I don’t have any inside info here, but based on my work with other organizations I think each of your first three hypotheses are plausible, either alone or in combination.
Another consideration I would mention is that it’s just really hard to judge how to interpret advocacy failures over a short time horizon. Given that your first try failed, does that mean the situation is hopeless and you should stop throwing good money after bad? Or does it mean that you meaningfully moved the needle on people’s opinions and the next campaign is now likelier to succeed? It’s not hard for me to imagine that in 2016-17 or so, having seen some intermediate successes that didn’t ultimately result in legislation signed into law, OP staff might have held out genuine hope that victory was still close at hand. Or after the First Step Act was passed in 2018 and signed into law by Trump, maybe they thought they could convert Trump into a more consistent champion on the issue and bring the GOP along with him. Even as late as 2020, when the George Floyd protests broke out, Chloe’s grantmaking recommendations ended up being circulated widely and presumably moved a lot of money; I could imagine there was hope at that time for transformative policy potential. Knowing when to walk away from sustained but not-yet-successful efforts at achieving low-probability, high-impact results, especially when previous attempts have unknown correlations with the probability of future success, is intrinsically a very difficult estimation problem. (Indeed, if someone at QURI could develop a general solution to this, I think that would be a very useful contribution to the discourse!)
I don’t have any inside info here, but based on my work with other organizations I think each of your first three hypotheses are plausible, either alone or in combination.
Another consideration I would mention is that it’s just really hard to judge how to interpret advocacy failures over a short time horizon. Given that your first try failed, does that mean the situation is hopeless and you should stop throwing good money after bad? Or does it mean that you meaningfully moved the needle on people’s opinions and the next campaign is now likelier to succeed? It’s not hard for me to imagine that in 2016-17 or so, having seen some intermediate successes that didn’t ultimately result in legislation signed into law, OP staff might have held out genuine hope that victory was still close at hand. Or after the First Step Act was passed in 2018 and signed into law by Trump, maybe they thought they could convert Trump into a more consistent champion on the issue and bring the GOP along with him. Even as late as 2020, when the George Floyd protests broke out, Chloe’s grantmaking recommendations ended up being circulated widely and presumably moved a lot of money; I could imagine there was hope at that time for transformative policy potential. Knowing when to walk away from sustained but not-yet-successful efforts at achieving low-probability, high-impact results, especially when previous attempts have unknown correlations with the probability of future success, is intrinsically a very difficult estimation problem. (Indeed, if someone at QURI could develop a general solution to this, I think that would be a very useful contribution to the discourse!)