I think this criticism be extended beyond cryptocurrency, to Social Media. Specifically, EA is heavily reliant on funding from Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder Facebook. (I’m fairly ignorant as to details of Moskovitz’s finance, I believe he still owns shares in Meta and so has at least some controlling interest in the company, but I could be off-base here)
There’s a story here that goes ‘Man who’s made billions in technology that significantly damages social and political institutions, including spreading misinformation about elections, covid, vaccines, and allowing people to spread abuse and incite violence, now wants to use that money for the good of society ’. And to the degree that you think that’s true, you might think that the harms done by Meta outweigh the good done by Open Philanthropy.
---
There’s a critique of EA, that goes ‘EA is more focused on individual donations than systemic change’. I used to think this was off-base, because there’s plenty of EAs who want to do system-changing things, like advocate for animal welfare laws, or work in government policy.
Now I read this criticism more like:
“By relying on one or two extremely rich donors for a large portion of EA funding, EA is less likely to be advocate for the kind of systemic change that would be harmful to the financial interests of these donors”,
or (and I’m thinking of crypto and social media here:)
“By relying on one or two extremely rich donors who’ve made their fortunes in ‘disruptive’ technology, EA is less likely to be critical of the harms that these technologies do to the world”.
And I actually think that’s quite a valid criticism.
I don’t believe Dustin has been involved in Facebook for many years, is several years into running his new startup (Asana) and doubt there’s any real obligation to like Facebook from that (at least, I do not perceive there to be, and at least given my impression of Dustin from Twitter it would be pretty surprising to me if others did)
First off, it is very hard to find a funding source that doesn’t create a conflict of interest. With ten megadonors in ten different fields, the conflicts would not be as acute but would be more broadly distributed. Government support brings conflicts. Relying on an army of small, mildly engaged donors creates “conflicts” of a different sort—there is a strong motivation to focus on what looks good and will play to a mildly-engaged donor base rather than what does good.
The obvious risk for conflict of interest is that the money impedes or distorts the movement’s message. It’s generally not a meaningful problem for a kidney-disease charity to have financial entanglement with a social media company; it would very much be a problem for the American Academy of Pediatrics. It seems relatively less likely that, applying the principles of EA, that being critical of the harm social media creates and/or advocating for systemic change that would specifically or disproportionately tank Meta/Asana stock would be priority cause areas.
It seems more likely to me that faithful application of EA principles would lead down a path that is contrary to in the interests of very wealthy donors more generally. But that is a hard problem to get around for a movement that wants to have great impact and needs loads of funding to do it.
I think this criticism be extended beyond cryptocurrency, to Social Media. Specifically, EA is heavily reliant on funding from Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder Facebook. (I’m fairly ignorant as to details of Moskovitz’s finance, I believe he still owns shares in Meta and so has at least some controlling interest in the company, but I could be off-base here)
Social media is criticised for a lot of things, but here I’m just going to link the following article, because it’s recent, and because it seems topical to a lot of EA global health/development stuff: Meta faces $1.6bn lawsuit over Facebook posts inciting violence in Tigray war.
There’s a story here that goes ‘Man who’s made billions in technology that significantly damages social and political institutions, including spreading misinformation about elections, covid, vaccines, and allowing people to spread abuse and incite violence, now wants to use that money for the good of society ’. And to the degree that you think that’s true, you might think that the harms done by Meta outweigh the good done by Open Philanthropy.
---
There’s a critique of EA, that goes ‘EA is more focused on individual donations than systemic change’. I used to think this was off-base, because there’s plenty of EAs who want to do system-changing things, like advocate for animal welfare laws, or work in government policy.
Now I read this criticism more like:
“By relying on one or two extremely rich donors for a large portion of EA funding, EA is less likely to be advocate for the kind of systemic change that would be harmful to the financial interests of these donors”,
or (and I’m thinking of crypto and social media here:)
“By relying on one or two extremely rich donors who’ve made their fortunes in ‘disruptive’ technology, EA is less likely to be critical of the harms that these technologies do to the world”.
And I actually think that’s quite a valid criticism.
I don’t believe Dustin has been involved in Facebook for many years, is several years into running his new startup (Asana) and doubt there’s any real obligation to like Facebook from that (at least, I do not perceive there to be, and at least given my impression of Dustin from Twitter it would be pretty surprising to me if others did)
I’m not that concerned about this.
First off, it is very hard to find a funding source that doesn’t create a conflict of interest. With ten megadonors in ten different fields, the conflicts would not be as acute but would be more broadly distributed. Government support brings conflicts. Relying on an army of small, mildly engaged donors creates “conflicts” of a different sort—there is a strong motivation to focus on what looks good and will play to a mildly-engaged donor base rather than what does good.
The obvious risk for conflict of interest is that the money impedes or distorts the movement’s message. It’s generally not a meaningful problem for a kidney-disease charity to have financial entanglement with a social media company; it would very much be a problem for the American Academy of Pediatrics. It seems relatively less likely that, applying the principles of EA, that being critical of the harm social media creates and/or advocating for systemic change that would specifically or disproportionately tank Meta/Asana stock would be priority cause areas.
It seems more likely to me that faithful application of EA principles would lead down a path that is contrary to in the interests of very wealthy donors more generally. But that is a hard problem to get around for a movement that wants to have great impact and needs loads of funding to do it.