Both Givewell and GWWC want to shift donation money to effective charities, which is why they have to make a compelling case for donors. Transparency seems to be a good tool for this. The analogy here would be CEA making the case for them to get funded for their work. Zach has written a bit about how they engage with funders.
That undermines the first motivation for I gave for transparency, but I don’t think it really touches on the other four. And as you say, it only undermines the first to the extent that we don’t think it would be better that they get more diverse funding.
I think if only for feedback-loop reasons, it would be far better for CEA to get more from the community—if they’re struggling to do so, that could be considered an important form of feedback in itself.
However, I can also see that the EV of this might be lower than that of engaging with a smaller set of funders. Transparency and engaging with a broad audience can be pretty time-consuming and thus lower the cost-effectiveness of your approach.
I feel like this proves too much. Givewell’s potential donors could make exactly the same claim, but Givewell repeatedly reinforced their belief that greater transparency is necessary to have high credence that the organisation in question is doing a good job. The fact that CEA’s outputs are less concrete/measurable/directly tied to human welfare if anything makes me think it’s more important that feedback loops are tightened than for Givewell evaluands.
That undermines the first motivation for I gave for transparency, but I don’t think it really touches on the other four. And as you say, it only undermines the first to the extent that we don’t think it would be better that they get more diverse funding.
I think if only for feedback-loop reasons, it would be far better for CEA to get more from the community—if they’re struggling to do so, that could be considered an important form of feedback in itself.
I feel like this proves too much. Givewell’s potential donors could make exactly the same claim, but Givewell repeatedly reinforced their belief that greater transparency is necessary to have high credence that the organisation in question is doing a good job. The fact that CEA’s outputs are less concrete/measurable/directly tied to human welfare if anything makes me think it’s more important that feedback loops are tightened than for Givewell evaluands.