I think it depends what sort of risks we are talking about. The more likely Dustin is to turn out to be perpetrating a fraud (which I think is very unlikely!) the more the marginal person should be earning to give. And the more projects should be taking approaches that conserve runway at the cost of making slower progress toward their goals.
I think it depends what sort of risks we are talking about.
Agree—I don’t think the fatalistic view applies to all Dustin-related risks, just enough to make him a suboptimal comparison here.
To take an FTX-like situation as an example, I doubt many orgs could avoid bankruptcy if they had liability for 4-6 years’ clawback of prior OP grants, and it’s not clear that getting months to years’ worth of advance notice and attempted mitigation would materially reduce the odds of bankruptcy. (As you note, this is extraordinarily unlikely!)
Encouraging more people to EtG would be mitigation for the movement as a whole, but its effectiveness would be dependent on [1] the catastrophic fraud actually existing, [2] you having enough reason to believe that to recommend action to other EAs but not enough to go to the media and/or cops and get traction,[1] [3] you persuading the would-be EtGers that circumstances warranted them choosing this path, and [4] your advocacy not indirectly causing prompt public discovery and collapse of the fraud. After all, the value would be knowing of the risk in advance to take mitigating action sufficiently in advance of public discovery. Understanding the true risk a few weeks to months in advance of everyone else isn’t likely to help much at all. Those seem like difficult conditions to meet.
Reporting, but not getting traction from external watchdogs, is possible (cf. Madoff). I have not thought through whether having enough reason to advise other EAs, but not enough to report externally, is possible.
I think it depends what sort of risks we are talking about. The more likely Dustin is to turn out to be perpetrating a fraud (which I think is very unlikely!) the more the marginal person should be earning to give. And the more projects should be taking approaches that conserve runway at the cost of making slower progress toward their goals.
Agree—I don’t think the fatalistic view applies to all Dustin-related risks, just enough to make him a suboptimal comparison here.
To take an FTX-like situation as an example, I doubt many orgs could avoid bankruptcy if they had liability for 4-6 years’ clawback of prior OP grants, and it’s not clear that getting months to years’ worth of advance notice and attempted mitigation would materially reduce the odds of bankruptcy. (As you note, this is extraordinarily unlikely!)
Encouraging more people to EtG would be mitigation for the movement as a whole, but its effectiveness would be dependent on [1] the catastrophic fraud actually existing, [2] you having enough reason to believe that to recommend action to other EAs but not enough to go to the media and/or cops and get traction,[1] [3] you persuading the would-be EtGers that circumstances warranted them choosing this path, and [4] your advocacy not indirectly causing prompt public discovery and collapse of the fraud. After all, the value would be knowing of the risk in advance to take mitigating action sufficiently in advance of public discovery. Understanding the true risk a few weeks to months in advance of everyone else isn’t likely to help much at all. Those seem like difficult conditions to meet.
Reporting, but not getting traction from external watchdogs, is possible (cf. Madoff). I have not thought through whether having enough reason to advise other EAs, but not enough to report externally, is possible.