I generally agree with the spirit of empathy in this comment, but I also think you may be misinterpreting Dustin in a similar way to how others are. My understanding is that Dustin is not primarily driven by how other actors might use his funding / public comments against him. Instead, it is something like the following:
“Dustin doesn’t want to be continually funding stuff that he doesn’t endorse, because he thinks that doing things well and being responsible for the consequences of your actions is intrinsically important. He is a virtue ethicist and not a utilitarian in this regard. He feels that OP has funded things he doesn’t endorse enough times in enough areas to not want to extend blanket trust, and thus feels more responsibility than before to evaluate cases himself, to make sure that both individual grants and higher-level funding strategies are aligned with his values. He believes in doing fewer things well than more things poorly, which is why some areas are being cut.”
Obviously this could be wrong and I don’t want Dustin to feel any obligation to confirm/not confirm it. I’m writing it because I’m fairly confident that it’s at least more right than the prevailing narrative currently in the comments, and because the reasoning makes a fair amount of sense to me (and much more sense than the PR-based narrative that many are currently projecting).
(I don’t want to spend too much time psychologizing here, though I do think a root cause analysis is useful, so I will comment a bit, but will bow out if this gets too much)
I feel like this doesn’t really match with Dustin’s other comments about repeatedly emphasizing non-financial concrete costs. I think Dustin’s model is closer to “every time I fund something I don’t endorse, I lose important forms of social capital, political capital, and feel a responsibility to defend and explain my choices towards others, for which I only have limited bandwidth and don’t have time or energy for. As a result, I am restricting my giving to things that I feel excited to stand behind, which is a smaller set, and where I feel good about the tradeoffs of financial and non-financial costs”.
Re: attack surface in my early comment, I actually meant attacks from EAs. People want to debate the borders, quite understandably. I have folks in my DMs as well as in the comments. Q: “Why did we not communicate more thoroughly on the forum” A: “Because we’ve communicated on the forum before”
I don’t think endorse vs. not endorse describes everything here, but it describes some if it. I do think I spend some energy on ~every cause area, and if I am lacking conviction, that is a harder expenditure from a resource I consider finite.
An example of a non-monetary cost where I have conviction: anxiety about potential retribution from our national political work. This is arguably not even EA (and not new), but it is a stressful side hustle we have this year. I had hoped it wouldn’t be a recurring thing, but here we are.
An example of a non-monetary cost where I have less conviction: the opportunity cost of funding insect welfare instead of chicken, cow, or pig welfare. I think I could be convinced, but I haven’t been yet and I’ve been thinking about it a long time! I’d much prefer to just see someone who actually feels strongly about that take the wheel. It is not a lot of $s in itself, but it keeps building, and there are an increasing number of smaller FAW areas like this.
I failed to forecast this issue for myself well when we were in an expansionary mindset, and I found that the further we went, the more each area on the margin had some element of this problem. I deferred for a really long time, until it became too much. Concurrently, I saw the movement becoming less and less appealing to other funders, and I believe these are related issues.
I generally agree with the spirit of empathy in this comment, but I also think you may be misinterpreting Dustin in a similar way to how others are. My understanding is that Dustin is not primarily driven by how other actors might use his funding / public comments against him. Instead, it is something like the following:
“Dustin doesn’t want to be continually funding stuff that he doesn’t endorse, because he thinks that doing things well and being responsible for the consequences of your actions is intrinsically important. He is a virtue ethicist and not a utilitarian in this regard. He feels that OP has funded things he doesn’t endorse enough times in enough areas to not want to extend blanket trust, and thus feels more responsibility than before to evaluate cases himself, to make sure that both individual grants and higher-level funding strategies are aligned with his values. He believes in doing fewer things well than more things poorly, which is why some areas are being cut.”
Obviously this could be wrong and I don’t want Dustin to feel any obligation to confirm/not confirm it. I’m writing it because I’m fairly confident that it’s at least more right than the prevailing narrative currently in the comments, and because the reasoning makes a fair amount of sense to me (and much more sense than the PR-based narrative that many are currently projecting).
(I don’t want to spend too much time psychologizing here, though I do think a root cause analysis is useful, so I will comment a bit, but will bow out if this gets too much)
I feel like this doesn’t really match with Dustin’s other comments about repeatedly emphasizing non-financial concrete costs. I think Dustin’s model is closer to “every time I fund something I don’t endorse, I lose important forms of social capital, political capital, and feel a responsibility to defend and explain my choices towards others, for which I only have limited bandwidth and don’t have time or energy for. As a result, I am restricting my giving to things that I feel excited to stand behind, which is a smaller set, and where I feel good about the tradeoffs of financial and non-financial costs”.
Re: attack surface in my early comment, I actually meant attacks from EAs. People want to debate the borders, quite understandably. I have folks in my DMs as well as in the comments. Q: “Why did we not communicate more thoroughly on the forum”
A: “Because we’ve communicated on the forum before”
I don’t think endorse vs. not endorse describes everything here, but it describes some if it. I do think I spend some energy on ~every cause area, and if I am lacking conviction, that is a harder expenditure from a resource I consider finite.
An example of a non-monetary cost where I have conviction: anxiety about potential retribution from our national political work. This is arguably not even EA (and not new), but it is a stressful side hustle we have this year. I had hoped it wouldn’t be a recurring thing, but here we are.
An example of a non-monetary cost where I have less conviction: the opportunity cost of funding insect welfare instead of chicken, cow, or pig welfare. I think I could be convinced, but I haven’t been yet and I’ve been thinking about it a long time! I’d much prefer to just see someone who actually feels strongly about that take the wheel. It is not a lot of $s in itself, but it keeps building, and there are an increasing number of smaller FAW areas like this.
I failed to forecast this issue for myself well when we were in an expansionary mindset, and I found that the further we went, the more each area on the margin had some element of this problem. I deferred for a really long time, until it became too much. Concurrently, I saw the movement becoming less and less appealing to other funders, and I believe these are related issues.