Thanks for this. Interestingly, I wasn’t especially concerned about the things you list, although I do think they are all risks. I agree that they are possible, but also agree that they are unlikely to be material. Indeed, I feel bad for focusing mainly on Claire and this transaction, because I have no reason to think they are anything but a great trustee and great program officer.
My concern is broader than this—unfortunately, I see this transaction as one fairly prominent example of a pattern.
EA orgs tolerate an unusually large number of conflicts of interest. A relatively small group of people sit on multiple Boards and orgs; it is not unusual for people to sit on both sides of very large transactions; sometimes the biggest recipients of funding are organizations where the grantor’s trustees work, or where they are trustees, or similar; etc. We saw this in particular with FTX but it is true across the EA ecosystem.
This is contrary to just about any accepted governance norms. Many of these conflicts could be managed fairly easily, for example by using conflicted people as advisors rather than trustees; by asking disinterested people to assess grant bids and interested people to recuse themselves; etc. However, this rarely seems to happen, even in cases where there is an incredibly strong prima facie case for doing so, like this one. So I think the pattern is that EA orgs/leaders are less bothered by conflicts than I/people familiar with governance would expect; and that they tend to just acknowledge the conflict and then assume everyone will both a) act in good faith (largely true, I expect) and b) make the best decisions possible (trickier).
I think this matters for three reasons:
It meaningfully increases the risk of intentional malpractice, as happened with FTX.
It meaningfully increases the risk of people acting in good faith but not making the best decisions, because they are conflicted.
It reinforces negative impressions of EA, e.g. that it is an ‘immature’ movement, that it is prone to self-dealing etc. (Notably, conflicts of interest policies always talk about both actual andperceived conflicts, and there are numerous examples of the perception of a conflict causing huge reputational harm in the public eye.)
So that means that there is risk of actual material harm, and a risk of reputational harm.
To go back to my original comment, I am still genuinely amazed that there either wasn’t a perceived conflict, or that the conflict was ignored, in this particular case, because it seems like a textbook example of something where your conflict of interest policy would kick in and where it would be worth taking extra steps to manage both the conflict and the perception of a conflict. That is, it’s a materially large transaction (>£10m), with a person in a potentially conflicted position, on a potentially controversial grant.
I notice that most of my comments here are getting pretty bad karma and agreement, so it may be that the community isn’t with me on this—but, honestly, I think this might be an example of EA thinking the normal rules don’t apply to it because [insert reason here].
My view is that there are reasons that governance norms and procedures for managing conflicts of interest exist, and I think EA orgs/leaders will learn those reasons the hard way if they don’t take them seriously now. And this seems particularly pertinent as we literally just saw the consequences of bad governance/controls in the most devastating, harmful way possible with FTX (who are now on the record as thinking that they were too smart for things like basic accounting practices).
Just finally, this has rather migrated from a discussion about the Wytham Abbey grant into ‘Jack’s concerns about EA governance’, which is pretty unfair to people involved in the original issue. So I just want to emphasise that I’m absolutely not accusing Claire of any of the ‘theoretical ’issues here, like malpractice or acting in bad faith or getting the grant decision obviously wrong. I’m just explaining why I find this transaction and process concerning.
It sounds like you’re advocating for the position of always following “good practices heuristics” and you’re saying “grantmakers who are on the board of another org should recuse themselves from grantmaking decisions about this other org” is one such heuristic. The first point seems uncontroversial; the second point is, in my view, open to debate.
It’s open to debate because “board membership” at most correlates with having specific conflicts of interest. What we should really be concerned about are the potentially-biasing influences themselves, like:
Does the grantmaker person have a strong financial motive to make a particular decision?
Does the grantmaker have a strong reputational motive to make a particular decision?
Does the grantmaker have a strong social motive (friendship, romance, peer pressure, etc.) to make a particular decision?
Once we learn that Claire joined EVF’s board in her role as a grantmaker, all the other ways in which “being a board member” is usually correlated with the above three potentially-biasing influences no longer apply. Learning the context in which she joined screens off these other factors. By contrast, if we knew nothing about why Claire joined the EVF board, and especially if she had joined their board before starting to work at Open Phil, then it would become hard to rule out that her board membership comes with potentially-biasing influences.
Maybe another concern is “Is the grantmaker at risk of exerting undue influence over an org” – but that depends on what we mean by “undue.” It’s also somewhat common for funders to join boards, so it’s not like this clearly violates good practices.
Overall, I think it’s quite reasonable not to be concerned about this after thinking through the specifics. The position of “it’s hubris to think through the specifics when we must avoid anything that’s even just vaguely correlated with a conflict of interest” doesn’t seem appealing to me. It also seems like “process theater” where people signal how virtuously they adhere to “good processes” without seeming to even understand or care why these processes are there in the first place. If anything, I’d find it concerning if people reasoned about things in a rigidly-rule-driven way that’s disconnected from “why might this be bad?”
I think the information about Claire’s dual role (and rationale) should have been publicly disclosed up front (was it?) . That would have been very low cost, and would send a signal that the appropriate people were keeping an eye on COI issues. Not disclosing a conflict, the waiver, and the rationale on a big grant until a grant decision is challenged in the media and by numerous forum users would not send the right message about EA’s attitude toward managing COI.
As to the merits of this one, I just can’t find a huge difference between the ultimate donor (who I assume was Dustin Moskovitz / GV) serving dual roles of sitting on the EVF board and deciding whether to fund an EVF ask, and the donor authorizing Claire to perform both roles (with oversight on the OP end) more or less on his behalf. That’s why I come back to whether the donor was aware of and approved the conflict waiver. $15MM is enough that I think that some actual donor awareness of the dual role was necessary here.
Hi Elizabeth,
Thanks for this. Interestingly, I wasn’t especially concerned about the things you list, although I do think they are all risks. I agree that they are possible, but also agree that they are unlikely to be material. Indeed, I feel bad for focusing mainly on Claire and this transaction, because I have no reason to think they are anything but a great trustee and great program officer.
My concern is broader than this—unfortunately, I see this transaction as one fairly prominent example of a pattern.
EA orgs tolerate an unusually large number of conflicts of interest. A relatively small group of people sit on multiple Boards and orgs; it is not unusual for people to sit on both sides of very large transactions; sometimes the biggest recipients of funding are organizations where the grantor’s trustees work, or where they are trustees, or similar; etc. We saw this in particular with FTX but it is true across the EA ecosystem.
This is contrary to just about any accepted governance norms. Many of these conflicts could be managed fairly easily, for example by using conflicted people as advisors rather than trustees; by asking disinterested people to assess grant bids and interested people to recuse themselves; etc. However, this rarely seems to happen, even in cases where there is an incredibly strong prima facie case for doing so, like this one. So I think the pattern is that EA orgs/leaders are less bothered by conflicts than I/people familiar with governance would expect; and that they tend to just acknowledge the conflict and then assume everyone will both a) act in good faith (largely true, I expect) and b) make the best decisions possible (trickier).
I think this matters for three reasons:
It meaningfully increases the risk of intentional malpractice, as happened with FTX.
It meaningfully increases the risk of people acting in good faith but not making the best decisions, because they are conflicted.
It reinforces negative impressions of EA, e.g. that it is an ‘immature’ movement, that it is prone to self-dealing etc. (Notably, conflicts of interest policies always talk about both actual and perceived conflicts, and there are numerous examples of the perception of a conflict causing huge reputational harm in the public eye.)
So that means that there is risk of actual material harm, and a risk of reputational harm.
To go back to my original comment, I am still genuinely amazed that there either wasn’t a perceived conflict, or that the conflict was ignored, in this particular case, because it seems like a textbook example of something where your conflict of interest policy would kick in and where it would be worth taking extra steps to manage both the conflict and the perception of a conflict. That is, it’s a materially large transaction (>£10m), with a person in a potentially conflicted position, on a potentially controversial grant.
I notice that most of my comments here are getting pretty bad karma and agreement, so it may be that the community isn’t with me on this—but, honestly, I think this might be an example of EA thinking the normal rules don’t apply to it because [insert reason here].
My view is that there are reasons that governance norms and procedures for managing conflicts of interest exist, and I think EA orgs/leaders will learn those reasons the hard way if they don’t take them seriously now. And this seems particularly pertinent as we literally just saw the consequences of bad governance/controls in the most devastating, harmful way possible with FTX (who are now on the record as thinking that they were too smart for things like basic accounting practices).
Just finally, this has rather migrated from a discussion about the Wytham Abbey grant into ‘Jack’s concerns about EA governance’, which is pretty unfair to people involved in the original issue. So I just want to emphasise that I’m absolutely not accusing Claire of any of the ‘theoretical ’issues here, like malpractice or acting in bad faith or getting the grant decision obviously wrong. I’m just explaining why I find this transaction and process concerning.
It sounds like you’re advocating for the position of always following “good practices heuristics” and you’re saying “grantmakers who are on the board of another org should recuse themselves from grantmaking decisions about this other org” is one such heuristic. The first point seems uncontroversial; the second point is, in my view, open to debate.
It’s open to debate because “board membership” at most correlates with having specific conflicts of interest. What we should really be concerned about are the potentially-biasing influences themselves, like:
Does the grantmaker person have a strong financial motive to make a particular decision?
Does the grantmaker have a strong reputational motive to make a particular decision?
Does the grantmaker have a strong social motive (friendship, romance, peer pressure, etc.) to make a particular decision?
Once we learn that Claire joined EVF’s board in her role as a grantmaker, all the other ways in which “being a board member” is usually correlated with the above three potentially-biasing influences no longer apply. Learning the context in which she joined screens off these other factors. By contrast, if we knew nothing about why Claire joined the EVF board, and especially if she had joined their board before starting to work at Open Phil, then it would become hard to rule out that her board membership comes with potentially-biasing influences.
Maybe another concern is “Is the grantmaker at risk of exerting undue influence over an org” – but that depends on what we mean by “undue.” It’s also somewhat common for funders to join boards, so it’s not like this clearly violates good practices.
Overall, I think it’s quite reasonable not to be concerned about this after thinking through the specifics. The position of “it’s hubris to think through the specifics when we must avoid anything that’s even just vaguely correlated with a conflict of interest” doesn’t seem appealing to me. It also seems like “process theater” where people signal how virtuously they adhere to “good processes” without seeming to even understand or care why these processes are there in the first place. If anything, I’d find it concerning if people reasoned about things in a rigidly-rule-driven way that’s disconnected from “why might this be bad?”
I think the information about Claire’s dual role (and rationale) should have been publicly disclosed up front (was it?) . That would have been very low cost, and would send a signal that the appropriate people were keeping an eye on COI issues. Not disclosing a conflict, the waiver, and the rationale on a big grant until a grant decision is challenged in the media and by numerous forum users would not send the right message about EA’s attitude toward managing COI.
As to the merits of this one, I just can’t find a huge difference between the ultimate donor (who I assume was Dustin Moskovitz / GV) serving dual roles of sitting on the EVF board and deciding whether to fund an EVF ask, and the donor authorizing Claire to perform both roles (with oversight on the OP end) more or less on his behalf. That’s why I come back to whether the donor was aware of and approved the conflict waiver. $15MM is enough that I think that some actual donor awareness of the dual role was necessary here.