It seems that Nick has not been able to leverage his position as EA fund manager to outperform his Open Phil grants (or at least meaningfully distinguish his EA fund grants from his Open Phil grants). This means that we can think of donating to the far future and community funds as having similar cost-effectiveness to individual donations to Open Phil earmarked for those causes. This seems like a problem, since the best individual donations should be able to outperform Open Phil, at least when you account for the benefits of not centralizing donations on too few decisionmakers. I don’t see anyone calling for Open Phil to accept/solicit money from small donors.
The case for finding another manager seems pretty strong. EA funds is a fundamentally sound idea—we should be trying to consolidate donation decisions somewhat to take advantage of different levels of expertise and save small donors’ time and mental energy, but this doesn’t seem like the best way to do it.
It seems that Nick has not been able to leverage his position as EA fund manager to outperform his Open Phil grants (or at least meaningfully distinguish his EA fund grants from his Open Phil grants). This means that we can think of donating to the far future and community funds as having similar cost-effectiveness to individual donations to Open Phil earmarked for those causes. This seems like a problem, since the best individual donations should be able to outperform Open Phil, at least when you account for the benefits of not centralizing donations on too few decisionmakers. I don’t see anyone calling for Open Phil to accept/solicit money from small donors.
The case for finding another manager seems pretty strong. EA funds is a fundamentally sound idea—we should be trying to consolidate donation decisions somewhat to take advantage of different levels of expertise and save small donors’ time and mental energy, but this doesn’t seem like the best way to do it.