I’m concerned with the framing that you updated towards it being correct for EA Funds to persist past the three month trial period. If there was support to start out with and you mostly didn’t gather more support later on relative to what one would expect...
In the OP Kerry wrote:
The donation amounts we’ve received so far are greater than we expected, especially given that donations typically decrease early in the year after ramping up towards the end of the year.
CEA’s original expectation of donations could just have been wrong, of course. But I don’t see a failure of logic here.
Re. your last paragraph, Kerry can confirm or deny but I think he’s referring to the fact that a bunch of people were surprised to see (e.g.? Not sure if there were other cases.) GWWC start recommending the EA funds and closing down the GWWC trust recently when CEA hadn’t actually officially given the funds a ‘green light’ yet. So not referring to the same set of criticisms you are talking about. I think ‘confusion at GWWC’s endorsement of EA funds’ is a reasonable description of how I felt when I received this e-mail, at the very least*; I like the funds but prominently recommending something that is in beta and might be discontinued at any minute seemed odd.
*I got the e-mail from GWWC announcing this on 11th April. I got CEA’s March 2017 update saying they’d decided to continue with the funds later on the same day, but I think that goes to a much narrower list and in the interim I was confused and was going to ask someone about it. Checking now it looks like CEA actually announced this on their blog on 10th April (see below link), but again presumably lots of GWWC members don’t read that.
Kerry can confirm or deny but I think he’s referring to the fact that a bunch of people were surprised to see (e.g.? Not sure if there were other cases.) GWWC start recommending the EA funds and closing down the GWWC trust recently when CEA hadn’t actually officially given the funds a ‘green light’ yet.
Correct. We had updated in favor of EA Funds internally but hadn’t communicated that fact in public. When we started linking to EA Funds on the GWWC website, people were justifiably confused.
I’m concerned with the framing that you updated towards it being correct for EA Funds to persist past the three month trial period. If there was support to start out with and you mostly didn’t gather more support later on relative to what one would expect, then your prior on whether EA Funds is well received should be stronger but you shouldn’t update in favor of it being well received based on more recent data.
The money moved is the strongest new data point.
It seemed quite plausible to me that we could have the community be largely supportive of the idea of EA Funds without actually using the product. This is more or less what happened with EA Ventures—lots of people thought it was a good idea, but not many promising projects showed up and not many funders actually donated to the projects we happened to find.
Do you feel that the post as currently written still overhypes the communities perception of the project? If so, what changes would you suggest to bring it more in line with the observable evidence?
This is more or less what happened with EA Ventures—lots of people thought it was a good idea, but not many promising projects showed up and not many funders actually donated to the projects we happened to find.
It seems like the character of the EA movement needs to be improved somehow, (probably, as always, there are marginal improvements to the implementation too) but especially the character of the movement because arguably if EA could spawn many projects, its impact would be increased many-fold.
In the OP Kerry wrote:
CEA’s original expectation of donations could just have been wrong, of course. But I don’t see a failure of logic here.
Re. your last paragraph, Kerry can confirm or deny but I think he’s referring to the fact that a bunch of people were surprised to see (e.g.? Not sure if there were other cases.) GWWC start recommending the EA funds and closing down the GWWC trust recently when CEA hadn’t actually officially given the funds a ‘green light’ yet. So not referring to the same set of criticisms you are talking about. I think ‘confusion at GWWC’s endorsement of EA funds’ is a reasonable description of how I felt when I received this e-mail, at the very least*; I like the funds but prominently recommending something that is in beta and might be discontinued at any minute seemed odd.
*I got the e-mail from GWWC announcing this on 11th April. I got CEA’s March 2017 update saying they’d decided to continue with the funds later on the same day, but I think that goes to a much narrower list and in the interim I was confused and was going to ask someone about it. Checking now it looks like CEA actually announced this on their blog on 10th April (see below link), but again presumably lots of GWWC members don’t read that.
https://​​www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/​​blog/​​cea-update-march-2017/​​
Correct. We had updated in favor of EA Funds internally but hadn’t communicated that fact in public. When we started linking to EA Funds on the GWWC website, people were justifiably confused.
The money moved is the strongest new data point.
It seemed quite plausible to me that we could have the community be largely supportive of the idea of EA Funds without actually using the product. This is more or less what happened with EA Ventures—lots of people thought it was a good idea, but not many promising projects showed up and not many funders actually donated to the projects we happened to find.
Do you feel that the post as currently written still overhypes the communities perception of the project? If so, what changes would you suggest to bring it more in line with the observable evidence?
It seems like the character of the EA movement needs to be improved somehow, (probably, as always, there are marginal improvements to the implementation too) but especially the character of the movement because arguably if EA could spawn many projects, its impact would be increased many-fold.