In the week since I made my original post, Joey Savoie of Charity Science made this post, itself being rapidly upvoted, that how EA is represented, and how and who EA as a whole community ought trust to represent us, is receiving significant misgivings with how things have been going within EA. Whether it’s part of a genuine pattern or not, the perception of the CEA (or any other organization representing EA) as failing to represent EA in accord with the what the EA movement as their supporters think tears the fabric of EA as a movement.
Indeed, two early grants from these funds were to emerging orgs: BERI and EA Sweden, so I think it’s good that some warning was here. That said, even at the time this was written, I think “likely” was too strong a word, and “may” would have been more appropriate. It’s just an error that I failed to catch. In a panel discussion at EA Global in 2017, my answer to a related question about funding new vs. established orgs was more tentative, and better reflects what I think the page should have said.
I also think there are a couple of other statements like this on the page that I think could have been misinterpreted in similar ways, and I have regrets about them as well.
In my follow-up, I’ll clarify misunderstanding about how the Long-Term Future and EA Community Funds would be allocated by both donors to the Funds, and other effective altruists, is a result of misinterpretation of ambiguous communications in hindsight should have been handled differently. To summarize my feelings here, if ultimately this much confusion resulted from some minor errors in diction, one would hope in an EA organization there would be enough oversight to ensure their own accountability such that minor errors in word choice would not lead to such confusion in the first place.
Ultimately, it was the responsibility of the CEA’s Tech Team to help you ensure these regretted communications never led to this, and looking at the organization online, there is nobody else responsible than the CEA as a whole organization to ensure the Tech Team prioritizes that well. And if the CEA got what it identified as its own priorities relative to what of its own activities the rest of the EA community were most important to building and leading the movement so wrong, it also leads me to conclude the CEA as a whole needs to be more in touch with the EA movement as a whole. I don’t know if there is any more to ask about why what’s happened with not only the two EA Funds you manage, but the continued lagging of the CEA behind the community’s and donors’ realistic expectations to update them even as all the fund managers themselves had answers to provide. But one theme of my follow-up will to be asking how the CEA, including its leadership, and the EA movement can work together to ensure outcomes like this don’t happen again.
[Part II of II]
In the week since I made my original post, Joey Savoie of Charity Science made this post, itself being rapidly upvoted, that how EA is represented, and how and who EA as a whole community ought trust to represent us, is receiving significant misgivings with how things have been going within EA. Whether it’s part of a genuine pattern or not, the perception of the CEA (or any other organization representing EA) as failing to represent EA in accord with the what the EA movement as their supporters think tears the fabric of EA as a movement.
In my follow-up, I’ll clarify misunderstanding about how the Long-Term Future and EA Community Funds would be allocated by both donors to the Funds, and other effective altruists, is a result of misinterpretation of ambiguous communications in hindsight should have been handled differently. To summarize my feelings here, if ultimately this much confusion resulted from some minor errors in diction, one would hope in an EA organization there would be enough oversight to ensure their own accountability such that minor errors in word choice would not lead to such confusion in the first place.
Ultimately, it was the responsibility of the CEA’s Tech Team to help you ensure these regretted communications never led to this, and looking at the organization online, there is nobody else responsible than the CEA as a whole organization to ensure the Tech Team prioritizes that well. And if the CEA got what it identified as its own priorities relative to what of its own activities the rest of the EA community were most important to building and leading the movement so wrong, it also leads me to conclude the CEA as a whole needs to be more in touch with the EA movement as a whole. I don’t know if there is any more to ask about why what’s happened with not only the two EA Funds you manage, but the continued lagging of the CEA behind the community’s and donors’ realistic expectations to update them even as all the fund managers themselves had answers to provide. But one theme of my follow-up will to be asking how the CEA, including its leadership, and the EA movement can work together to ensure outcomes like this don’t happen again.