(Sorry for the slower response, your last paragraph gave me pause and I wanted to think about it. I still don’t feel like I have a satisfactory handle on it, but also feel I should reply at this point.)
this makes me feel slightly uneasy given that a survey may weight the opinions of people who have considered the problem less or feel less strongly about it equally with the opinions of others.
This makes total sense to me, and I do currently perceive something of an inverse correlation between how hard people have thought about the funds and how positively they feel about them. I agree this is a cause for concern. The way I would describe that situation from your perspective is not ‘the funds have not been well-received’, but rather ‘the funds have been well-received but only because too many (most?) people are analysing the idea in a superficial way’. Maybe that is what you were aiming for originally and I just didn’t read it that way.
But what we likely care about is whether or not the community is positive on EA Funds at the moment, which may or may not be different from whether it was positive on EA Funds in the past.
True. That post was only a couple of months before this one though; not a lot of time for new data/​arguments to emerge or opinions to change. The only major new data point I can think of since then is the funds raising ~$1m, which I think is mostly orthogonal to what we are discussing. I’m curious whether you personally a perceive a change (drop) in popularity in your circles?
My view is further that the community’s response to this sort of thing is partly a function of how debates on honesty and integrity have been resolved in the past; if lack of integrity in EA has been an issue in the past, the sort of people who care about integrity are less likely to stick around in EA, such that the remaining population of EAs will have fewer people who care about integrity, which itself affects how the average EA feels about future incidents relating to integrity (such as this one), and so on. So, on some level I’m positing that the public response to EA Funds would be more negative if we hadn’t filtered certain people out of EA by having an integrity problem in the first place.
This story sounds plausibly true. It’s a difficult one to falsify though (I could flip all the language and get something that also sounds plausibly true), so turning it over in my head for the past few days I’m still not sure how much weight to put on it.
(Sorry for the slower response, your last paragraph gave me pause and I wanted to think about it. I still don’t feel like I have a satisfactory handle on it, but also feel I should reply at this point.)
This makes total sense to me, and I do currently perceive something of an inverse correlation between how hard people have thought about the funds and how positively they feel about them. I agree this is a cause for concern. The way I would describe that situation from your perspective is not ‘the funds have not been well-received’, but rather ‘the funds have been well-received but only because too many (most?) people are analysing the idea in a superficial way’. Maybe that is what you were aiming for originally and I just didn’t read it that way.
True. That post was only a couple of months before this one though; not a lot of time for new data/​arguments to emerge or opinions to change. The only major new data point I can think of since then is the funds raising ~$1m, which I think is mostly orthogonal to what we are discussing. I’m curious whether you personally a perceive a change (drop) in popularity in your circles?
This story sounds plausibly true. It’s a difficult one to falsify though (I could flip all the language and get something that also sounds plausibly true), so turning it over in my head for the past few days I’m still not sure how much weight to put on it.