One idea I’ve had to try and resolve this issue for donors is to have all private grants audited by a trusted animal welfare person who doesn’t work on the fund (e.g. Lewis Bollard) and commit to publishing their comments in payout reports. I think they’d be able to say things like “I agree that the private grants should be kept private and on average they were about as cost-effective as the public grants”.
I’ll take <agree> <disagree> votes to indicate how compelling this would be to readers.
I would find this compelling but I think there are pretty strong social incentives to not disagree publicly with the fund managers so you either need a mechanism to get around that or need someone who is very happy to disagree publicly and incur social/reputational costs
Personally I don’t believe in a “trusted person”, as a concept. I think EA has had its fun trying to be a high trust environment where some large things are kept private, and it backfired horribly.
I’ll take <agree> <disagree> votes to indicate how compelling this would be to readers.
That was the aim of my comment as well, so I do hope more people actually vote on it.
One idea I’ve had to try and resolve this issue for donors is to have all private grants audited by a trusted animal welfare person who doesn’t work on the fund (e.g. Lewis Bollard) and commit to publishing their comments in payout reports. I think they’d be able to say things like “I agree that the private grants should be kept private and on average they were about as cost-effective as the public grants”.
I’ll take <agree> <disagree> votes to indicate how compelling this would be to readers.
I would find this compelling but I think there are pretty strong social incentives to not disagree publicly with the fund managers so you either need a mechanism to get around that or need someone who is very happy to disagree publicly and incur social/reputational costs
Personally I don’t believe in a “trusted person”, as a concept. I think EA has had its fun trying to be a high trust environment where some large things are kept private, and it backfired horribly.
That was the aim of my comment as well, so I do hope more people actually vote on it.
I think a reasonably independent reviewer who is not perfectly trustworthy would still be better than no reviewer at all.