I want to see more discussion on how EA can better diversify and have strategically-chosen distance from OP/GV.
One reason is that it seems like multiple people at OP/GV have basically said that they want this (or at least, many of the key aspects of this).
A big challenge is that it seems very awkward for someone to talk and work on this issue, if one is employed under the OP/GV umbrella. This is a pretty clear conflict of interest. CEA is currently the main organization for “EA”, but I believe CEA is majority funded by OP, with several other clear strong links. (Board members, and employees often go between these orgs).
In addition, it clearly seems like OP/GV wants certain separation to help from their side. The close link means that problems with EA often spills over to the reputation of OP/GV.
I’d love to see some other EA donors and community members step up here. I think it’s kind of damning how little EA money comes from community members or sources other than OP right now. Long-term this seems pretty unhealthy.
One proposal is to have some “mini-CEA” that’s non-large-donor funded. This group’s main job would be to understand and act on EA interests that organizations funded by large donors would have trouble with.
I know Oliver Habryka has said that he thinks it would be good for the EA Forum to also be pulled away from large donors. This seems good to me, though likely expensive (I believe this team is sizable).
Another task here is to have more non-large-donor funding for CEA.
For large donors, one way of dealing with potential conflicts of interest would be doing funding in large blocks, like a 4-year contribution. But I realize that OP might sensibly be reluctant to do this at this point.
Also, related—I’d really hope that the EA Infrastructure Fund could help here, but I don’t know if this is possible for them. I’m dramatically more excited about large long-term projects on making EA more community-driven and independent, and/or well-managed, than I am the kinds of small projects they seem to fund. I don’t think they’ve ever funded CEA, despite that CEA might now represent the majority of funding on the direct EA community. I’d encourage people from this fund to think through this issue and be clear about what potential projects they might be excited for, around this topic.
Backing up a bit—it seems to me like EA is really remarkably powerless for what it is, outside of the OP/GV funding stream right now. This seems quite wrong to me, like large mistakes were made. Part of me think that positive change here is somewhat hopeless at this point (I’ve been thinking about this space for a few years now but haven’t taken much action because of uncertainty on this), but part of me also thinks that with the right cleverness or talent, there could be some major changes.
Another quick thought: This seems like a good topic for a “Debate Week”, in case anyone from that team is seeing this.
(To add clarity—I’m not suggesting that OP drops it’s funding of EA! It’s more that I think that non-OP donors should step up more, and that key EA services should be fairly independent.)
Yeah I agree that funding diversification is a big challenge for EA, and I agree that OP/GV also want more funders in this space. In the last MCF, which is run by CEA, the two main themes were brand and funding, which are two of CEA’s internal priorities. (Though note that in the past year we were more focused on hiring to set strong foundations for ops/systems within CEA.) Not to say that CEA has this covered though — I’d be happy to see more work in this space overall!
Personally, I worry that funding diversification is a bit downstream of improving the EA brand — it may be hard for people to be excited to support EA community building projects if they feel like others dislike it, and it may be hard to convince new people/orgs to fund EA community things if they read stuff about how EA is bad. So I’m personally more optimistic about prioritizing brand-related work (one example being highlighting EA Forum content on other platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Substack).
I’d love to see some other EA donors and community members step up here. I think it’s kind of damning how little EA money comes from community members or sources other than OP right now. Long-term this seems pretty unhealthy.
There was some prior relevant discussion in November 2023 in this CEA fundraising thread, such as my comment here about funder diversity at CEA. Basically, I didn’t think that there was much meaningful difference between a CEA that was (e.g.) 90% OP/GV funded vs. 70% OP/GV funded. So I think the only practical way for that percentage to move enough to make a real difference would be both an increase in community contributions/control and CEA going on a fairly severe diet.
As for EAIF, expected total grantmaking was ~$2.5MM for 2025. Even if a sizable fraction of that went to CEA, it would only be perhaps 1-2% of CEA’s 2023 budget of $31.4MM.
I recall participating in some discussions here about identifying core infrastructure that should be prioritized for broad-based funding for democratic and/or epistemic reasons. Identifying items in the low millions for more independent funding seems more realistic than meaningful changes in CEA’s funding base. The Forum strikes me as an obvious candidate, but a community-funded version would presumably need to run on a significantly leaner budget than I understand to be currently in place.
Basically, I didn’t think that there was much meaningful difference between a CEA that was (e.g.) 90% OP/GV funded vs. 70% OP/GV funded.
Personally, I’m optimistic that this could be done in specific ways that could be better than one might initially presume. One wouldn’t fund “CEA”—they could instead fund specific programs in CEA, for instance. I imagine that people at CEA might have some good ideas of specific things they could fund that OP isn’t a good fit for.
One complication is that arguably we’d want to do this in a way that’s “fair” to OP. Like, it doesn’t seem “fair” for OP to pay for all the stuff that both OP+EA agrees on, and EA only to fund the stuff that EA likes. But this really depends on what OP is comfortable with.
Lastly, I’d flag that CEA being 90% OP/GV funded really can be quite different than 70% in some important ways, still. For example, if OP/GV were to leave—then CEA might be able to go to 30% of its size—a big loss, but much better than 10% of its size.
Personally, I’m optimistic that this could be done in specific ways that could be better than one might initially presume. One wouldn’t fund “CEA”—they could instead fund specific programs in CEA, for instance. I imagine that people at CEA might have some good ideas of specific things they could fund that OP isn’t a good fit for.
That may be viable, although I think it would be better for both sides if these programs were not in CEA but instead in an independent organization. For the small-donor side, it limits the risk that their monies will just funge against OP/GV’s, or that OP/GV will influence how the community-funded program is run (e.g., through its influence on CEA management officials). On the OP/GV side, organizational separation is probably necessary to provide some of the reputational distance it may be looking for. That being said, given that small/medium donors have never to my knowledge been given this kind of opportunity, and the significant coordination obstacles involved, I would not characterize them not having taken it as indicative of much in particular.
~
More broadly, I think this is a challenging conversation without nailing down the objective better—and that may be hard for us on the Forum to do. Without any inside knowledge, my guess is that OP/GV’s concerns are not primarily focused on the existence of discrete programs “that OP isn’t a good fit for” or a desire not to fund them.
For example, a recent public comment from Dustin contain the following sentence: “But I can’t e.g. get SBF to not do podcasts nor stop the EA (or two?) that seem to have joined DOGE and started laying waste to USAID.” The concerns implied by that statement aren’t really fixable by the community funding discrete programs, or even by shelving discrete programs altogether. Not being the flagship EA organization’s predominant donor may not be sufficient for getting reputational distance from that sort of thing, but it’s probably a necessary condition.
I speculate that other concerns may be about the way certain core programs are run—e.g., I would not be too surprised to hear that OP/GV would rather not have particular controversialcontent allowed on the Forum, or have advocates for certain political positions admitted to EAGs, or whatever. I’m not going to name the content I have in mind in an attempt not to be drawn into an object-level discussion on those topics, but I wouldn’t want my own money being used to platform such content or help its adherents network either. Anyway, these types of issues can probably be fixed by running the program with community/other-donor funding in a separate organization, but these programs are expensive to run. And the community / non-OP/GV donors are not a monolithic constituency; I suspect that at least a significant minority of the community would share OP/GV’s concerns on the merits.
Lastly, I’d flag that CEA being 90% OP/GV funded really can be quite different than 70% in some important ways, still. For example, if OP/GV were to leave—then CEA might be able to go to 30% of its size—a big loss, but much better than 10% of its size.
I agree—the linked comment was focused more on the impact of funding diversity on conflicts of interest and cause prio. But the amount of smaller-EA-donor dollars to go around is limited,[1] and so we have to consider the opportunity cost of diverting them to fund CEA or similar meta work on an ongoing basis. OP/GV is usually a pretty responsible funder, so the odds of them suddenly defunding CEA without providing some sort of notice and transitional funding seems low.
For instance, I believe GWWC pledgers gave about $32MM/year on average from 2020-2022 [p. 12 of this impact assessment], and not all pledgers are EAs.
I think you bring up a bunch of good points. I’d hope that any concrete steps on this would take these sorts of considerations in mind.
> The concerns implied by that statement aren’t really fixable by the community funding discrete programs, or even by shelving discrete programs altogether. Not being the flagship EA organization’s predominant donor may not be sufficient for getting reputational distance from that sort of thing, but it’s probably a necessary condition.
I wasn’t claiming that this funding change would fix all of OP/GV’s concerns. I assume that would take a great deal of work, among many different projects/initiatives.
One thing I care about is that someone is paid to start thinking about this critically and extensively, and I imagine they’d be more effective if not under the OP umbrella. So one of the early steps to take is just trying to find a system that could help figure out future steps.
> I speculate that other concerns may be about the way certain core programs are run—e.g., I would not be too surprised to hear that OP/GV would rather not have particular controversialcontent allowed on the Forum, or have advocates for certain political positions admitted to EAGs, or whatever.
I think this raises an important and somewhat awkward point that levels of separation between EA and OP/GV would make it harder for OP/GV to have as much control over these areas, and there are times where they wouldn’t be as happy with the results.
Of course: 1. If this is the case, it implies that the EA community does want some concretely different things, so from the standpoint of the EA community, this would make funding more appealing. 2. I think in the big picture, it seems like OP/GV doesn’t want to be held as responsible for the EA community. Ultimately there’s a conflict here—on one hand, they don’t want to be seen as responsible for the EA community—on the other hand, they might prefer situations where they can have a very large amount of control over the EA community. I hope it can be understood that these two desires can’t easily go together. Perhaps they won’t be willing to compromise on the latter, but also will complain about the former. That might well happen, but I’d hope there could be a better arrangement made.
> OP/GV is usually a pretty responsible funder, so the odds of them suddenly defunding CEA without providing some sort of notice and transitional funding seems low.
I largely agree. That said, if I were CEA, I’d still feel fairly uncomfortable. When the vast majority of your funding comes from any one donor, you’ll need to place a whole lot of trust in them.
I’d imagine that if I were working within CEA, I’d be incredibly precautious not to upset OP or GV. I’d also imagine this to mess with my epistemics/communication/actions.
Also, of course, I’d flag that the world can change quickly. Maybe Trump will go on a push against EA one day, and put OP in an awkward spot, for example.
I want to see more discussion on how EA can better diversify and have strategically-chosen distance from OP/GV.
One reason is that it seems like multiple people at OP/GV have basically said that they want this (or at least, many of the key aspects of this).
I agree with the approach’s direction, but this premise doesn’t seem very helpful in shaping the debate. It doesn’t seem that there is a right level of funding for meta EA or that this is what we currently have.
My perception is that OP has specific goals, one of which is to reduce GCR risk. As there are not so many high absorbency funding opportunities and a lot of uncertainty in the field, they focus more on capacity building, of which EA has proven to be a solid investment in talent pipeline building.
If this is true, then the level of funding we are currently seeing is downstream from OP’s overall yearly spending and their goals. Other funders will come to very different conclusions as to why they would want to fund EA meta and to what extent.
If you’re a meta funder who agrees with GCR risks, you might see opportunities that either don’t want OPs’ money, that OP doesn’t want to fund, or that want to keep OPs’ funding under a certain bar. These are more neglected, but they are more cost-effective for you as they are not as fungible.
At the last, MCF funding diversification and the EA brand were the two main topics, but to me, meta-funding diversification seems much harder, especially for areas under the EA brand.
This is good to know. While mentioning MCF, I would bring up that it seems bad to me that MCF seems to be very much within the OP umbrella, as I understand it. I believe that it was funded by OP or CEA, and the people who set it up were employed by CEA, which was primarily funded by OP. Most of the attendees seem like people at OP or CEA, or else heavily funded by OP.
I have a lot of respect for many of these people and am not claiming anything nefarious. But I do think that this acts as a good example of the sort of thing that seems important for the EA community, and also that OP has an incredibly large amount of control over. It seems like an obvious potential conflict of interest.
Quickly: > I agree with the approach’s direction, but this premise doesn’t seem very helpful in shaping the debate.
Sorry, I don’t understand this. What is “the debate” that you are referring to?
I just meant the discussion you wanted to see; I probably used the wrong synonym.
This is good to know. While mentioning MCF, I would bring up that it seems bad to me that MCF seems to be very much within the OP umbrella, as I understand it. I believe that it was funded by OP or CEA, and the people who set it up were employed by CEA, which was primarily funded by OP. Most of the attendees seem like people at OP or CEA, or else heavily funded by OP.
I generally believe that EA is effective at being pragmatic, and in that regard, I think it’s important for the key organizations that are both giving and receiving funding in this area to coordinate, especially with topics like funding diversification. I agree that this is not the ideal world, but this goes back to the main topic.
I generally believe that EA is effective at being pragmatic, and in that regard, I think it’s important for the key organizations that are both giving and receiving funding in this area to coordinate, especially with topics like funding diversification. I agree that this is not the ideal world, but this goes back to the main topic.
For reference, I agree it’s important for these people to be meeting with each other. I wasn’t disagreeing with that.
However, I would hope that over time, there would be more people brought in who aren’t in the immediate OP umbrella, to key discussions of the future of EA. At least have like 10% of the audience be strongly/mostly independent or something.
I think its better to start something new. Reform is hard but no one is going to stop you from making a new charity. The EA brand isn’t in the best shape. Imo the “new thing” can take money from individual EAs but shouldn’t accept anything connected to OpenPhil/CEA/Dustin/etc.
If you start new you can start with a better culture.
I mean Dustin Moskovitz used to come on the forum and beg people to do earn to give yet I don’t think the number of donors has grown that much. More people should go to Jane Street and do Y-Combinator but it feels as though that’s taboo to say for some reason.
I have said this in other spaces since the FTX collapse: The original idea of EA, as I see it, was that it was supposed to make the kind of research work done at philanthropic foundations open and usable for well-to-do-but-not-Bill-Gates-rich Westerners. While it’s inadvisable to outright condemn billionaires using EA work to orient their donations for… obvious reasons, I do think there is a moral hazard in billionaires funding meta EA. Now, the most extreme policy would be to have meta EA be solely funded by membership dues (as plenty organizations are!). I’m not sure if that would really be workable for the amounts of money involved, but some kind of donation cap could be plausibly envisaged.
The original idea of EA, as I see it, was that it was supposed to make the kind of research work done at philanthropic foundations open and usable for well-to-do-but-not-Bill-Gates-rich Westerners
This part doesn’t resonate with me. I worked at 80k early on (~2014) and have been in the community for a long time. Then, I think the main thing was excitement over “doing good the most effectively”. The assumption was that most philanthropic foundations weren’t doing a good job—not that we wanted regular people to participate, specifically. I think then, most community members would be pretty excited about the idea of the key EA ideas growing as quickly as possible, and billionaires would help with that.
GiveWell specifically was started with a focus on smaller donors, but there was a always a separation between them and EA.
(I am of course more sympathetic to a general skepticism around any billionaire or other overwhelming donor. Though I’m personally also skeptical of most other donation options to other degrees—I want some pragmatic options that can understand the various strengths and weaknesses of different donors and respond accordingly)
GiveWell specifically was started with a focus on smaller donors, but there was a always a separation between them and EA.
… I’m confused by what you would mean by early EA then? As the history of the movement is generally told it started by the merger of three strands: GiveWell (which attempt to make charity effectiveness research available for well-to-do-but-not-Bill-Gates-rich Westerners), GWWC (which attempt to convince well-to-do-but-not-Bill-Gates-rich Westerners to give to charity too), and the rationalists and proto-longtermists (not relevant here).
Criticisms of ineffective charities (stereotypically, the Make a Wish Foundation) could be part of that, but they’re specifically the charities well-to-do-but-not-Bill-Gates-rich Westerners tend to donate to when they do donate, I don’t think people were going out claiming the biggest billionaire philanthropic foundations (like, say, well, the Bill Gates Foundation) didn’t knew what to do with their money.
Quickly: 1. Some of this gets into semantics. There are some things that are more “key inspirations for what was formally called EA” and other things that “were formally called EA, or called themselves EA.” GiveWell was highly influential around EA, but I think it was created before EA was coined, and I don’t think they publicly associated as “EA” for some time (if ever). 2. I think we’re straying from the main topic at this point. One issue is that while I think we disagree on some of the details/semantics of early EA, I also don’t think that matters much for the greater issue at hand. “The specific reason why the EA community technically started” is pretty different from “what people in this scene currently care about.”
Didn’t really want to in depth go beyond what @Ozzie Gooen already said and mentioning the event that originally prompted that line of thought, but added a link to @David Thorstad’s sequence on the subject.
Someone wrote to me in a PM that they think one good reason for EA donors not to have funded EA community projects was because OP was funding them, and arguably there are other more neglected projects.
I do think this is a big reason, and I was aware of this before. It’s a complex area.
At the same time, I think the current situation is really not the best, and can easily imagine healthier environments where motivated funders and community would have found good arrangements here.
I also take responsibility for not doing a better job around this (and more).
I want to see more discussion on how EA can better diversify and have strategically-chosen distance from OP/GV.
One reason is that it seems like multiple people at OP/GV have basically said that they want this (or at least, many of the key aspects of this).
A big challenge is that it seems very awkward for someone to talk and work on this issue, if one is employed under the OP/GV umbrella. This is a pretty clear conflict of interest. CEA is currently the main organization for “EA”, but I believe CEA is majority funded by OP, with several other clear strong links. (Board members, and employees often go between these orgs).
In addition, it clearly seems like OP/GV wants certain separation to help from their side. The close link means that problems with EA often spills over to the reputation of OP/GV.
I’d love to see some other EA donors and community members step up here. I think it’s kind of damning how little EA money comes from community members or sources other than OP right now. Long-term this seems pretty unhealthy.
One proposal is to have some “mini-CEA” that’s non-large-donor funded. This group’s main job would be to understand and act on EA interests that organizations funded by large donors would have trouble with.
I know Oliver Habryka has said that he thinks it would be good for the EA Forum to also be pulled away from large donors. This seems good to me, though likely expensive (I believe this team is sizable).
Another task here is to have more non-large-donor funding for CEA.
For large donors, one way of dealing with potential conflicts of interest would be doing funding in large blocks, like a 4-year contribution. But I realize that OP might sensibly be reluctant to do this at this point.
Also, related—I’d really hope that the EA Infrastructure Fund could help here, but I don’t know if this is possible for them. I’m dramatically more excited about large long-term projects on making EA more community-driven and independent, and/or well-managed, than I am the kinds of small projects they seem to fund. I don’t think they’ve ever funded CEA, despite that CEA might now represent the majority of funding on the direct EA community. I’d encourage people from this fund to think through this issue and be clear about what potential projects they might be excited for, around this topic.
Backing up a bit—it seems to me like EA is really remarkably powerless for what it is, outside of the OP/GV funding stream right now. This seems quite wrong to me, like large mistakes were made. Part of me think that positive change here is somewhat hopeless at this point (I’ve been thinking about this space for a few years now but haven’t taken much action because of uncertainty on this), but part of me also thinks that with the right cleverness or talent, there could be some major changes.
Another quick thought: This seems like a good topic for a “Debate Week”, in case anyone from that team is seeing this.
(To add clarity—I’m not suggesting that OP drops it’s funding of EA! It’s more that I think that non-OP donors should step up more, and that key EA services should be fairly independent.)
Yeah I agree that funding diversification is a big challenge for EA, and I agree that OP/GV also want more funders in this space. In the last MCF, which is run by CEA, the two main themes were brand and funding, which are two of CEA’s internal priorities. (Though note that in the past year we were more focused on hiring to set strong foundations for ops/systems within CEA.) Not to say that CEA has this covered though — I’d be happy to see more work in this space overall!
Personally, I worry that funding diversification is a bit downstream of improving the EA brand — it may be hard for people to be excited to support EA community building projects if they feel like others dislike it, and it may be hard to convince new people/orgs to fund EA community things if they read stuff about how EA is bad. So I’m personally more optimistic about prioritizing brand-related work (one example being highlighting EA Forum content on other platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Substack).
There was some prior relevant discussion in November 2023 in this CEA fundraising thread, such as my comment here about funder diversity at CEA. Basically, I didn’t think that there was much meaningful difference between a CEA that was (e.g.) 90% OP/GV funded vs. 70% OP/GV funded. So I think the only practical way for that percentage to move enough to make a real difference would be both an increase in community contributions/control and CEA going on a fairly severe diet.
As for EAIF, expected total grantmaking was ~$2.5MM for 2025. Even if a sizable fraction of that went to CEA, it would only be perhaps 1-2% of CEA’s 2023 budget of $31.4MM.
I recall participating in some discussions here about identifying core infrastructure that should be prioritized for broad-based funding for democratic and/or epistemic reasons. Identifying items in the low millions for more independent funding seems more realistic than meaningful changes in CEA’s funding base. The Forum strikes me as an obvious candidate, but a community-funded version would presumably need to run on a significantly leaner budget than I understand to be currently in place.
Personally, I’m optimistic that this could be done in specific ways that could be better than one might initially presume. One wouldn’t fund “CEA”—they could instead fund specific programs in CEA, for instance. I imagine that people at CEA might have some good ideas of specific things they could fund that OP isn’t a good fit for.
One complication is that arguably we’d want to do this in a way that’s “fair” to OP. Like, it doesn’t seem “fair” for OP to pay for all the stuff that both OP+EA agrees on, and EA only to fund the stuff that EA likes. But this really depends on what OP is comfortable with.
Lastly, I’d flag that CEA being 90% OP/GV funded really can be quite different than 70% in some important ways, still. For example, if OP/GV were to leave—then CEA might be able to go to 30% of its size—a big loss, but much better than 10% of its size.
That may be viable, although I think it would be better for both sides if these programs were not in CEA but instead in an independent organization. For the small-donor side, it limits the risk that their monies will just funge against OP/GV’s, or that OP/GV will influence how the community-funded program is run (e.g., through its influence on CEA management officials). On the OP/GV side, organizational separation is probably necessary to provide some of the reputational distance it may be looking for. That being said, given that small/medium donors have never to my knowledge been given this kind of opportunity, and the significant coordination obstacles involved, I would not characterize them not having taken it as indicative of much in particular.
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More broadly, I think this is a challenging conversation without nailing down the objective better—and that may be hard for us on the Forum to do. Without any inside knowledge, my guess is that OP/GV’s concerns are not primarily focused on the existence of discrete programs “that OP isn’t a good fit for” or a desire not to fund them.
For example, a recent public comment from Dustin contain the following sentence: “But I can’t e.g. get SBF to not do podcasts nor stop the EA (or two?) that seem to have joined DOGE and started laying waste to USAID.” The concerns implied by that statement aren’t really fixable by the community funding discrete programs, or even by shelving discrete programs altogether. Not being the flagship EA organization’s predominant donor may not be sufficient for getting reputational distance from that sort of thing, but it’s probably a necessary condition.
I speculate that other concerns may be about the way certain core programs are run—e.g., I would not be too surprised to hear that OP/GV would rather not have particular controversial content allowed on the Forum, or have advocates for certain political positions admitted to EAGs, or whatever. I’m not going to name the content I have in mind in an attempt not to be drawn into an object-level discussion on those topics, but I wouldn’t want my own money being used to platform such content or help its adherents network either. Anyway, these types of issues can probably be fixed by running the program with community/other-donor funding in a separate organization, but these programs are expensive to run. And the community / non-OP/GV donors are not a monolithic constituency; I suspect that at least a significant minority of the community would share OP/GV’s concerns on the merits.
I agree—the linked comment was focused more on the impact of funding diversity on conflicts of interest and cause prio. But the amount of smaller-EA-donor dollars to go around is limited,[1] and so we have to consider the opportunity cost of diverting them to fund CEA or similar meta work on an ongoing basis. OP/GV is usually a pretty responsible funder, so the odds of them suddenly defunding CEA without providing some sort of notice and transitional funding seems low.
For instance, I believe GWWC pledgers gave about $32MM/year on average from 2020-2022 [p. 12 of this impact assessment], and not all pledgers are EAs.
I think you bring up a bunch of good points. I’d hope that any concrete steps on this would take these sorts of considerations in mind.
> The concerns implied by that statement aren’t really fixable by the community funding discrete programs, or even by shelving discrete programs altogether. Not being the flagship EA organization’s predominant donor may not be sufficient for getting reputational distance from that sort of thing, but it’s probably a necessary condition.
I wasn’t claiming that this funding change would fix all of OP/GV’s concerns. I assume that would take a great deal of work, among many different projects/initiatives.
One thing I care about is that someone is paid to start thinking about this critically and extensively, and I imagine they’d be more effective if not under the OP umbrella. So one of the early steps to take is just trying to find a system that could help figure out future steps.
> I speculate that other concerns may be about the way certain core programs are run—e.g., I would not be too surprised to hear that OP/GV would rather not have particular controversial content allowed on the Forum, or have advocates for certain political positions admitted to EAGs, or whatever.
I think this raises an important and somewhat awkward point that levels of separation between EA and OP/GV would make it harder for OP/GV to have as much control over these areas, and there are times where they wouldn’t be as happy with the results.
Of course:
1. If this is the case, it implies that the EA community does want some concretely different things, so from the standpoint of the EA community, this would make funding more appealing.
2. I think in the big picture, it seems like OP/GV doesn’t want to be held as responsible for the EA community. Ultimately there’s a conflict here—on one hand, they don’t want to be seen as responsible for the EA community—on the other hand, they might prefer situations where they can have a very large amount of control over the EA community. I hope it can be understood that these two desires can’t easily go together. Perhaps they won’t be willing to compromise on the latter, but also will complain about the former. That might well happen, but I’d hope there could be a better arrangement made.
> OP/GV is usually a pretty responsible funder, so the odds of them suddenly defunding CEA without providing some sort of notice and transitional funding seems low.
I largely agree. That said, if I were CEA, I’d still feel fairly uncomfortable. When the vast majority of your funding comes from any one donor, you’ll need to place a whole lot of trust in them.
I’d imagine that if I were working within CEA, I’d be incredibly precautious not to upset OP or GV. I’d also imagine this to mess with my epistemics/communication/actions.
Also, of course, I’d flag that the world can change quickly. Maybe Trump will go on a push against EA one day, and put OP in an awkward spot, for example.
I agree with the approach’s direction, but this premise doesn’t seem very helpful in shaping the debate. It doesn’t seem that there is a right level of funding for meta EA or that this is what we currently have.
My perception is that OP has specific goals, one of which is to reduce GCR risk. As there are not so many high absorbency funding opportunities and a lot of uncertainty in the field, they focus more on capacity building, of which EA has proven to be a solid investment in talent pipeline building.
If this is true, then the level of funding we are currently seeing is downstream from OP’s overall yearly spending and their goals. Other funders will come to very different conclusions as to why they would want to fund EA meta and to what extent.
If you’re a meta funder who agrees with GCR risks, you might see opportunities that either don’t want OPs’ money, that OP doesn’t want to fund, or that want to keep OPs’ funding under a certain bar. These are more neglected, but they are more cost-effective for you as they are not as fungible.
At the last, MCF funding diversification and the EA brand were the two main topics, but to me, meta-funding diversification seems much harder, especially for areas under the EA brand.
I think you raise some good points on why diversification as I discuss it is difficult and why it hasn’t been done more.
Quickly:
> I agree with the approach’s direction, but this premise doesn’t seem very helpful in shaping the debate.
Sorry, I don’t understand this. What is “the debate” that you are referring to?
> At the last, MCF funding diversification and the EA brand were the two main topics
This is good to know. While mentioning MCF, I would bring up that it seems bad to me that MCF seems to be very much within the OP umbrella, as I understand it. I believe that it was funded by OP or CEA, and the people who set it up were employed by CEA, which was primarily funded by OP. Most of the attendees seem like people at OP or CEA, or else heavily funded by OP.
I have a lot of respect for many of these people and am not claiming anything nefarious. But I do think that this acts as a good example of the sort of thing that seems important for the EA community, and also that OP has an incredibly large amount of control over. It seems like an obvious potential conflict of interest.
I just meant the discussion you wanted to see; I probably used the wrong synonym.
I generally believe that EA is effective at being pragmatic, and in that regard, I think it’s important for the key organizations that are both giving and receiving funding in this area to coordinate, especially with topics like funding diversification. I agree that this is not the ideal world, but this goes back to the main topic.
For reference, I agree it’s important for these people to be meeting with each other. I wasn’t disagreeing with that.
However, I would hope that over time, there would be more people brought in who aren’t in the immediate OP umbrella, to key discussions of the future of EA. At least have like 10% of the audience be strongly/mostly independent or something.
I think its better to start something new. Reform is hard but no one is going to stop you from making a new charity. The EA brand isn’t in the best shape. Imo the “new thing” can take money from individual EAs but shouldn’t accept anything connected to OpenPhil/CEA/Dustin/etc.
If you start new you can start with a better culture.
AIM seems to be doing this quite well in the GHW/AW spaces, but lacks the literal openness of the EA community-as-idea (for better or worse)
I mean Dustin Moskovitz used to come on the forum and beg people to do earn to give yet I don’t think the number of donors has grown that much. More people should go to Jane Street and do Y-Combinator but it feels as though that’s taboo to say for some reason.
I have said this in other spaces since the FTX collapse: The original idea of EA, as I see it, was that it was supposed to make the kind of research work done at philanthropic foundations open and usable for well-to-do-but-not-Bill-Gates-rich Westerners. While it’s inadvisable to outright condemn billionaires using EA work to orient their donations for… obvious reasons, I do think there is a moral hazard in billionaires funding meta EA. Now, the most extreme policy would be to have meta EA be solely funded by membership dues (as plenty organizations are!). I’m not sure if that would really be workable for the amounts of money involved, but some kind of donation cap could be plausibly envisaged.
This part doesn’t resonate with me. I worked at 80k early on (~2014) and have been in the community for a long time. Then, I think the main thing was excitement over “doing good the most effectively”. The assumption was that most philanthropic foundations weren’t doing a good job—not that we wanted regular people to participate, specifically. I think then, most community members would be pretty excited about the idea of the key EA ideas growing as quickly as possible, and billionaires would help with that.
GiveWell specifically was started with a focus on smaller donors, but there was a always a separation between them and EA.
(I am of course more sympathetic to a general skepticism around any billionaire or other overwhelming donor. Though I’m personally also skeptical of most other donation options to other degrees—I want some pragmatic options that can understand the various strengths and weaknesses of different donors and respond accordingly)
… I’m confused by what you would mean by early EA then? As the history of the movement is generally told it started by the merger of three strands: GiveWell (which attempt to make charity effectiveness research available for well-to-do-but-not-Bill-Gates-rich Westerners), GWWC (which attempt to convince well-to-do-but-not-Bill-Gates-rich Westerners to give to charity too), and the rationalists and proto-longtermists (not relevant here).
Criticisms of ineffective charities (stereotypically, the Make a Wish Foundation) could be part of that, but they’re specifically the charities well-to-do-but-not-Bill-Gates-rich Westerners tend to donate to when they do donate, I don’t think people were going out claiming the biggest billionaire philanthropic foundations (like, say, well, the Bill Gates Foundation) didn’t knew what to do with their money.
Quickly:
1. Some of this gets into semantics. There are some things that are more “key inspirations for what was formally called EA” and other things that “were formally called EA, or called themselves EA.” GiveWell was highly influential around EA, but I think it was created before EA was coined, and I don’t think they publicly associated as “EA” for some time (if ever).
2. I think we’re straying from the main topic at this point. One issue is that while I think we disagree on some of the details/semantics of early EA, I also don’t think that matters much for the greater issue at hand. “The specific reason why the EA community technically started” is pretty different from “what people in this scene currently care about.”
It might be helpful to clarify what you mean by “moral hazard” here.
Didn’t really want to in depth go beyond what @Ozzie Gooen already said and mentioning the event that originally prompted that line of thought, but added a link to @David Thorstad’s sequence on the subject.
Someone wrote to me in a PM that they think one good reason for EA donors not to have funded EA community projects was because OP was funding them, and arguably there are other more neglected projects.
I do think this is a big reason, and I was aware of this before. It’s a complex area.
At the same time, I think the current situation is really not the best, and can easily imagine healthier environments where motivated funders and community would have found good arrangements here.
I also take responsibility for not doing a better job around this (and more).