Thanks very much for writing this up and I’m really excited and hopeful to see CEA engaging with this.
Respondents mentioned several times that CEA “overpromised and under delivered”.
I think this has been my key frustration with CEA over the past many years. More frustratingly, I think CEA has frequently tried to “acquire” core activities from other organizations, sometimes using fairly overt pressure. In many cases this has turned out well, but in many cases this has pushed out another group that may have done a good job only for the newly acquired activity to end up “under delivered” by CEA. I’d be curious if you’ve thought any more about decentralizing some of what CEA does?
Of course, speaking only for myself here as a “concerned citizen”, purely on an individual basis. Also apologies if this feels snipey—just something I needed to get off my chest.
I’d be curious if you’ve thought any more about decentralizing some of what CEA does?
I’m glad you raised this, Peter. We have been thinking carefully about where our comparative advantage lies and which projects we are best placed to do. As mentioned above:
In 2019, we have made a concerted effort to be careful with our commitments and only agree to things we are confident we can deliver. This is reflected in internal processes, such as a commitments project in Asana where we record and regularly track progress on any commitments we have made, as well as external humility in scaling back the number of programs and promises we make.
This has resulted in us taking on fewer projects in 2019, and I expect the trend to continue in 2020. If people have particular opinions about which aspects of our work would be most valuable to “decentralize” (and what “decentralization” looks like), we would love to hear that.
Also happy to see this and the mistakes page (which I just realized existed). CEA has a pretty important but difficult position.
I would also be excited about this eventually getting more specific, though I realize that honesty does come with challenges. For instance, on the mistakes page, there’s the shortcoming “We were too slow to distribute funds to student and local groups.” This is obviously quite vague. It doesn’t say when this happened or how big of an issue this was.
Also, one quick idea: I could imagine it may be worthwhile to hire external consultants or eventually organize a semi-extensive project to better understand what the experience of “joining the Effective Altruism movement” is like and trying to improve it accordingly. Service design, for instance, is used to understand how people go through complex experiences, like finding out about, traveling to, and experiencing Disneyland. Here’s a page on it’s use for UK government services. Perhaps similar could be done to analyze all of the pain points for possible new enthusiasts. I imagine there are a lot of pain points that may not be obvious, even to people experienced with things.
Thanks for the suggestion, Ozzie! We agree it’s important that we understand community members’ experiences. I appreciate the pointer to Service Design.
We are working on an update to the mistakes page that will include more data and more recent issues, but I’m not certain if/when we’ll revise that particular item on the mistakes page. Still, I’ve noted the request—thanks.
I’m glad to see this! I feel a bit confused about some of the areas that were included in the discussion. Why did you decide to include EAs being considered nice, or EAs being considered unwelcoming, in a document that’s primarily about CEA’s successes and failures?
I want to echo this. I would love to see CEA talk more about what they see as their mistakes and achievements, but this felt like a confusing mixture of feedback about some aspects of CEA (mostly EA Global, EA Forum, and the Community Health team) and some general feedback about the EA community that CEA only has partial control over. While CEA occupies an important position in EA, there are many factors beyond CEA that contribute to whether EA community members are smart and thoughtful or whether they’re not welcoming enough.
Ah, I can see why that question would come up! I didn’t see this document as “primarily about CEA’s successes and failures” – about half of the questions I asked were targeted towards things CEA directly does, but as you have noticed, about half were about the EA community in general.
As our goal is to grow and maintain the EA community, it’s important for us to understand how that community is functioning—even the aspects not directly related to CEA.
We have another post forthcoming that’s focused more specifically on CEA, and will cover the kinds of issues noted on our “mistakes” page.
Thanks for the explanation. I can understand why you’d want to publish all of the interview results in one post.
However, when that post is titled ‘feedback for CEA’, it looks like you believe that you’re responsible for the friendliness of the EA community. It’s… kind of offensive? In my view, CEA has very little to do with how friendly or unfriendly I am. This sort of information should be shared on the Forum as feedback for us, rather than treated primarily as feedback for CEA.
It would probably have been easiest to make the distinction between feedback on community health and feedback on CEA by posting to separate articles, but it could have also been accomplished in the introduction.
(Along the same lines, I’d like more detail on specific positives and negatives about community health, especially in London. I feel like local community members are the ones who need to take the feedback forward, so we need to have access to as much quality information as possible.)
However, when that post is titled ‘feedback for CEA’, it looks like you believe that you’re responsible for the friendliness of the EA community.
I think there may be a misunderstanding – the title of this post is “Feedback Collected by CEA”, not “for” CEA.
It would probably have been easiest to make the distinction between feedback on community health and feedback on CEA by posting to separate articles, but it could have also been accomplished in the introduction.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will keep this in mind for future articles.
(Along the same lines, I’d like more detail on specific positives and negatives about community health, especially in London. I feel like local community members are the ones who need to take the feedback forward, so we need to have access to as much quality information as possible.)
I agree that locale-specific information is important. You are probably already aware of this, but for other readers who are not: the EA Survey contains a bunch of data about geographic differences in EA. Your posts on Londondemographics come to mind as one example of local analysis that I would like to see more of.
I think there may be a misunderstanding – the title of this post is “Feedback Collected by CEA”, not “for” CEA.
This is fair, but I want to give some examples of why I thought this document was about feedback about CEA, with the hope of helping with communication around this in the future. Even after your clarification, the document still gives a strong impression to me of the feedback being about CEA, rather than about the community in general. Below are some quotes that make it sound that way to me, with emphasis added:
Summary of Core Feedback Collected by CEA in Spring/Summer 2019
The title doesn’t mention what the feedback is about. I think most people would assume that it refers to feedback about CEA, rather than the community overall. That’s what I assumed.
CEA collects feedback from community members in a variety of ways (see “CEA’s Feedback Process” below). In the spring and summer of 2019, we reached out to about a dozen people who work in senior positions in EA-aligned organizations to solicit their feedback. We were particularly interested to get their take on execution, communication, and branding issues in EA. Despite this focus, the interviews were open-ended and tended to cover the areas each person felt was important.
This document is a summary of their feedback. The feedback is presented “as is,” without any endorsement by CEA.
It’s not clearly stated what the feedback is about (“CEA collects feedback”, “solicit their feedback” without elaboration of what the feedback is about). The closest it gets to specifying what feedback might pertain to is when it’s mentioned that CEA was particularly interested in feedback on execution, communication, and branding issues in EA. This is still fairly vague, and “branding” to me implies that the feedback is about CEA. It does say ”...issues in EA”, but I didn’t pay that much importance.
This post is the first in a series of upcoming posts where we aim to share summaries of the feedback we have received.
In general, I assume that feedback to an organization is about the organization itself.
CEA has, historically, been much better at collecting feedback than at publishing the results of what we collect.
While unclear again about what “feedback” refers to, in general I would expect this to mean feedback about CEA.
As some examples of other sources of feedback CEA has collected this year:
We have received about 2,000 questions, comments and suggestions via Intercom (a chat widget on many of CEA’s websites) so far this year
We hosted a group leaders retreat (27 attendees), a community builders retreat (33 attendees), and had calls with organizers from 20 EA groups asking about what’s currently going on in their groups and how CEA can be helpful
Calls with 18 of our most prolific EA Forum users, to ask how the Forum can be made better.
A “medium-term events” survey, where we asked everyone who had attended an Individual Outreach retreat how the retreat impacted them 6-12 months later. (53 responses)
EA Global has an advisory board of ~25 people who are asked for opinions about content, conference size, format, etc., and we receive 200-400 responses to the EA Global survey from attendees each time.
All of these are examples of feedback about CEA or its events and activities. There are no examples of feedback about the community.
I think the confusion comes from the lack of clear elaboration in the title and/or beginning of the document of what the scope of the feedback was. Clarifying this in the future should eliminate this problem.
Summary of Core Feedback Collected by CEA in Spring/Summer 2019
I understand CEA to have ask people questions about EA broadly and CEA specifically, and this heading says to me that the OP contains a summary of both types of feedback, not just the former. If that wasn’t intended then please edit to say something closer to
Summary of Broad Feedback About EA, Collected in Spring/Summer 2019
I was glad to see this included in the post, although I can see why it could seem weird / surprising. Since an important part of CEA’s role is to grow the EA community in a healthy way, it seems like an important outcome measure of whether CEA is doing its job is whether the EA community is in fact growing in a healthy way (and more specifically what parts of that are going well and badly). That seems like a particularly hard outcome to measure, and it would seem easy and understandable to blame others the parts that aren’t going well rather than taking responsibility and thinking about how to improve things. It’s great that you’re finding ways to get a sense of how things are going, and figuring out what CEA can do to improve things.
> We think individuals and leaders can make a difference in their own communities and organizations in this regard, and hope that our efforts encourage others to do the same. As some examples:
I particularly appreciate this, and the specific examples given. Something I struggle with is that I would like the EA community to be welcoming to new people, and for it to be easy for people who have been around it for ages to mix with people who have just starting to explore it. But I’m somewhat shy, and typically find it tiring talking to new people. Since my day job involves talking to a lot of new people (I’m an adviser at 80,000 Hours), going to meet ups for new EAs outside of work typically feels daunting rather than appealing. I worry that a lot of EAs are similar to me in being somewhat geeky and introverted, and so finding it hard and tiring to do a lot of meeting people new to EA outside work. This makes me really grateful that CEA is taking this on as a project, and thinking through systematically how to make the community more welcoming and friendly.
Thanks for this; I think engagement like this is great & would be excited to see more of it!
For example: there have been 12 posts on psychedelics on the forum in 2019, and only 4 on malaria, despite malaria being a much more mainstream cause within EA. Respondents were particularly concerned that newcomers may get an inaccurate picture of what the community values.
There’s a general dynamic whereby new & controversial stuff gets more attention than old & agreed-upon stuff.
Given that the Forum is a clearinghouse for new EA thought, I wouldn’t expect Forum content to reflect the distribution of what the community values.
Thanks, Milan! I agree that one impact of the Forum is sharing new ideas, and there are other impacts as well – my colleagues JP and Aaron have written some of these here.
I think our respondents were pointing out that, regardless of what the forum “should” be for, newcomers are going to assume that the content is representative of EA. One project we are working on is putting a new version of the handbook on the Forum, which we hope will provide newcomers with a more representative introduction to EA, while still keeping the existing aspects of the Forum for those who want new articles.
If you have more feedback on the goals of the Forum, we would be excited to hear them!
Thanks Ben. I’m very happy to see CEA gathering and publishing all this detailed feedback.
I imagine it is easier to get feedback from the people that are already communicating the most with you. I was wondering whether or how much you have tried to get feedback from people and groups in the EA community who you have less contact with.
For example, I imagine that the group leaders attending the retreats (and possibly those having the calls) may be the group leaders that already get the most support from CEA. The comment that made think this was
most of our groups, including some of our strongest groups at key universities, have never received a visit from CEA staff
While it would be wonderful if CEA was able to visit groups in person, that seems like an unusually large ask, so I was surprised it was singled out in the feedback. I believe there are groups who have had little or no personal contact with CEA (email or call), and this seems like a more important and easier thing to address.
Thanks for asking about that. I agree that calls and emails are valuable, in addition to in-person visits. I think it’s accurate that there are groups who would say they’d like more support from CEA, of various forms. The respondents here weren’t current group leaders, though, so I believe the comment you’re pointing to might not provide much data for your question. But it’s a good question, and we’ve invested this year in building connections with more groups.
For example: Alex Barry, our Groups Associate, worked with LEAN on a group organizers survey this year, so we could get feedback from a wide range of groups and update our list of contacts. Alex has also had about 100 calls with group organizers this year, answered ~500 emails from group organizers, and had about 50 meetings during EA Globals. He can be booked by emailing groups@effectivealtruism.org.
We also have a Slack channel for group organizers, as well as a Facebook group. This post on our groups support has more information – if you are a group organizer, please check out the resources listed there or let others know about them!
Sorry, fixed to be less jargony! CEA’s former Individual Outreach (IO) team did a series of retreats on different topics in 2018. For example, the Ops Retreat brought together a group of people interested in finding EA operations roles; it included a workshop aimed at improving ops skills and chances to talk with different orgs that were planning to hire for ops positions.
49% of speakers at EA Global London 2019 were female (compared to 29% of respondents to the 2018 EA Survey who identified as female). 26% of speakers at EA Global London 2019 were people of color (compared to 22% of EA Survey 2018 respondents who identified as nonwhite).
Do you have analogous stats for EA Global SF 2019?
Thanks for the question! 38% of confirmed speakers at EAG SF 2019 were female and 27% were people of color. (NB: The final numbers may have been slightly different than the confirmed count, due to last-minute cancellations.)
Respondents mentioned two broad concerns about EA Funds:
...
Funds was targeted to meet the needs of a small set of donors, but was advertised to the entire EA community.
.
Many donors may not want their donations going towards “unusual, risky, or time-sensitive projects”, and respondents were concerned that the Funds were advertised to too broad a set of donors, including those for whom the Funds may not have been a good fit.
.
we do not currently proactively advertise EA Funds.
I’d be happy to learn more about these considerations/concerns.
It seems to me that many of the interventions that are a good idea from a ‘long-term future perspective’ are unusual, risky, or time-sensitive. Is this an unusual view in the EA sphere?
Thanks for the question! There are different degrees and types of unusual-ness and riskiness. For example, as a reason why someone may choose not to donate to the Long-Term Future Fund we state:
First, they may prefer to support established organizations. The fund’s most recent grants have mostly funded newer organizations and individual researchers. This trend is likely to continue, provided that promising opportunities continue to exist.
Established organizations focused on the long-term future such as the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) are, in some ways, “unusual” and “risky”, but some donors may still prefer to donate to FHI instead of an independent researcher with a short track record, and those donors may not be a good fit for donating to the Long-Term Future Fund.
As a side note: we have been brainstorming internally about the correct adjective which would differentiate between e.g. FHI and an independent researcher. As you noted, “risk” is not exactly the dimension along which these two donation targets differ – if anyone has a better suggestion, we would appreciate hearing it.
To clarify my view, I do think there is a large variance in risk among ‘long-term future interventions’ (such as donating to FHI, or donating to fund an independent researcher with a short track record).
Thanks very much for writing this up and I’m really excited and hopeful to see CEA engaging with this.
I think this has been my key frustration with CEA over the past many years. More frustratingly, I think CEA has frequently tried to “acquire” core activities from other organizations, sometimes using fairly overt pressure. In many cases this has turned out well, but in many cases this has pushed out another group that may have done a good job only for the newly acquired activity to end up “under delivered” by CEA. I’d be curious if you’ve thought any more about decentralizing some of what CEA does?
Of course, speaking only for myself here as a “concerned citizen”, purely on an individual basis. Also apologies if this feels snipey—just something I needed to get off my chest.
I’m glad you raised this, Peter. We have been thinking carefully about where our comparative advantage lies and which projects we are best placed to do. As mentioned above:
This has resulted in us taking on fewer projects in 2019, and I expect the trend to continue in 2020. If people have particular opinions about which aspects of our work would be most valuable to “decentralize” (and what “decentralization” looks like), we would love to hear that.
Also happy to see this and the mistakes page (which I just realized existed). CEA has a pretty important but difficult position.
I would also be excited about this eventually getting more specific, though I realize that honesty does come with challenges. For instance, on the mistakes page, there’s the shortcoming “We were too slow to distribute funds to student and local groups.” This is obviously quite vague. It doesn’t say when this happened or how big of an issue this was.
Also, one quick idea: I could imagine it may be worthwhile to hire external consultants or eventually organize a semi-extensive project to better understand what the experience of “joining the Effective Altruism movement” is like and trying to improve it accordingly. Service design, for instance, is used to understand how people go through complex experiences, like finding out about, traveling to, and experiencing Disneyland. Here’s a page on it’s use for UK government services. Perhaps similar could be done to analyze all of the pain points for possible new enthusiasts. I imagine there are a lot of pain points that may not be obvious, even to people experienced with things.
Thanks for the suggestion, Ozzie! We agree it’s important that we understand community members’ experiences. I appreciate the pointer to Service Design.
We are working on an update to the mistakes page that will include more data and more recent issues, but I’m not certain if/when we’ll revise that particular item on the mistakes page. Still, I’ve noted the request—thanks.
I’m glad to see this! I feel a bit confused about some of the areas that were included in the discussion. Why did you decide to include EAs being considered nice, or EAs being considered unwelcoming, in a document that’s primarily about CEA’s successes and failures?
I want to echo this. I would love to see CEA talk more about what they see as their mistakes and achievements, but this felt like a confusing mixture of feedback about some aspects of CEA (mostly EA Global, EA Forum, and the Community Health team) and some general feedback about the EA community that CEA only has partial control over. While CEA occupies an important position in EA, there are many factors beyond CEA that contribute to whether EA community members are smart and thoughtful or whether they’re not welcoming enough.
Ah, I can see why that question would come up! I didn’t see this document as “primarily about CEA’s successes and failures” – about half of the questions I asked were targeted towards things CEA directly does, but as you have noticed, about half were about the EA community in general.
As our goal is to grow and maintain the EA community, it’s important for us to understand how that community is functioning—even the aspects not directly related to CEA.
We have another post forthcoming that’s focused more specifically on CEA, and will cover the kinds of issues noted on our “mistakes” page.
Thanks for the explanation. I can understand why you’d want to publish all of the interview results in one post.
However, when that post is titled ‘feedback for CEA’, it looks like you believe that you’re responsible for the friendliness of the EA community. It’s… kind of offensive? In my view, CEA has very little to do with how friendly or unfriendly I am. This sort of information should be shared on the Forum as feedback for us, rather than treated primarily as feedback for CEA.
It would probably have been easiest to make the distinction between feedback on community health and feedback on CEA by posting to separate articles, but it could have also been accomplished in the introduction.
(Along the same lines, I’d like more detail on specific positives and negatives about community health, especially in London. I feel like local community members are the ones who need to take the feedback forward, so we need to have access to as much quality information as possible.)
Thanks for the feedback.
I think there may be a misunderstanding – the title of this post is “Feedback Collected by CEA”, not “for” CEA.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will keep this in mind for future articles.
I agree that locale-specific information is important. You are probably already aware of this, but for other readers who are not: the EA Survey contains a bunch of data about geographic differences in EA. Your posts on London demographics come to mind as one example of local analysis that I would like to see more of.
This is fair, but I want to give some examples of why I thought this document was about feedback about CEA, with the hope of helping with communication around this in the future. Even after your clarification, the document still gives a strong impression to me of the feedback being about CEA, rather than about the community in general. Below are some quotes that make it sound that way to me, with emphasis added:
The title doesn’t mention what the feedback is about. I think most people would assume that it refers to feedback about CEA, rather than the community overall. That’s what I assumed.
It’s not clearly stated what the feedback is about (“CEA collects feedback”, “solicit their feedback” without elaboration of what the feedback is about). The closest it gets to specifying what feedback might pertain to is when it’s mentioned that CEA was particularly interested in feedback on execution, communication, and branding issues in EA. This is still fairly vague, and “branding” to me implies that the feedback is about CEA. It does say ”...issues in EA”, but I didn’t pay that much importance.
In general, I assume that feedback to an organization is about the organization itself.
While unclear again about what “feedback” refers to, in general I would expect this to mean feedback about CEA.
All of these are examples of feedback about CEA or its events and activities. There are no examples of feedback about the community.
I think the confusion comes from the lack of clear elaboration in the title and/or beginning of the document of what the scope of the feedback was. Clarifying this in the future should eliminate this problem.
Just to add to this
I understand CEA to have ask people questions about EA broadly and CEA specifically, and this heading says to me that the OP contains a summary of both types of feedback, not just the former. If that wasn’t intended then please edit to say something closer to
Thanks for responding Ben :)
I was glad to see this included in the post, although I can see why it could seem weird / surprising. Since an important part of CEA’s role is to grow the EA community in a healthy way, it seems like an important outcome measure of whether CEA is doing its job is whether the EA community is in fact growing in a healthy way (and more specifically what parts of that are going well and badly). That seems like a particularly hard outcome to measure, and it would seem easy and understandable to blame others the parts that aren’t going well rather than taking responsibility and thinking about how to improve things. It’s great that you’re finding ways to get a sense of how things are going, and figuring out what CEA can do to improve things.
Really really good to see CEA engaging with and accepting criticism, and showing how it’s trying and is changing policies.
Thanks, Haydn!
> We think individuals and leaders can make a difference in their own communities and organizations in this regard, and hope that our efforts encourage others to do the same. As some examples:
I particularly appreciate this, and the specific examples given. Something I struggle with is that I would like the EA community to be welcoming to new people, and for it to be easy for people who have been around it for ages to mix with people who have just starting to explore it. But I’m somewhat shy, and typically find it tiring talking to new people. Since my day job involves talking to a lot of new people (I’m an adviser at 80,000 Hours), going to meet ups for new EAs outside of work typically feels daunting rather than appealing. I worry that a lot of EAs are similar to me in being somewhat geeky and introverted, and so finding it hard and tiring to do a lot of meeting people new to EA outside work. This makes me really grateful that CEA is taking this on as a project, and thinking through systematically how to make the community more welcoming and friendly.
Thanks for this; I think engagement like this is great & would be excited to see more of it!
There’s a general dynamic whereby new & controversial stuff gets more attention than old & agreed-upon stuff.
Given that the Forum is a clearinghouse for new EA thought, I wouldn’t expect Forum content to reflect the distribution of what the community values.
Thanks, Milan! I agree that one impact of the Forum is sharing new ideas, and there are other impacts as well – my colleagues JP and Aaron have written some of these here.
I think our respondents were pointing out that, regardless of what the forum “should” be for, newcomers are going to assume that the content is representative of EA. One project we are working on is putting a new version of the handbook on the Forum, which we hope will provide newcomers with a more representative introduction to EA, while still keeping the existing aspects of the Forum for those who want new articles.
If you have more feedback on the goals of the Forum, we would be excited to hear them!
Thanks Ben. I’m very happy to see CEA gathering and publishing all this detailed feedback.
I imagine it is easier to get feedback from the people that are already communicating the most with you. I was wondering whether or how much you have tried to get feedback from people and groups in the EA community who you have less contact with.
For example, I imagine that the group leaders attending the retreats (and possibly those having the calls) may be the group leaders that already get the most support from CEA. The comment that made think this was
While it would be wonderful if CEA was able to visit groups in person, that seems like an unusually large ask, so I was surprised it was singled out in the feedback. I believe there are groups who have had little or no personal contact with CEA (email or call), and this seems like a more important and easier thing to address.
Thanks for asking about that. I agree that calls and emails are valuable, in addition to in-person visits. I think it’s accurate that there are groups who would say they’d like more support from CEA, of various forms. The respondents here weren’t current group leaders, though, so I believe the comment you’re pointing to might not provide much data for your question. But it’s a good question, and we’ve invested this year in building connections with more groups.
For example: Alex Barry, our Groups Associate, worked with LEAN on a group organizers survey this year, so we could get feedback from a wide range of groups and update our list of contacts. Alex has also had about 100 calls with group organizers this year, answered ~500 emails from group organizers, and had about 50 meetings during EA Globals. He can be booked by emailing groups@effectivealtruism.org.
We also have a Slack channel for group organizers, as well as a Facebook group. This post on our groups support has more information – if you are a group organizer, please check out the resources listed there or let others know about them!
What is an “IO Retreat”?
There are so many acronyms in EA, it is hard to keep on top of them all!
Sorry, fixed to be less jargony! CEA’s former Individual Outreach (IO) team did a series of retreats on different topics in 2018. For example, the Ops Retreat brought together a group of people interested in finding EA operations roles; it included a workshop aimed at improving ops skills and chances to talk with different orgs that were planning to hire for ops positions.
Individual outreach.
Note: The comment you and Ben replied to seems to have disappeared
That’s not supposed to happen, thanks for the report
Do you have analogous stats for EA Global SF 2019?
Thanks for the question! 38% of confirmed speakers at EAG SF 2019 were female and 27% were people of color. (NB: The final numbers may have been slightly different than the confirmed count, due to last-minute cancellations.)
Thanks for publishing this!
.
.
I’d be happy to learn more about these considerations/concerns. It seems to me that many of the interventions that are a good idea from a ‘long-term future perspective’ are unusual, risky, or time-sensitive. Is this an unusual view in the EA sphere?
Thanks for the question! There are different degrees and types of unusual-ness and riskiness. For example, as a reason why someone may choose not to donate to the Long-Term Future Fund we state:
Established organizations focused on the long-term future such as the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) are, in some ways, “unusual” and “risky”, but some donors may still prefer to donate to FHI instead of an independent researcher with a short track record, and those donors may not be a good fit for donating to the Long-Term Future Fund.
As a side note: we have been brainstorming internally about the correct adjective which would differentiate between e.g. FHI and an independent researcher. As you noted, “risk” is not exactly the dimension along which these two donation targets differ – if anyone has a better suggestion, we would appreciate hearing it.
Thanks for this helpful explanation!
To clarify my view, I do think there is a large variance in risk among ‘long-term future interventions’ (such as donating to FHI, or donating to fund an independent researcher with a short track record).