People who were receiving (or hoping for) funding from OP, and now won’t;
OP staff, navigating comms when there may be tensions between what they personally believe in, and their various duties (to donors and to grantees);
Cari and Dustin’s evident desire not to throw their weight around too much, but also not to be pushed into funding things they don’t properly believe in.
Second, a little local disappointment in OP. At some point in the past it seemed to me like OP was trying pretty hard to be very straightforward and honest. I no longer get that vibe from OP’s public comms; they seem more like they’re being carefully crafted for something like looking-good or being-defensible while only saying true things. Of course I don’t know all the constraints they’re under so I can’t be sure this is a mistake. But I personally feel a bit sad about it — I think it makes it harder for people to make useful updates from things OP says, which is awkward because I think a bunch of people kind of look to OP for leadership. I don’t think anything is crucially wrong here, but I’m worried about people missing the upside from franker communication, and I wanted to mention it publicly so others could express (dis)agreement and make it easier for everyone to get a sense of the temperature of the room. (I also get this vibe a little from the GV statement, especially in not discussing which areas they’re dropping, but it doesn’t matter so much since people less look to them for leadership; and I don’t get this vibe from Dustin’s comments on this thread, which seem to me to be straightforward and helpful.)
Third, some optimism. When I first heard this news I felt like things were somehow going wrong. Having read Dustin’s elaborations I more feel like this is a step towards things working as they should[1]. Over the last few years I’ve deepened my belief in the value of doing things properly. And it feels proper for things to be supported by people who wholeheartedly believe in the things (and if PR or other tangles make people feel it’s headachey to support an area, that can be a legitimate impediment to wholeheartedness). I think that if GV retreats from funding some areas, the best things there are likely to attract funding from people who more believe in them, and that feels healthy and good. (I also have some nervousness that some great projects will get hurt in the process of shaking things out; I don’t really have a view on Habryka’s claim that the implementation is bad.)
Fourth, a sense that perhaps there was a better path here? (This is very speculative.) It seems like a decent part of what Dustin is saying is that each different funding area brings additional bandwidth costs for the funder (e.g. necessity to think about the shape of the field being crafted; and about possible missteps that warrant funder responses). That makes sense. But then the puzzle is: given that so much of funding work is successfully outsourced to OP, why is it not working to outsource these costs too? If I imagine myself in Cari and Dustin’s shoes, and query my internal sense of why that doesn’t work, I get:
Some degree of failure-of-PR-insulation, as discussed in comment threads elsewhere on this post
(This also applies to responsibility for non-PR headaches)
Some feeling like OP may be myopically looking for the best funding opportunities, and not sufficiently taking responsibility for how their approach as a funder changes the landscape of things people are striving to do
And therefore leaving that responsibility more with GV
(It does sound from things Alexander has written elsewhere that OP is weighing PR concerns more now than in the past; I’m curious how much that’s driven by deference to Cari and Dustin)
That might be off, but it is sparking thoughts about the puzzle of wanting people to take ownership of things without being controlling, and how to get that. From a distance, it seems like there’s some good chance there might have been a relationship GV and OP could have settled into that they’d have been mutually happier with than the status quo (maybe via OP investing more in trying to be good agents of Cari and Dustin, and less backing their own views about what’s good?); although navigating to anything like that seems delicate, so even if I’m right I’m not trying to ascribe blame here.
Fifth, thoughts on implications for other donors:
If you believe in some of the work that isn’t being funded by GV any more, your dollars just got more valuable
It wouldn’t be surprising if it was correct for a bunch of people to shift a lot of their giving explicitly to things OP won’t support for donor-preference reasons
(I’d feel happier if OP or GV had shared both thoughts about what they weren’t funding, and thoughts about what the hazards in funding those areas were, so that other donors could make maximally informed decisions; but I’m currently assuming that that won’t happen, for some reason like “the impetus is basically from Cari and Dustin, and they don’t have the bandwidth to explain publicly”)
I say “a lot of their giving” rather than “all of their giving”, because of a feeling that for donor coordination/cooperation reasons, it may be a bit off to leave GV picking up the tab for everything that they’re willing to, even when others think these things may be excellent
If you liked being able to defer to OP (and don’t want to take responsibility for the donor oversight things yourself more directly), it’s possible it would be worth investigating the possibility of an OP-discretion fund, where donors can give to things which OP (or maybe individual OP staff members) chooses at their discretion
That is, given what I understand of Cari and Dustin’s views, it seems proper for them not to support these things. I’m not here taking a view on which parts of the object level they’re correct on.
Speculating on your point 4: The messaging so far has been framed as “Good Ventures is pulling out of XYZ areas; since OP is primarily funded by GV, they are also pulling out.” But perhaps, if the sweet spot here is “Cari and Dustin aren’t controlling EA but also are obviously allowed not to fund things they don’t buy/want to” one solution would be to leave OP open to funding XYZ areas if a new funder appears who wants to partner with them to do so. This would, to me, seem to allow GV and OP to overtime develop more PR and bandwidth breathing room between the two orgs.
My sense is that this is not what’s happening now. As in my other comment on this thread, I don’t want to reveal my sources because I like this account being anonymous, but I’m reasonably confident that OP staff have been told “we are not doing XYZ anymore” not “Cari and Dustin don’t want to fund XYZ anymore, so if you want to work on it, we need to find more funding.”
My suspicion (from some conversations with people who interact directly with OP leadership) is that it isn’t only Cari and Dustin who don’t want to support the dropped areas, but also at least some leadership at OP. If that’s right, it explains why they haven’t taken the approach I’m suggesting here, but not why they didn’t say so (perhaps connecting this back to your point 2).
Just flagging that I think “OP [is] open to funding XYZ areas if a new funder appears who wants to partner with them to do so” accurately describes the status quo. In the post above we (twice!) invited outreach from other funders interested in the some of these spaces, and we’re planning to do a lot more work to try to find other funders for some of this work in the coming months.
I am skeptical that a new large philanthropist would be well-advised by doing their grantmaking via OP (though I do think OP has a huge amount of knowledge and skill as a grantmaker). At least given my current model, it seems hard to avoid continuing conflict about the shared brand and indirect-effects of OP on Good Ventures.
I think any new donor, especially one that is smaller than GV (as is almost guaranteed to the the case), would end up still having their donations affect Good Ventures and my best understanding of the things Dustin is hoping to protect via this change.
If Dustin can’t communicate that he doesn’t endorse every aspect of, or can’t take responsibility for, everything that is currently funded through OP, I doubt that the difficult-to-track “from which source did OP spend this money” aspect of an additional donor would successfully avoid the relevant conflicts.
My best guess is that if OP attracts an additional large donor above ~$200M, it seems best for some people to leave OP, establish a new organization that the now donor would actually be confident will be independent from Dustin’s preferences, while maintaining a collaborative relationship with OP to share thoughts and insights.
I am not super confident of this, but I don’t see a clear line that would allow a new donor to have confidence that OP staff isn’t still going to heavily take into account Dustin’s reputation and non-financial priorities in the recommendations to the new donor.
That could well be, but my experience was having another foundation, like FTX, didn’t insulate me from reputation risks either. I’m just another “adherent of SBF’s worldview” to outsiders.
I’d like to see a future OP that is not synonymous with GVF, because we’re just one of the important donors instead of THE important donor, and having a division of focus areas currently seems viable to me. If other donors don’t agree or if staff behaves as if it isn’t true, then of course it won’t happen.
That could well be, but my experience was having another foundation, like FTX, didn’t insulate me from reputation risks either. I’m just another “adherent of SBF’s worldview” to outsiders.
Yeah, makes sense.
This to be clear is the primary reason why in my model it is much much better for an additional donor to not be part of an institution that you have a huge amount of influence over.
It’s going to be very hard for their actions to not reflect on you, and if they are worried that staff at their grantmaker will be unduly affected by that, the best way I see forward is for them to be have a separate institution where even if you are unhappy about their choices, you are not in a position to influence them as much.
My hope is that having other donors for OP would genuinely create governance independence as my apparent power comes from not having alternate funding sources*, not from structural control. Consequently, you and others lay blame on me even for the things we don’t do. I would be happy to leave the board even, and happy to expand it to diminish my (non-controlling) vote further. I did not want to create a GVF hegemony any more than you wanted one to exist. (If the future is a bunch of different orgs, or some particular “pure” org, that’s good by me too; I don’t care about OP aggregating the donors if others don’t see that as useful.)
But I do want agency over our grants. As much as the whole debate has been framed (by everyone else) as reputation risk, I care about where I believe my responsibility lies, and where the money comes from has mattered. I don’t want to wake up anymore to somebody I personally loathe getting platformed only to discover I paid for the platform. That fact matters to me.
* Notably just for the “weird” stuff. We do successfully partner with other donors now! I don’t get in their way at all, as far as I know.
Just chiming in to have more than Habryka’s view represented here. I think it’s not unreasonable in principle to think that OP and GV could create PR distance between themselves. I think it will just take time, and Habryka is being moderately too pessimistic (or, accurately pessimistic in the short term but not considering reasonable long-term potential). I’d guess many think-tank type organizations have launched on the strength of a single funder and come to advise many funders, having a distinct reputation from them—OP seems to be pursuing this more strongly now than in the past, and while it will take time to work, it seems like a reasonable theory of change.
I have updated, based on this exchange, that OP is more open to investment in non-GV-supported activities than previously came through. I’m happy to hear that.
I don’t want to wake up anymore to somebody I personally loathe getting platformed only to discover I paid for the platform. That fact matters to me.
This is eminently reasonable. Any opposition to these changes I’ve aired here is more about disappointment in some of the specific cause areas being dropped and the sense that OP couldn’t continue on them without GV; I’m definitely not intending to complain about GV’s decision, and overall I think OP attempting to diversify funding sources (and EA trying to do so at well) is very, very healthy and needed.
My hope is that having other donors for OP would genuinely create governance independence as my apparent power comes from not having alternate funding sources*, not from structural control. [...] I would be happy to leave the board even, and happy to expand it to diminish my (non-controlling) vote further. I did not want to create a GVF hegemony any more than you wanted one to exist. (If the future is a bunch of different orgs, or some particular “pure” org, that’s good by me too; I don’t care about OP aggregating the donors if others don’t see that as useful.)
Thanks, I am glad that you are willing to do this and am somewhat relieved that your perspective on this seems more amenable to other people participating with stuff on their own terms than I was worried about. I am still concerned, and think it’s unlikely that other donors for OP would be capable of getting the appropriate levels of trust with OP for this to work (and am also more broadly quite worried about chilling effects of many types here), but I do genuinely believe you are trying to mitigate those damages and see many of the same costs that I see.
Consequently, you and others lay blame on me even for the things we don’t do.
Yeah, I think that’s life. Acts by omission are real acts, and while the way people are judged for them are different, and the way people try to react to them generally tend to be more fraught, there are of course many acts of omission that are worthy of judgement, and many acts of omission that are worthy of praise.
I don’t think reality splits neatly into “things you are responsible for” and “things you are not responsible for”, and I think we seem to have a deeper disagreement here about what this means for building platforms, communities and societal institutions, which, if working correctly, practically always platform people its creators strongly disagree with or find despicable (I have found many people on LW despicable in many different ways, but my job as a discourse platform provider is to set things up to allow other people to form their own beliefs on that, not to impose my own beliefs on the community that I am supporting).
Neglecting those kinds of platforms, or pouring resources into activities that will indirectly destroy those platforms (like pouring millions of dollars into continued EA and AI Safety growth without supporting institutions that actually allow those communities and movements to have sane discourse, or to coordinate with each other, or to learn about important considerations), is an act with real consequences that of course should be taken into account when thinking about how to relate to the people responsible for that funding and corresponding lack of funding of their complement.
A manager at a company who overhires can easily tank the company if they try to not get involved with setting the right culture and onboarding processes in place and are absolutely to blame if the new hires destroy the company culture or its internal processes.
But again, my guess is we have deep, important and also (to me) interesting disagreements here, which I don’t want you to feel pressured to hash out here. This isn’t the kind of stuff I think one should aim to resolve in a single comment thread, and maybe not ever, but I have thought about this topic a lot and it seemed appropriate to share.
I’ve long taken for granted that I am not going to live in integrity with your values and the actions you think are best for the world. I’m only trying to get back into integrity with my own.
OP is not an abstraction, of course, and I hope you continue talking to the individuals you know and have known there.
To clarify, I did see the invitations to other funders. However, my perception was that those are invitations to find people to hand things off to, rather than to be a continuing partner like with GV. Perhaps I misunderstood.
I also want to be clear that the status quo you’re articulating here does not match what I’ve heard from former grantees about how able OP staff are to participate in efforts to attract additional funding. Perhaps there has been quite a serious miscommunication.
To clarify, I did see the invitations to other funders. However, my perception was that those are invitations to find people to hand things off to, rather than to be a continuing partner like with GV.
This was also my impression. To the extent that the reason why OP doesn’t want to fund something is because of PR risks & energy/time/attention costs, it’s a bit surprising that OP would partner with another group to fund something.
Perhaps the idea here is that the PR/energy/time/attention costs would be split between orgs? And that this would outweigh the costs of coordinating with another group?
Or it’s just that OP feels better if OP doesn’t have to spend its own money on something? Perhaps because of funding constraints?
I’m also a bit confused about scenarios where OP wouldn’t fund X for PR reasons but would want some other EA group to fund X. It seems to me like the PR attacks against the EA movement would be just as strong– perhaps OP as an institution could distance itself, but from an altruistic standpoint that wouldn’t matter much. (I do see how OP would want to not fund something for energy/capacity reasons but then be OK with some other funder focusing on that space.)
In general, I feel like communication from OP could have been clearer in a lot of the comments. Or OP could’ve done a “meta thing” just making it explicit that they don’t currently want to share more details.
In the post above we (twice!) invited outreach from other funders
But EG phrasing like this makes me wonder if OP believes it’s communicating clearly and is genuinely baffled when commentators have (what I see as quite reasonable) misunderstandings or confusions.
I’m confused about what you’re saying here. It feels like maybe you’re conflating OP with GV? (Which may be functionally a reasonable approximation 99% of the time, but gets in the way of the point of the conversation here in the 1%.) e.g. at one point you say “better if OP doesn’t have to spend its own money”, but as far as I understand things, to a first approximation Open Philanthropy doesn’t have any money; rather, Good Ventures does.
In the opening post, Alexander invites people interested in funding research on the potential moral patienthood of digital minds to reach out to OP, which I took as indicative of continued interest.
This isn’t true for any of the other sub-focus areas that will be exited though, which I thought was strange. Given that nothing other than digital minds work was listed, how would any potential donors or people who know potential donors know about OP exiting things like invertebrates or wild animal welfare?
(I’m basing those sub-focus areas on the comments in this thread because of exactly this problem—I’m unclear if there’s more being exited or if those two are definitely part of it)
I want to express a few things.
First, empathy, for:
People who were receiving (or hoping for) funding from OP, and now won’t;
OP staff, navigating comms when there may be tensions between what they personally believe in, and their various duties (to donors and to grantees);
Cari and Dustin’s evident desire not to throw their weight around too much, but also not to be pushed into funding things they don’t properly believe in.
Second, a little local disappointment in OP. At some point in the past it seemed to me like OP was trying pretty hard to be very straightforward and honest. I no longer get that vibe from OP’s public comms; they seem more like they’re being carefully crafted for something like looking-good or being-defensible while only saying true things. Of course I don’t know all the constraints they’re under so I can’t be sure this is a mistake. But I personally feel a bit sad about it — I think it makes it harder for people to make useful updates from things OP says, which is awkward because I think a bunch of people kind of look to OP for leadership. I don’t think anything is crucially wrong here, but I’m worried about people missing the upside from franker communication, and I wanted to mention it publicly so others could express (dis)agreement and make it easier for everyone to get a sense of the temperature of the room. (I also get this vibe a little from the GV statement, especially in not discussing which areas they’re dropping, but it doesn’t matter so much since people less look to them for leadership; and I don’t get this vibe from Dustin’s comments on this thread, which seem to me to be straightforward and helpful.)
Third, some optimism. When I first heard this news I felt like things were somehow going wrong. Having read Dustin’s elaborations I more feel like this is a step towards things working as they should[1]. Over the last few years I’ve deepened my belief in the value of doing things properly. And it feels proper for things to be supported by people who wholeheartedly believe in the things (and if PR or other tangles make people feel it’s headachey to support an area, that can be a legitimate impediment to wholeheartedness). I think that if GV retreats from funding some areas, the best things there are likely to attract funding from people who more believe in them, and that feels healthy and good. (I also have some nervousness that some great projects will get hurt in the process of shaking things out; I don’t really have a view on Habryka’s claim that the implementation is bad.)
Fourth, a sense that perhaps there was a better path here? (This is very speculative.) It seems like a decent part of what Dustin is saying is that each different funding area brings additional bandwidth costs for the funder (e.g. necessity to think about the shape of the field being crafted; and about possible missteps that warrant funder responses). That makes sense. But then the puzzle is: given that so much of funding work is successfully outsourced to OP, why is it not working to outsource these costs too? If I imagine myself in Cari and Dustin’s shoes, and query my internal sense of why that doesn’t work, I get:
Some degree of failure-of-PR-insulation, as discussed in comment threads elsewhere on this post
(This also applies to responsibility for non-PR headaches)
Some feeling like OP may be myopically looking for the best funding opportunities, and not sufficiently taking responsibility for how their approach as a funder changes the landscape of things people are striving to do
And therefore leaving that responsibility more with GV
(It does sound from things Alexander has written elsewhere that OP is weighing PR concerns more now than in the past; I’m curious how much that’s driven by deference to Cari and Dustin)
That might be off, but it is sparking thoughts about the puzzle of wanting people to take ownership of things without being controlling, and how to get that. From a distance, it seems like there’s some good chance there might have been a relationship GV and OP could have settled into that they’d have been mutually happier with than the status quo (maybe via OP investing more in trying to be good agents of Cari and Dustin, and less backing their own views about what’s good?); although navigating to anything like that seems delicate, so even if I’m right I’m not trying to ascribe blame here.
Fifth, thoughts on implications for other donors:
If you believe in some of the work that isn’t being funded by GV any more, your dollars just got more valuable
It wouldn’t be surprising if it was correct for a bunch of people to shift a lot of their giving explicitly to things OP won’t support for donor-preference reasons
(I’d feel happier if OP or GV had shared both thoughts about what they weren’t funding, and thoughts about what the hazards in funding those areas were, so that other donors could make maximally informed decisions; but I’m currently assuming that that won’t happen, for some reason like “the impetus is basically from Cari and Dustin, and they don’t have the bandwidth to explain publicly”)
I say “a lot of their giving” rather than “all of their giving”, because of a feeling that for donor coordination/cooperation reasons, it may be a bit off to leave GV picking up the tab for everything that they’re willing to, even when others think these things may be excellent
I’d prefer other people to continue to give to excellent opportunities that come up when they see them; I just think that they should expect a larger proportion of these opportunities to come in areas GV won’t fund
If you liked being able to defer to OP (and don’t want to take responsibility for the donor oversight things yourself more directly), it’s possible it would be worth investigating the possibility of an OP-discretion fund, where donors can give to things which OP (or maybe individual OP staff members) chooses at their discretion
That is, given what I understand of Cari and Dustin’s views, it seems proper for them not to support these things. I’m not here taking a view on which parts of the object level they’re correct on.
Speculating on your point 4: The messaging so far has been framed as “Good Ventures is pulling out of XYZ areas; since OP is primarily funded by GV, they are also pulling out.” But perhaps, if the sweet spot here is “Cari and Dustin aren’t controlling EA but also are obviously allowed not to fund things they don’t buy/want to” one solution would be to leave OP open to funding XYZ areas if a new funder appears who wants to partner with them to do so. This would, to me, seem to allow GV and OP to overtime develop more PR and bandwidth breathing room between the two orgs.
My sense is that this is not what’s happening now. As in my other comment on this thread, I don’t want to reveal my sources because I like this account being anonymous, but I’m reasonably confident that OP staff have been told “we are not doing XYZ anymore” not “Cari and Dustin don’t want to fund XYZ anymore, so if you want to work on it, we need to find more funding.”
My suspicion (from some conversations with people who interact directly with OP leadership) is that it isn’t only Cari and Dustin who don’t want to support the dropped areas, but also at least some leadership at OP. If that’s right, it explains why they haven’t taken the approach I’m suggesting here, but not why they didn’t say so (perhaps connecting this back to your point 2).
Just flagging that I think “OP [is] open to funding XYZ areas if a new funder appears who wants to partner with them to do so” accurately describes the status quo. In the post above we (twice!) invited outreach from other funders interested in the some of these spaces, and we’re planning to do a lot more work to try to find other funders for some of this work in the coming months.
I am skeptical that a new large philanthropist would be well-advised by doing their grantmaking via OP (though I do think OP has a huge amount of knowledge and skill as a grantmaker). At least given my current model, it seems hard to avoid continuing conflict about the shared brand and indirect-effects of OP on Good Ventures.
I think any new donor, especially one that is smaller than GV (as is almost guaranteed to the the case), would end up still having their donations affect Good Ventures and my best understanding of the things Dustin is hoping to protect via this change.
If Dustin can’t communicate that he doesn’t endorse every aspect of, or can’t take responsibility for, everything that is currently funded through OP, I doubt that the difficult-to-track “from which source did OP spend this money” aspect of an additional donor would successfully avoid the relevant conflicts.
My best guess is that if OP attracts an additional large donor above ~$200M, it seems best for some people to leave OP, establish a new organization that the now donor would actually be confident will be independent from Dustin’s preferences, while maintaining a collaborative relationship with OP to share thoughts and insights.
I am not super confident of this, but I don’t see a clear line that would allow a new donor to have confidence that OP staff isn’t still going to heavily take into account Dustin’s reputation and non-financial priorities in the recommendations to the new donor.
That could well be, but my experience was having another foundation, like FTX, didn’t insulate me from reputation risks either. I’m just another “adherent of SBF’s worldview” to outsiders.
I’d like to see a future OP that is not synonymous with GVF, because we’re just one of the important donors instead of THE important donor, and having a division of focus areas currently seems viable to me. If other donors don’t agree or if staff behaves as if it isn’t true, then of course it won’t happen.
Yeah, makes sense.
This to be clear is the primary reason why in my model it is much much better for an additional donor to not be part of an institution that you have a huge amount of influence over.
It’s going to be very hard for their actions to not reflect on you, and if they are worried that staff at their grantmaker will be unduly affected by that, the best way I see forward is for them to be have a separate institution where even if you are unhappy about their choices, you are not in a position to influence them as much.
My hope is that having other donors for OP would genuinely create governance independence as my apparent power comes from not having alternate funding sources*, not from structural control. Consequently, you and others lay blame on me even for the things we don’t do. I would be happy to leave the board even, and happy to expand it to diminish my (non-controlling) vote further. I did not want to create a GVF hegemony any more than you wanted one to exist. (If the future is a bunch of different orgs, or some particular “pure” org, that’s good by me too; I don’t care about OP aggregating the donors if others don’t see that as useful.)
But I do want agency over our grants. As much as the whole debate has been framed (by everyone else) as reputation risk, I care about where I believe my responsibility lies, and where the money comes from has mattered. I don’t want to wake up anymore to somebody I personally loathe getting platformed only to discover I paid for the platform. That fact matters to me.
* Notably just for the “weird” stuff. We do successfully partner with other donors now! I don’t get in their way at all, as far as I know.
Just chiming in to have more than Habryka’s view represented here. I think it’s not unreasonable in principle to think that OP and GV could create PR distance between themselves. I think it will just take time, and Habryka is being moderately too pessimistic (or, accurately pessimistic in the short term but not considering reasonable long-term potential). I’d guess many think-tank type organizations have launched on the strength of a single funder and come to advise many funders, having a distinct reputation from them—OP seems to be pursuing this more strongly now than in the past, and while it will take time to work, it seems like a reasonable theory of change.
I have updated, based on this exchange, that OP is more open to investment in non-GV-supported activities than previously came through. I’m happy to hear that.
This is eminently reasonable. Any opposition to these changes I’ve aired here is more about disappointment in some of the specific cause areas being dropped and the sense that OP couldn’t continue on them without GV; I’m definitely not intending to complain about GV’s decision, and overall I think OP attempting to diversify funding sources (and EA trying to do so at well) is very, very healthy and needed.
Thanks, I am glad that you are willing to do this and am somewhat relieved that your perspective on this seems more amenable to other people participating with stuff on their own terms than I was worried about. I am still concerned, and think it’s unlikely that other donors for OP would be capable of getting the appropriate levels of trust with OP for this to work (and am also more broadly quite worried about chilling effects of many types here), but I do genuinely believe you are trying to mitigate those damages and see many of the same costs that I see.
Yeah, I think that’s life. Acts by omission are real acts, and while the way people are judged for them are different, and the way people try to react to them generally tend to be more fraught, there are of course many acts of omission that are worthy of judgement, and many acts of omission that are worthy of praise.
I don’t think reality splits neatly into “things you are responsible for” and “things you are not responsible for”, and I think we seem to have a deeper disagreement here about what this means for building platforms, communities and societal institutions, which, if working correctly, practically always platform people its creators strongly disagree with or find despicable (I have found many people on LW despicable in many different ways, but my job as a discourse platform provider is to set things up to allow other people to form their own beliefs on that, not to impose my own beliefs on the community that I am supporting).
Neglecting those kinds of platforms, or pouring resources into activities that will indirectly destroy those platforms (like pouring millions of dollars into continued EA and AI Safety growth without supporting institutions that actually allow those communities and movements to have sane discourse, or to coordinate with each other, or to learn about important considerations), is an act with real consequences that of course should be taken into account when thinking about how to relate to the people responsible for that funding and corresponding lack of funding of their complement.
A manager at a company who overhires can easily tank the company if they try to not get involved with setting the right culture and onboarding processes in place and are absolutely to blame if the new hires destroy the company culture or its internal processes.
But again, my guess is we have deep, important and also (to me) interesting disagreements here, which I don’t want you to feel pressured to hash out here. This isn’t the kind of stuff I think one should aim to resolve in a single comment thread, and maybe not ever, but I have thought about this topic a lot and it seemed appropriate to share.
I’ve long taken for granted that I am not going to live in integrity with your values and the actions you think are best for the world. I’m only trying to get back into integrity with my own.
OP is not an abstraction, of course, and I hope you continue talking to the individuals you know and have known there.
To clarify, I did see the invitations to other funders. However, my perception was that those are invitations to find people to hand things off to, rather than to be a continuing partner like with GV. Perhaps I misunderstood.
I also want to be clear that the status quo you’re articulating here does not match what I’ve heard from former grantees about how able OP staff are to participate in efforts to attract additional funding. Perhaps there has been quite a serious miscommunication.
+1 to Alexander’s POV
This was also my impression. To the extent that the reason why OP doesn’t want to fund something is because of PR risks & energy/time/attention costs, it’s a bit surprising that OP would partner with another group to fund something.
Perhaps the idea here is that the PR/energy/time/attention costs would be split between orgs? And that this would outweigh the costs of coordinating with another group?
Or it’s just that OP feels better if OP doesn’t have to spend its own money on something? Perhaps because of funding constraints?
I’m also a bit confused about scenarios where OP wouldn’t fund X for PR reasons but would want some other EA group to fund X. It seems to me like the PR attacks against the EA movement would be just as strong– perhaps OP as an institution could distance itself, but from an altruistic standpoint that wouldn’t matter much. (I do see how OP would want to not fund something for energy/capacity reasons but then be OK with some other funder focusing on that space.)
In general, I feel like communication from OP could have been clearer in a lot of the comments. Or OP could’ve done a “meta thing” just making it explicit that they don’t currently want to share more details.
But EG phrasing like this makes me wonder if OP believes it’s communicating clearly and is genuinely baffled when commentators have (what I see as quite reasonable) misunderstandings or confusions.
I’m confused about what you’re saying here. It feels like maybe you’re conflating OP with GV? (Which may be functionally a reasonable approximation 99% of the time, but gets in the way of the point of the conversation here in the 1%.) e.g. at one point you say “better if OP doesn’t have to spend its own money”, but as far as I understand things, to a first approximation Open Philanthropy doesn’t have any money; rather, Good Ventures does.
oops yup— was conflating and my comment makes less sense once the conflation goes away. good catch!
In the opening post, Alexander invites people interested in funding research on the potential moral patienthood of digital minds to reach out to OP, which I took as indicative of continued interest.
This isn’t true for any of the other sub-focus areas that will be exited though, which I thought was strange. Given that nothing other than digital minds work was listed, how would any potential donors or people who know potential donors know about OP exiting things like invertebrates or wild animal welfare?
(I’m basing those sub-focus areas on the comments in this thread because of exactly this problem—I’m unclear if there’s more being exited or if those two are definitely part of it)