It’s not clear what effect this has had, if any. I am personally somewhat surprised by this—I would have expected more people to stop donating to us.
I asked Rob Bensinger about this; he summarized it as “We announced nondisclosed-by-default in April 2017, and we suspected that this would make fundraising harder. In fact, though, we received significantly more funding in 2017 (https://intelligence.org/2019/05/31/2018-in-review/#2018-finances), and have continued to receive strong support since then. I don’t know that there’s any causal relationship between those two facts; e.g., the obvious thing to look at in understanding the 2017 spike was the cryptocurrency price spike that year. And there are other factors that changed around the same time too, e.g., Colm [who works at MIRI on fundraising among other things] joining MIRI in late 2016.“
It’s not clear what effect this has had, if any. I am personally somewhat surprised by this—I would have expected more people to stop donating to us.
I asked Rob Bensinger about this; he summarized it as “We announced nondisclosed-by-default in April 2017, and we suspected that this would make fundraising harder. In fact, though, we received significantly more funding in 2017 (https://intelligence.org/2019/05/31/2018-in-review/#2018-finances), and have continued to receive strong support since then. I don’t know that there’s any causal relationship between those two facts; e.g., the obvious thing to look at in understanding the 2017 spike was the cryptocurrency price spike that year. And there are other factors that changed around the same time too, e.g., Colm [who works at MIRI on fundraising among other things] joining MIRI in late 2016.“