I’m not super motivated+available at the moment to do a full write up/analysis, but I’m quite skeptical of the idea that the default/equilibrium in EA would trend towards 100% grift, regardless of whether that is the standard in companies (which I also dispute, although I don’t disagree that as an organization becomes larger self-management becomes increasingly complex—perhaps more complex than can be efficiently handled by humans running on weak ancestral-social hardware).
It might be plausible that “grift” becomes more of a problem, approaching (say) 25% of spending, but there are a variety of strong horizontal (peer-to-peer) and vertical checks on blatant grift, and at some point if someone wants to just thoroughly scam people it seems like it would be more profitable to do it outside of EA.
I’d be happy to see someone else do a more thorough response, though.
Worrying about the percent of spending misses the main problems, e.g. donors who notice the increasing grift become less willing to trust the claims of new organizations, thereby missing some of the best opportunities.
I’m not super motivated+available at the moment to do a full write up/analysis, but I’m quite skeptical of the idea that the default/equilibrium in EA would trend towards 100% grift, regardless of whether that is the standard in companies (which I also dispute, although I don’t disagree that as an organization becomes larger self-management becomes increasingly complex—perhaps more complex than can be efficiently handled by humans running on weak ancestral-social hardware).
It might be plausible that “grift” becomes more of a problem, approaching (say) 25% of spending, but there are a variety of strong horizontal (peer-to-peer) and vertical checks on blatant grift, and at some point if someone wants to just thoroughly scam people it seems like it would be more profitable to do it outside of EA.
I’d be happy to see someone else do a more thorough response, though.
Worrying about the percent of spending misses the main problems, e.g. donors who notice the increasing grift become less willing to trust the claims of new organizations, thereby missing some of the best opportunities.