I’m fine with trusting your judgement if I can verify what you decided. This provides a mechanism for the donators to express displeasure with your financial decisions.
But this has turned this entire fund into a black box. For all we know you could be giving money to charities run by your friends. Throwing money into a mystery black box is so far from the values of effective altruism.
How can you honestly tell people that the most effective way to donate their money is to give it to you and totally trust that you will do a good job with it.
The vast majority of projects do not opt-out of public reporting and as a charity, our trustees do have oversight over large grants that we make.
As Linch said, I do think that this change to our requirements does require you to place some more trust in our grantmakers but I still think, due to the sensitive nature of some of our grants, this is the right call.
Why don’t you just add an option for people to donate funds to public reporting only projects?
I apologize if I’m coming off rude, but I think the reason this has me particularly peeved is that this isn’t just some normal charity, this is one of the major charities behind the movement.
If it turns out that you mismanaged this fund, you are going to tarnish the entire effective altruism movement. This is the type of thing that gets an episode on John Oliver if you mess up.
I think that this would probably be fully funged by other donors as we have a very small number of grants that aren’t publicly reported and a relatively small proportion of donors provide the majority of our funding.
That said GWWC now manages the donations side of funds and I can request they add this feature if I see more demand for it (it will create some operational overhead on our side).
I don’t think that argument makes sense. The more money one donates, the more funds will likely be distributed to causes of all types, including private ones. While you can’t be certain your specific donation caused an increase in funding to private causes, you can be relatively confident that on average such donations will do so.
This is just like how you can’t guarantee buying meat will kill more animals, but you can be relatively confident it will do so on average.
I’m fine with trusting your judgement if I can verify what you decided. This provides a mechanism for the donators to express displeasure with your financial decisions.
But this has turned this entire fund into a black box. For all we know you could be giving money to charities run by your friends. Throwing money into a mystery black box is so far from the values of effective altruism.
How can you honestly tell people that the most effective way to donate their money is to give it to you and totally trust that you will do a good job with it.
Thanks for sharing your concern!
The vast majority of projects do not opt-out of public reporting and as a charity, our trustees do have oversight over large grants that we make.
As Linch said, I do think that this change to our requirements does require you to place some more trust in our grantmakers but I still think, due to the sensitive nature of some of our grants, this is the right call.
Why don’t you just add an option for people to donate funds to public reporting only projects?
I apologize if I’m coming off rude, but I think the reason this has me particularly peeved is that this isn’t just some normal charity, this is one of the major charities behind the movement.
If it turns out that you mismanaged this fund, you are going to tarnish the entire effective altruism movement. This is the type of thing that gets an episode on John Oliver if you mess up.
I think that this would probably be fully funged by other donors as we have a very small number of grants that aren’t publicly reported and a relatively small proportion of donors provide the majority of our funding.
That said GWWC now manages the donations side of funds and I can request they add this feature if I see more demand for it (it will create some operational overhead on our side).
I don’t think that argument makes sense. The more money one donates, the more funds will likely be distributed to causes of all types, including private ones. While you can’t be certain your specific donation caused an increase in funding to private causes, you can be relatively confident that on average such donations will do so.
This is just like how you can’t guarantee buying meat will kill more animals, but you can be relatively confident it will do so on average.