A big part of the issue, IMO is the fact that EA funding is often very skewed by people who have managed to capture the long-tail of wealth/income, and while this is quite necessary for EA to be as impactful as it is in a world where it’s good for EA to remain small, and I’d still say it was positive overall to do the strategy, this also inevitably distorts any conversations, because people reasonably fear that being unable to justify/defer to a funder about what to do means you can’t get off the ground at all, since there are few alternative funders.
So this sort of deference to funders will likely always remain, unfortunately, and we will have to mitigate the downsides that come from seeking the long-tails of wealth/income (which very few people can achieve).
A big part of the issue, IMO is the fact that EA funding is often very skewed by people who have managed to capture the long-tail of wealth/income, and while this is quite necessary for EA to be as impactful as it is in a world where it’s good for EA to remain small, and I’d still say it was positive overall to do the strategy, this also inevitably distorts any conversations, because people reasonably fear that being unable to justify/defer to a funder about what to do means you can’t get off the ground at all, since there are few alternative funders.
So this sort of deference to funders will likely always remain, unfortunately, and we will have to mitigate the downsides that come from seeking the long-tails of wealth/income (which very few people can achieve).