You might well think that eg MIRI’s agenda should be more widely worked on, or that it would be better if MIRI had more sources of funding. But it doesn’t seem worrying that that isn’t case.
This consideration seems important and I couldn’t understand it (I’m talking about the general consideration, not its specific application to MIRI’s agenda). I’d be happy to read more about it.
Sorry my example wasn’t clear. I meant to be distinguishing the level of granularity of the intervention, and saying that the more specific the intervention, the less worrying it seems if there’s only one funder in the space.
A clearer example might be: if the Gates foundation was the only funder of malaria interventions, that would be really bad not just because it would mean insufficient funding was going to fighting malaria, but also because they might focus on the wrong types of interventions, and because it’s showing a really surprising lack of interest in funding malaria interventions by the rest of the world. On the other hand, if there’s some particular malaria vaccine being researched and the funding from that is all coming from Gates, you might think that was less worrying: the optimal level of funding for such a vaccine is much lower than for the whole set of malaria interventions, and it’s less surprising that something that specific is funded by just one donor so it’s less likely to indicate systemic problems with the malaria-funding-space.
For similar reasons, it would seem much more worrying to me if there were only one funder for ‘EA community building’ than if there were just one funder for (for example) EA Global.
(unrelated to the OP)
This consideration seems important and I couldn’t understand it (I’m talking about the general consideration, not its specific application to MIRI’s agenda). I’d be happy to read more about it.
Sorry my example wasn’t clear. I meant to be distinguishing the level of granularity of the intervention, and saying that the more specific the intervention, the less worrying it seems if there’s only one funder in the space.
A clearer example might be: if the Gates foundation was the only funder of malaria interventions, that would be really bad not just because it would mean insufficient funding was going to fighting malaria, but also because they might focus on the wrong types of interventions, and because it’s showing a really surprising lack of interest in funding malaria interventions by the rest of the world. On the other hand, if there’s some particular malaria vaccine being researched and the funding from that is all coming from Gates, you might think that was less worrying: the optimal level of funding for such a vaccine is much lower than for the whole set of malaria interventions, and it’s less surprising that something that specific is funded by just one donor so it’s less likely to indicate systemic problems with the malaria-funding-space.
For similar reasons, it would seem much more worrying to me if there were only one funder for ‘EA community building’ than if there were just one funder for (for example) EA Global.
Thanks for this helpful explanation!
Do you mean about the object level (MIRI in particular) or the meta-level (diversification of funding not being ideal)?
The latter (not MIRI in particular).