new website is governed, the Progress Forum can either break us free as a movement from this stranglehold, or it can tighten the restrictions.

An autonomous Progress Forum could be an open platform that levels the playing field and enables lots of bloggers writing lots of great progress-related content to get the exposure that they need without serious financial barriers. Or the Progress Forum could be controlled by the one person who already has virtually 100% of the current fund-raising and the vast majority of the media exposure. This will lead all future fund-raising will only go in one direction making it hard for anyone else to breakthrough.

How can we grow the movement with these very negative incentives built into the system? How will things ever change if he is given control of the Progress Forum without accountability to the movement?

Is this what we want for the Progress Forum, which I believe will be the most powerful tool that we will ever have to grow as a group?

We need to ensure that the power of the Progress Forum is used to the benefit of the entire Progress movement. If this were 2010, I would say “Do we really need to talk about this? Let’s just focus on building it and figure out governance as we go along?”

Unfortunately, there have been too many examples of online platforms that started off looking like great technological achievements with no negative side-effects suddenly morphing into something very different. Unfortunately, far too many small committed minorities have figured out how to move into seemingly unimportant administrations and abuse their power at the expense of the majority.

We cannot allow this to happen with the Progress Forum. To be clear, I am not predicting that it will happen. I am only stating that it is a real possibility that we need to prepare for before it actually happens. This will mitigate the damage and reduce the possibility of it occurring.

Update: Jason’s announcement on January 13th stating that he will be controlling the Progress Forum without accountability shows that this is a real threat, not a hypothetical one.

I also think that many members of the Progress movement are a little naïve about the politics of progress. We need to understand that, though we have the facts on our side, facts alone will not win debates. The people who are skeptical of the existence of progress or opposed to progress are very strong and motivated. The bigger we grow, the more a target we will become.

For that reason, we need robust governance rules before we launch. To achieve that, we need a spirited, transparent and honest debate on how the Progress Forum should be governed within the PS Slack channel.

I say, no, but let’s debate it in the PS Slack channel with full openness rather than letting one man decide our fate.

Aren’t You Just Complaining From the Sidelines While Jason’s Team Does All the Work?

No, I am not a bystander on the project. I am a whistleblower.

Note: Jason Crawford has not disputed one single fact on this post.

In fact, I played a key role in getting this project started.

  1. My first Let’s Debate post “What the Progress Studies Movement Needs to Do to Grow?” explained why we need an online hub.
  2. When no one took the initiative to start work, I initiated a project on December 22.
  3. On December 30 I recruited a talented developer, Andrew Roberts, who is playing a key development role.
  4. We made a good faith effort to include Jason on the project.
  5. It was only after I announced this project to the Slack channel on January 3 that 20 minutes later Jason suddenly discovered that he already had such a project going.
    I did not complain at his obvious attempt to steal my project because I just wanted to get to work. I did not care who got the credit, but I certainly began to distrust his intentions.
  6. When I pressed him on what had actually been accomplished before my entry, Jason could not come up with anything more than having a domain name and waiting on an email. So basically it was ten minutes work.
  7. On the second day of the project, I created the UX Design for the long-term vision of the project (see above for design).
  8. I insisted that the project be transparent to all within Slack.
  9. I actively pushed to debate governance immediately, but Jason did everything possible to shut down that debate (now I know why).
  10. I started writing this post so the entire group could discuss governance in public, when suddenly everything within the project shifted.
  11. On the night of January 13th, we were very close to an agreement on the scope of MVP (which would have included the vast majority of my proposed functionality. Then Jason pulled his power move and pressured me to get out of the project.

It was only on the evening of January 13th when Jason Crawford made the statement that his organization, the Roots of Progress, would make all the decisions for the Progress Forum project before and after delivery.

Knowing that he could not control me, Jason made it clear that I should drop out of the project. Worse he refused to discuss the issue in private. He has also been unwilling to discuss the issue in public and has refused to agree to the decision of a fair democratic vote (which ended on January 24, 2022).

I was outraged because I thought that it was a betrayal of the trust of the group. Many of the developers had no idea that this was the real goal of the project. I am sure that many still do not. The Progress Forum is not the property of anyone man or institution.

For weeks I saw a common pattern of secrecy and evasion with him, but I was shocked that he would do such a thing. So I had to go public with this post.

My Proposed Governance Model for the Progress Forum

OK, so what is my alternative to total control by Jason Crawford?

I do not pretend to be an expert on this topic. Indeed, I am somewhat of a neophyte on social media compared to others. I am sure that much of what I believe will change in the course of the debate. I recently asked a Developer from LessWrong if he had any in writing about the governance of Less Wrong, and he said something like “Nothing very useful.”

Whereas on other topics in the “Let’s Debate Progress” series, I gave concrete proposals, this time I will state high-level principles with some suggestions for how to implement them.

Just so nobody thinks this post is a power move on my part, I publicly announce that I have no intention of running for Moderator. Nor am I trying to pack people who are sympathetic to me or my interests. Nor am I trying to use it for fund-raising.

I do, however, have a strong interest in making sure that all future Moderators have the best interests of the Progress movement at heart and do not abuse their authority. In particular, I am concerned about censorship or content imbalances for ideological or organizational reasons. No matter how much we wish otherwise, the concept of progress has huge political implications.

We should go into this with our eyes wide open to what could go wrong (and what is currently happening), while still believing that it most likely will not (update: it is already happening). Good governance is an insurance policy, not a prediction of doom.

I believe that the Progress Forum should:

The Moderators should:

The majority of active Moderators should never be controlled by any one individual nor any organization. This should be true even if we feel that an individual or institution has good intentions. Good intentions can often go in a very bad direction.

On some important issues, I have no opinion at the current time. I would love to hear what others think!

Why not just convince Jason in private?

I tried to for over a month.

Starting on December 3 I engaged in a number of private attempts to convince Jason that our group model was stunting our growth as a movement. It was clear to me that the people with the biggest social media “mega-phones” were not doing too much to boost up other potential leaders who could really help the movement grow.

I tried to convince Jason that there was a problem within the movement. I argued that we needed to have collective decision-making, a focus on action rather than chat and transparency. I tried to persuade him privately to be more transparent in money and building up others within the movement. We had long private messages across 7 different days and a 1-hour long Zoom call. I also invited him to join forces on this project despite my misgivings. The total length of our private messages was 10 pages.

Nothing. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that Jason had no desire to change towards that model.

More background on the Progress Forum project:

The following is a brief history of how the Progress Forum project got started and how it is progressing from my point of view.

Just so you know where I am coming from, I have been active within the Progress movement for a little over a year. During that time, I grew increasingly restless at the lack of action.

In late November, I decided to get things rolling. I thought about what we needed to do and I published my ideas on this blog. I originally started with an appeal for an “online hub” in early December. It generated a great deal of debate in the Progress Studies Slack channel.

Unfortunately, no one took up the challenge of building it. Not being one to sit on my hands, on December 22, I launched a project to create this hub and then noticed that Andrew Roberts had said he was willing to volunteer to be a dev for progress projects. I recruited him on December 30, explained my idea, and then he convinced me that cloning LessWrong would get us most of the way there.

We did some initial scoping of the project and started working. I did not make a public announcement until the day after the New Years because no one was online during the Christmas break.

On December 31, Andrew asked me to contact Jason to find out if anything was already being done in this area. We did so. It was only at this point that I became aware of Jason’s work (though it is clear that he had made virtually no progress up until then).

Twenty minutes after I announced the project on the PS channel, Jason announced that “it turns out” that the project already existed and he was the leader of it. He also pretended not to know that Andrew and I contacted him about working on the project!

This seemed very odd to me. Why did he not announce it months earlier? I decided that it was best to cooperate together rather than run a dueling project, so Andrew and I joined the common project. Only afterward, did Jason start recruiting developers.

Despite this clear power play, I made a good faith effort to work with Jason and his employees on this project. Together we worked to build a Progress Forum. As far as I know, none of us working on the project are being paid by any organization to do so.

I worked hard to keep all of the decision-making transparent on the “progress-forum” sub-channel. Jason and his people worked hard to do the opposite.

As a UX Designer with 20 years of experience, I knew that I was in a good position to get the project pointed in a really good direction. In about six hours of work, I created a very rough initial design for the “long-term vision” design (see earlier in this thread).

Andrew proposed a modification of my design to release as an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Alec Wilson, Jason Crawford’s Chief of Staff, appeared to agree with Andrew’s proposal as well.

Everything seems great. I was very happy. I was about to step back and let the developers focus on the implementation and step back from the project.

24 hours later, Jason stated his opposition to the compromise and then later Alec retracted his statement and claimed that there was a misunderstanding.

Fine, that often happens early in projects. The obvious next step was to call a brief meeting to hash out the differences and then let the project focus on implementation.

Unfortunately, Jason chose to handle the situation with a clear statement that he was in control and would make the ultimate call on all project decisions, including governance (see below).

This was shocking to me. I had sensed that something was wrong with Jason’s pattern of behavior. It was obvious that he was hiding something, but I had no idea that this was his real opinion. I had seen how he was very reluctant to discuss governance until after launch, but I took it on good faith that he was working on behalf of the progress movement.

That is when I went public and wrote this post.

Jason’s statement escalated a small difference of opinion that could have easily been resolved in good faith in 30 minutes into a power play that hurts the entire movement. He refused to answer my questions that related to conflict of interest, and he pressured me to drop out of the project because I was interfering with his real objectives.

I do not believe that it was bad people, but bad incentives. Sadly, trying to help build a flourishing decentralized movement is the opposite of the incentives created by our current system (as I explained above).

Jason’s public announcement that the Roots of Progress will control the Progress Forum makes it clear why he suddenly jumped into action when I announced the project. He knew that his ability to control the Progress Forum was in danger. He did not want people that he did not control influencing the project in any way. He knew that he could not go back to the board and fund-raising and say that he built the Progress Forum.

When I asked Jason what had been accomplished on this project thus far, he evaded the question. At this point, it is pretty obvious that almost nothing had been done and he was just trying to get out in front of me so that he could maintain control of the project.

It quickly became obvious that I was not wanted on the project. Remember, this entire debate started with a minor difference of opinion ideas of what MVP should be. In any functional project, this could have been resolved with a 30-minute discussion.

And now Jason Crawford refuses to accept the result of a fair election, even if the majority of members of the Progress movement votes against Roots of Progress control of the Progress Forum.

Last night’s declaration by Jason Crawford confirmed what I had sensed over the last two weeks. His goal is to control the Progress Forum. His actual motivation for doing so is unclear, but it represents a clear conflict of interest with his role on the project.

I had planned on making this post next Monday, but Jason’s action forced me to push it forward to ensure a transparent group debate.

Again I have no desire to control or Moderate the Progress Forum. I only want to design a great Progress Forum and assist the developers in building it as rapidly as possible. I really wish that Jason Crawford had not done what he did.

I believe that the Progress Forum will be the single best thing to ever happen to the Progress movement. Let’s get to work, and let’s debate who should control it: the entire Progress movement or the Roots of Progress.

Exit mobile version