Considering the size of these donations and the policy focus of many of these groups, it is useful to look at the campaigns these groups run. The issue is that political association for core EA institutions is not likely to be net positive unless very carefully managed and considered. It is also similarly the case that EA’s should not support policy groups without clear rationale, express aims and an understanding that sponsorship can come with the reasonable assumption from general public, journalists, or future or current members, that EA is endorsing particular political views.
“Achieving meaningful diversity and inclusion behind the scenes in hollywood”
“Ensuring Full and Fair Representation in the 2020 Census”
“Protecting Net Neutrality”
Other mission statements are politically motivated to a degree which is simply unacceptable for a group receiving major funds from an EA org. Under a heading “Right Wing Politics and White Nationalism”—a clear elision of right wing politics with hard-line racism—there appears the mission statement:
“Dismantling right-wing and white nationalist infrastructure/support”
This is a dishonest reading of politics, to be expected only of bad faith interpretations (akin to rendering left-wing politics as synonymous with Stalinism). Worse still than the rhetorical elision of RW and White Nationalism, is the mission itself—which taken at face value—commits the group to dismantling support and infrastructure for right-wing political beliefs. This is not an effective cause, and is—instead—a politically motivated one.
What, then, are the beliefs of the Color of Change? Under the title “Economic Justice”, Color of Change advocates for “Building momentum for progressive tax, labor and education policies”.
It should be clear at this point that Color of Change is a left-wing political pressure group designed to reduce right-wing infrastructure and support, and to smear right-wing beliefs (their political opponents) as synonymous with racism. What relevance has this to Effective Altruism?
These political beliefs are common across those funded. Mijente—given $255k in a grant to “support its work on criminal justice reform” describes itself as believing “our people can’t afford 4 more years of despair, fear and growing systematic criminalization. Our plan of attack is to win at the ballot box by mobilizing Latinx voters against Trump.” Regardless of personal opinions on Trump, or his suitability for the office of President, this is not an EA cause area (arguments of x-risk prevention aside as this was apparently for a criminal justice reform grant). Furthermore, as a side note, from the Campaigns section of Mijente’s website, it no longer appears they have an active criminal justice focus despite the $255k OP grant.
Similarly, LatinoJustice, given $500k from OP to encourage “Latinx activists to support criminal justice reform” does not advocate for criminal justice reform but rather states that “The criminal justice system in the U.S. needs not only to be reformed; it needs to be dismantled. It needs to be de-structured. It needs to be decolonized”. This is a political programme, disconnected to the original rationale for the OP grant.
Indeed, OP’s reasoning itself was expressly political for funding of at least one of these groups. The $100k grant to ReFrame was described as a grant for the ReFrame Mentorship, which OP describes as “an intensive training and mentorship program in strategic communications for social justice movement organizers”. This appears to be an expressly political rationale.
This is all to emphasise—not only as the post above does—that these groups were very likely far from effective uses of OP’s grants, but that they were also given expressly to groups with very clear, particular politics. It is difficult to see how any of these groups met the bar of OP funding, but it is all the more concerning that these were essentially a pattern of political campaigning groups, with very particular (but coherent with one another) political beliefs, receiving significant OP funds. This appears more akin to political activism, and less to effective giving. It is surprising and disappointing that OP funds were apparently used in such an ineffective and expressly political direction. The above shifts my estimate strongly towards the Progressive Funders and Mind Killer hypotheses.
“It is also similarly the case that EA’s should not support policy groups without clear rationale, express aims and an understanding that sponsorship can come with the reasonable assumption from general public, journalists, or future or current members, that EA is endorsing particular political views.”
This doesn’t seem right to me—I think anyone who understands EA should explicitly expect more consequentialist grant-makers to be willing to support groups whose political beliefs they might strongly disagree with if they also thought the group was going to take useful action with their funding.
As an observer, I would assume EA funders are just thinking through who has [leverage, influence, is positioned to act in the space, etc.] and putting aside any distaste they might feel for the group’s politics more readily than non-EA funders (e.g. the CJR program also funded conservative groups working on CJR whose views the program director presumably didn’t like or agree with for similar reasons).
“Other mission statements are politically motivated to a degree which is simply unacceptable for a group receiving major funds from an EA org.”
This seems to imply that EA funders should only give funding to groups that pass a certain epistemic purity test or are untouched by political considerations. I think applying EA-like epistemic standards to movement organizations in the US that touch on ~anything political would probably preclude you from funding anything political at all (maybe you’re arguing EA should therefore never fund anything that touches on politics, but that seems likely to be leaving a lot of impact on the table if taken to an extreme).
My guess is that if you looked at grantees in many other OP cause areas, you would see a large spread of opinions expressed by the grantees, many of which don’t follow EA-like epistemic norms. E.g. I understand the FAW grant-making team supports a range of groups who hold views on animal welfare, some of which are ideologically far afield from the internally stated goals of the program. Again, I don’t assume that the OP FAW POs necessarily endorse their views -- I assume they are being funded because the PO believes that those groups are going to do work that is effective, or productively contribute to the FAW movement ecosystem overall (e.g. by playing bad cop to another organization’s good cop with industry).
Hey! Member of the Open Phil grants team here (not officially writing on behalf of OP; just responding based on my experience of how things work here)
I feel that there’s a bit of a misunderstanding here about how our grants process works that I’d like to correct. It seems like the thrust of your argument is that it isn’t effective for us to fund non-EA-aligned organizations, and you list some of our grantees’ activities to support that claim (i.e. Color of Change’s work on diversity in Hollywood). I think you’d have to be making one of two assumptions for this argument to work:
We don’t have the ability to restrict how our grantees use the funds we give them, or
We can restrict our funding to projects aligned with our focus areas, but we can’t properly assess whether an organization’s other work or overall philosophy will spoil/reduce the impact of the work we want to fund.
Responding to the first assumption, we sometimes do restrict how our grantees use our funding, by adding a “purpose restriction” to the grant’s legal documentation. A purpose restriction is exactly what it sounds like—it specifies acceptable uses of our funds and prevents the grantee from spending our money on other projects. This enables us to fund a variety of organizations without having to worry much about the organizations spending lots of our money on things we don’t want to fund.
For example, our $2.5 million grant to Color of Change specifies exactly what we funded them to work on — prosecutorial reform, and advocacy/communication around the film “Just Mercy”. (We’ve also funded film-related projects in other areas, like farmanimalwelfare and effectivealtruism.)
While we try our best to restrict our funding to projects we’re excited about, restrictions aren’t perfect and money is fungible in a variety of ways. OP’s Program Officers try to address this, but it’s reasonable to worry that funding an org might encourage some of the work we didn’t fund. However, I think it makes more sense to view this as a tradeoff, not a reason for a blanket policy against funding political organizations. In my limited time at OP, I haven’t seen many instances where an organization we were funding was doing things with other funding that struck me as being actively harmful.
That said, it’s certainly possible that one of our grants has a negative impact that we didn’t intend; this might be inevitable given our hits-based giving model. We try our best to be mindful of these types of tail risks and incorporate them into the expected value assessments we do for our grants and we hope to learn from cases where we really get it wrong.
The second assumption also seems wrong to me. A large part of the job of a Program Officer at any funder is to conduct a comprehensive investigation into potential grantees to determine if they are capable of carrying out the funder’s goals. I don’t have a programmatic role at OP so I can’t comment too much here, other than to say that as far as I can tell OP Program Officers are very good at doing this. This is why I don’t think it’s particularly relevant what Color of Change “believes” as an organization. The relevant question was whether COC would be able to carry out specific CJR work that we would want to fund.
Maybe I’m being a bit uncharitable and ignoring an outside view, like “overtly political organizations are generally unable to implement narrowly designed programs”. That doesn’t seem too plausible to me.
There’s a better argument that says that overtly political organizations inevitably allow their political beliefs to seep into their programmatic work. I don’t know if that’s true, but if it is I think it probably looks more like “An overtly progressive organization trying to reduce the prison population of a large city (a programmatic goal of OP’s) uses some very progressive sounding language in their messaging” than “A progressive organization is too obsessed with ideological purity to accomplish the stated goals of a project”. If the former is true, it’s not clear to me why it’s relevant as long as the project succeeds. If it’s the latter, I think it’s the normal kind of risk to a project’s impact that our POs would be trying to ferret out, though they may not always succeed.
While we try our best to restrict our funding to projects we’re excited about, restrictions aren’t perfect and money is fungible in a variety of ways. OP’s Program Officers try to address this, but it’s reasonable to worry that funding an org might encourage some of the work we didn’t fund.
I’m curious as to how you estimate this. ‘reasonable to worry...might encourage some’ is a very mild assessment. In contrast, my intuition is that funging is near 100% for organisations with significant non-restricted funding and a large number of projects. I would expect most CEOs would choose to pursue the activities they are most excited about, and would have few qualms about the somewhat esoteric notion of funging with a grantmaker that they are apparently not very ideologically aligned with anyway.
I think you’d have to be making one of two assumptions for this argument to work:
We don’t have the ability to restrict how our grantees use the funds we give them, or
We can restrict our funding to projects aligned with our focus areas, but we can’t properly assess whether an organization’s other work or overall philosophy will spoil/reduce the impact of the work we want to fund.
You could also have:
2.5. Donating money to grantees which have very different goals is likely to incur in an impact penalty, and this impact penalty is likely to be larger the less the grantees understand and share your goals.
So for instance, donating to an organization not sharing your goals reduces their effectiveness through fungibility, as you point out. But it would also reduce their impact by doing a worse job than someone who was more aligned, making it less likely that they will continue pursuing their goals after you cease funding, employing worse strategies to pursue your goals in situations where its hard to model, and sometimes even trying to actively mislead you.
Taking a guess, this alone does seem to me that it could make a 2 to 100x difference.
In practice, this doesn’t seem so salient for something like, say, GiveDirectly, because once you decide that direct transfers are cost-effective, they seem very aligned in making the transfers happen. But the wiggle room for political grants seems much greater.
A large part of the job of a Program Officer at any funder is to conduct a comprehensive investigation into potential grantees to determine if they are capable of carrying out the funder’s goals.
Note that some of the grants in my discussion section, and discussed in the comment were “discretionary grants”: (Essie Justice group, Justice Strategies, Reframe mentorship). And in addition, many of the criminal justice reform grants also tend to have particularly short writeups.
I agree that EA as a movement (and thus, the organisations in charge of most EA funding) should be somewhat weary in what looks like endorsement of particular political groups (or particular interpretations/applications of them).
I don’t necessarily agree with what you describe as EA vs. non-EA goals, but I don’t have any strong arguments about this.
Still, I’d like to push back on two points:
Regardless of personal opinions on Trump, or his suitability for the office of President, this is not an EA cause area.
I’m very unconvinced of this. The identity of the most powerful person in the US has a huge impact and is something that should interest EA a lot. In particular, someone with as extreme views, behaviours and policy ideas as Trump is bound to have an outsized impact (of some sign) that’s meaningful to assess and perhaps try to change. In particular, it may have a large impact on the criminal justice system, which makes dealing with it relevant in this particular case.
This appears more akin to political activism, and less to effective giving.
I don’t see why you expect these to be disjoint. EA is a political idea, and some popular political philosophies will be more compatible with it than others; Some can be judged to have a much better impact, if adopted by more people, than others. I have barely seen any impact evaluation of political activism projects to base the confidence that they’re not EA-aligned on.
This is not to say anything about the effectiveness and impact of particular activism done by any of these groups.
Considering the size of these donations and the policy focus of many of these groups, it is useful to look at the campaigns these groups run. The issue is that political association for core EA institutions is not likely to be net positive unless very carefully managed and considered. It is also similarly the case that EA’s should not support policy groups without clear rationale, express aims and an understanding that sponsorship can come with the reasonable assumption from general public, journalists, or future or current members, that EA is endorsing particular political views.
The Color of Change group, to which OP donated 50% of Color of Change’s annual budget (at $2.5 million) for “increasing the salience of prosecutor and bail reform”, describes their work in a variety of mission statements. Some of these are very clearly not EA, such as:
“Achieving meaningful diversity and inclusion behind the scenes in hollywood”
“Ensuring Full and Fair Representation in the 2020 Census”
“Protecting Net Neutrality”
Other mission statements are politically motivated to a degree which is simply unacceptable for a group receiving major funds from an EA org. Under a heading “Right Wing Politics and White Nationalism”—a clear elision of right wing politics with hard-line racism—there appears the mission statement:
“Dismantling right-wing and white nationalist infrastructure/support”
This is a dishonest reading of politics, to be expected only of bad faith interpretations (akin to rendering left-wing politics as synonymous with Stalinism). Worse still than the rhetorical elision of RW and White Nationalism, is the mission itself—which taken at face value—commits the group to dismantling support and infrastructure for right-wing political beliefs. This is not an effective cause, and is—instead—a politically motivated one.
What, then, are the beliefs of the Color of Change? Under the title “Economic Justice”, Color of Change advocates for “Building momentum for progressive tax, labor and education policies”.
Their politics are all the clearer when looking to their current campaigns. These range from racial audits of Amazon, to advocating for the employment of a teacher fired for teaching critical race theory, to letters sent to prosecutors to stop “Anti-Trans Laws”. Indeed, most of the campaigns appear to be letter writing. It is difficult to see how this organisation should be considered for $2.5 million of EA funds.
It should be clear at this point that Color of Change is a left-wing political pressure group designed to reduce right-wing infrastructure and support, and to smear right-wing beliefs (their political opponents) as synonymous with racism. What relevance has this to Effective Altruism?
These political beliefs are common across those funded. Mijente—given $255k in a grant to “support its work on criminal justice reform” describes itself as believing “our people can’t afford 4 more years of despair, fear and growing systematic criminalization. Our plan of attack is to win at the ballot box by mobilizing Latinx voters against Trump.” Regardless of personal opinions on Trump, or his suitability for the office of President, this is not an EA cause area (arguments of x-risk prevention aside as this was apparently for a criminal justice reform grant). Furthermore, as a side note, from the Campaigns section of Mijente’s website, it no longer appears they have an active criminal justice focus despite the $255k OP grant.
Similarly, LatinoJustice, given $500k from OP to encourage “Latinx activists to support criminal justice reform” does not advocate for criminal justice reform but rather states that “The criminal justice system in the U.S. needs not only to be reformed; it needs to be dismantled. It needs to be de-structured. It needs to be decolonized”. This is a political programme, disconnected to the original rationale for the OP grant.
Indeed, OP’s reasoning itself was expressly political for funding of at least one of these groups. The $100k grant to ReFrame was described as a grant for the ReFrame Mentorship, which OP describes as “an intensive training and mentorship program in strategic communications for social justice movement organizers”. This appears to be an expressly political rationale.
This is all to emphasise—not only as the post above does—that these groups were very likely far from effective uses of OP’s grants, but that they were also given expressly to groups with very clear, particular politics. It is difficult to see how any of these groups met the bar of OP funding, but it is all the more concerning that these were essentially a pattern of political campaigning groups, with very particular (but coherent with one another) political beliefs, receiving significant OP funds. This appears more akin to political activism, and less to effective giving. It is surprising and disappointing that OP funds were apparently used in such an ineffective and expressly political direction. The above shifts my estimate strongly towards the Progressive Funders and Mind Killer hypotheses.
“It is also similarly the case that EA’s should not support policy groups without clear rationale, express aims and an understanding that sponsorship can come with the reasonable assumption from general public, journalists, or future or current members, that EA is endorsing particular political views.”
This doesn’t seem right to me—I think anyone who understands EA should explicitly expect more consequentialist grant-makers to be willing to support groups whose political beliefs they might strongly disagree with if they also thought the group was going to take useful action with their funding.
As an observer, I would assume EA funders are just thinking through who has [leverage, influence, is positioned to act in the space, etc.] and putting aside any distaste they might feel for the group’s politics more readily than non-EA funders (e.g. the CJR program also funded conservative groups working on CJR whose views the program director presumably didn’t like or agree with for similar reasons).
“Other mission statements are politically motivated to a degree which is simply unacceptable for a group receiving major funds from an EA org.”
This seems to imply that EA funders should only give funding to groups that pass a certain epistemic purity test or are untouched by political considerations. I think applying EA-like epistemic standards to movement organizations in the US that touch on ~anything political would probably preclude you from funding anything political at all (maybe you’re arguing EA should therefore never fund anything that touches on politics, but that seems likely to be leaving a lot of impact on the table if taken to an extreme).
My guess is that if you looked at grantees in many other OP cause areas, you would see a large spread of opinions expressed by the grantees, many of which don’t follow EA-like epistemic norms. E.g. I understand the FAW grant-making team supports a range of groups who hold views on animal welfare, some of which are ideologically far afield from the internally stated goals of the program. Again, I don’t assume that the OP FAW POs necessarily endorse their views -- I assume they are being funded because the PO believes that those groups are going to do work that is effective, or productively contribute to the FAW movement ecosystem overall (e.g. by playing bad cop to another organization’s good cop with industry).
Hey! Member of the Open Phil grants team here (not officially writing on behalf of OP; just responding based on my experience of how things work here)
I feel that there’s a bit of a misunderstanding here about how our grants process works that I’d like to correct. It seems like the thrust of your argument is that it isn’t effective for us to fund non-EA-aligned organizations, and you list some of our grantees’ activities to support that claim (i.e. Color of Change’s work on diversity in Hollywood). I think you’d have to be making one of two assumptions for this argument to work:
We don’t have the ability to restrict how our grantees use the funds we give them, or
We can restrict our funding to projects aligned with our focus areas, but we can’t properly assess whether an organization’s other work or overall philosophy will spoil/reduce the impact of the work we want to fund.
Responding to the first assumption, we sometimes do restrict how our grantees use our funding, by adding a “purpose restriction” to the grant’s legal documentation. A purpose restriction is exactly what it sounds like—it specifies acceptable uses of our funds and prevents the grantee from spending our money on other projects. This enables us to fund a variety of organizations without having to worry much about the organizations spending lots of our money on things we don’t want to fund.
For example, our $2.5 million grant to Color of Change specifies exactly what we funded them to work on — prosecutorial reform, and advocacy/communication around the film “Just Mercy”. (We’ve also funded film-related projects in other areas, like farm animal welfare and effective altruism.)
While we try our best to restrict our funding to projects we’re excited about, restrictions aren’t perfect and money is fungible in a variety of ways. OP’s Program Officers try to address this, but it’s reasonable to worry that funding an org might encourage some of the work we didn’t fund. However, I think it makes more sense to view this as a tradeoff, not a reason for a blanket policy against funding political organizations. In my limited time at OP, I haven’t seen many instances where an organization we were funding was doing things with other funding that struck me as being actively harmful.
That said, it’s certainly possible that one of our grants has a negative impact that we didn’t intend; this might be inevitable given our hits-based giving model. We try our best to be mindful of these types of tail risks and incorporate them into the expected value assessments we do for our grants and we hope to learn from cases where we really get it wrong.
The second assumption also seems wrong to me. A large part of the job of a Program Officer at any funder is to conduct a comprehensive investigation into potential grantees to determine if they are capable of carrying out the funder’s goals. I don’t have a programmatic role at OP so I can’t comment too much here, other than to say that as far as I can tell OP Program Officers are very good at doing this. This is why I don’t think it’s particularly relevant what Color of Change “believes” as an organization. The relevant question was whether COC would be able to carry out specific CJR work that we would want to fund.
Maybe I’m being a bit uncharitable and ignoring an outside view, like “overtly political organizations are generally unable to implement narrowly designed programs”. That doesn’t seem too plausible to me.
There’s a better argument that says that overtly political organizations inevitably allow their political beliefs to seep into their programmatic work. I don’t know if that’s true, but if it is I think it probably looks more like “An overtly progressive organization trying to reduce the prison population of a large city (a programmatic goal of OP’s) uses some very progressive sounding language in their messaging” than “A progressive organization is too obsessed with ideological purity to accomplish the stated goals of a project”. If the former is true, it’s not clear to me why it’s relevant as long as the project succeeds. If it’s the latter, I think it’s the normal kind of risk to a project’s impact that our POs would be trying to ferret out, though they may not always succeed.
I’m curious as to how you estimate this. ‘reasonable to worry...might encourage some’ is a very mild assessment. In contrast, my intuition is that funging is near 100% for organisations with significant non-restricted funding and a large number of projects. I would expect most CEOs would choose to pursue the activities they are most excited about, and would have few qualms about the somewhat esoteric notion of funging with a grantmaker that they are apparently not very ideologically aligned with anyway.
You could also have:
2.5. Donating money to grantees which have very different goals is likely to incur in an impact penalty, and this impact penalty is likely to be larger the less the grantees understand and share your goals.
So for instance, donating to an organization not sharing your goals reduces their effectiveness through fungibility, as you point out. But it would also reduce their impact by doing a worse job than someone who was more aligned, making it less likely that they will continue pursuing their goals after you cease funding, employing worse strategies to pursue your goals in situations where its hard to model, and sometimes even trying to actively mislead you.
Taking a guess, this alone does seem to me that it could make a 2 to 100x difference.
In practice, this doesn’t seem so salient for something like, say, GiveDirectly, because once you decide that direct transfers are cost-effective, they seem very aligned in making the transfers happen. But the wiggle room for political grants seems much greater.
Note that some of the grants in my discussion section, and discussed in the comment were “discretionary grants”: (Essie Justice group, Justice Strategies, Reframe mentorship). And in addition, many of the criminal justice reform grants also tend to have particularly short writeups.
I agree that EA as a movement (and thus, the organisations in charge of most EA funding) should be somewhat weary in what looks like endorsement of particular political groups (or particular interpretations/applications of them).
I don’t necessarily agree with what you describe as EA vs. non-EA goals, but I don’t have any strong arguments about this.
Still, I’d like to push back on two points:
I’m very unconvinced of this. The identity of the most powerful person in the US has a huge impact and is something that should interest EA a lot. In particular, someone with as extreme views, behaviours and policy ideas as Trump is bound to have an outsized impact (of some sign) that’s meaningful to assess and perhaps try to change. In particular, it may have a large impact on the criminal justice system, which makes dealing with it relevant in this particular case.
I don’t see why you expect these to be disjoint. EA is a political idea, and some popular political philosophies will be more compatible with it than others; Some can be judged to have a much better impact, if adopted by more people, than others. I have barely seen any impact evaluation of political activism projects to base the confidence that they’re not EA-aligned on.
This is not to say anything about the effectiveness and impact of particular activism done by any of these groups.