My personal take is that funders owe explanations to their donors, but not necessarily to the public or to the broader EA community (though it’s nice!). In this case, since the grant wasn’t really funded by CEA, this seems totally fine (though I do agree that, if it was bought by CEA, and many EAs donated to CEA, then justifying this publicly is probably good).
If it was a large funder with private funding, like OpenPhil, it feels much less clear to me. My guess is that general transparency is pretty good, and being able to receive high-quality external feedback is high value, but I’m not convinced that high-quality external feedback happens very often (and think that, eg, this post and the surrounding comments don’t meet that bar). I find Holden’s thoughts on this fairly persuasive. And I think that needing to make all decisions externally legible with clear, long justifications, seems plausibly more effort than is worth. Though I’m pretty in favour of the brief public grants databases they have.
My personal take is that funders owe explanations to their donors, but not necessarily to the public or to the broader EA community (though it’s nice!). In this case, since the grant wasn’t really funded by CEA, this seems totally fine (though I do agree that, if it was bought by CEA, and many EAs donated to CEA, then justifying this publicly is probably good).
If it was a large funder with private funding, like OpenPhil, it feels much less clear to me. My guess is that general transparency is pretty good, and being able to receive high-quality external feedback is high value, but I’m not convinced that high-quality external feedback happens very often (and think that, eg, this post and the surrounding comments don’t meet that bar). I find Holden’s thoughts on this fairly persuasive. And I think that needing to make all decisions externally legible with clear, long justifications, seems plausibly more effort than is worth. Though I’m pretty in favour of the brief public grants databases they have.