What route the money takes (not in each individual case and in detail but in the high level) is clearly a question senior leadership should know and sign off, in particular in an organisation as small (in terms of number of staff) as the FTX Foundation. (I don’t even know if they had any ops staff, there is no-one listed here.)
Aleks_K
Karma: 615
A UK charity can put rules in their governing documents on how to remove trustees. I don’t think EVFs governing documents are public, so we probably don’t know.
Recusing themselves from FTX decision-making is significantly weaker than being on leave of absence. The latter implies that they are still part of decision-making for non-FTX related issues which I assume exist. (And technically recusing from decision-making also doesn’t mean recusing from discussion, so they could have still been involved in discussions regarding FTX, though I’d assume that they also recused themselves from that). I think it’s a significant difference.
I think there are various reasons for not having such a list public:
It will (literally) create a first tier, second tier, etc of organisations in the effective altruism community, which feels bad/confusing.
People will associate the organisation the grant is given to with the tier, while it was actually that specific grant that was evaluated.
The information that are provided publicly for a given grant are likely only a small subset of the information that was used to decide the tier, but people just looking through the list won’t know or acknowledge that, leading to confusion about the actual bar.
If an organisation submits a funding request containing different activities, Open Phil will fund all those above the bar, but the different activities can be in different tiers, so would should be done in this case?
Organisations will likely want to have more information why their grant is on a specific tier which will might to additional work for lots of people.
Various of the above points just might lead to confusion by people trying to understand what the funding bar is.
I’m also confused slightly confused about the advantages you mention:
Those of us who are creating new projects would have a much better understanding of what OpenPhil would fund and be able to create better more aligned projects to OpenPhil’s goals. The EA community lacks a strong longtermist incubator and this is I expect one of the challenges.
Isn’t this to a large extent already possible as OpenPhil is publishing the grants they made? (I acknowledge that there is a time of maybe a year or so that we are in now where this is not really the case because the bar changed and maybe it would help for this period but not in general.)
Other funders could fill gaps that they believe OpenPhil has missed, or otherwise use OpenPhil’s tiers in their decision making.
I don’t understand the first point, I think this would only work if OpenPhil also would publish grant requests that they don’t fund (?) The second point might be true, but could also be a disadvantage.
It allows OpenPhil to receive useful constructive feedback or critiques.
That’s true, but it could also lead to non-constructive feedback and critiques or non-constructive discussions in the community.
I’m not saying that OpenPhil definitively shouldn’t publish the list, but I think there would be a lot of points for and against to be weigh up.
I think it is also worth checking what the reason was why the inquiries where opened and how this correlates with the outcomes. I only looked at a few but lots of them starts with quite obvious wrongdoings or mistakes by the trustees already and these are of course much more likely to end negatively.
“Multinational” corporations are usually not actually multinational in the sense of having independent entities in different countries, they generally have one main entity (with one CEO) based in one country that owns various subentities in other countries (the details of this are often of course quite complicated). This is different for EVF which has two independent entities.
Firstly, from the plot that you link (at least the one on the right) there actually seems to be a clear jump (total in 2017 is 300M from 150M the year before).
Secondly, I think the main reason is that Open Philanthropy didn’t just come into existence out of nothing, they started a partnership with GiveWell in 2014 (as the Wikipedia article says as well) and Good Ventures have already been giving through that, so it’s not that suddenly a new funder was there in 2017, it’s that a funder has been easing in over a long time and the founding of Open Philanthropy as an organisation was just one step in this process.
Another possible reason: He (and EA and longtermism) are not actually that interesting for most people.
I think this could have been avoided if more EA orgs, including FHI, had some kind of PR function instead of leaving all the heavy lifting to CEA. I’ve said as much here.
Bostrom works for Oxford University who have a PR department. From his statement is seems unlikely to me, though that he asked them (or any other PR experts) for advice.
I think the main issue with this is that this creates some kind of official ‘membership’ of EA which comes with tonnes of issues. (How do you decide who gets in? Who decides and how that/if people get thrown out? (Would SBF still in this?) Is there a transparent process for this? What kind of obligations do people part of it have (in terms of keeping conversations private for example)? Can you leave voluntarily and are there any repercussions if you do?, …)
3. can be answered from publicly available information: It’s not the latest version. On https://ftx.tghp.co.uk/our-grants/ it says “last updated June 2022”, while the latest version of the actual website states to have been updated in September (and also has a higher overall grant amount).
When the building (it’s not a castle) was bought (in early 2021), the name of the organisation that bought it was CEA. The change at some point after that to Effective Ventures. It’s unclear how much governance-wise a separate ‘umbrella CEA’ existed to a ‘core CEA’ at the point of the purchase, but even now, CEA does not seem to have a board separate from Effective Ventures, and it’s ultimately the same people that hare fully responsible and it’s legally the same organisation that people donated to (unclear what kind of restrictions could put on their donations at which point in time). Note that this is different from your Google/Deepmind example, as both of these are separte legal entities (albeit owned by the same umbrella company).
GivingWhatWeCan has what they call the Further Pledge. This is mainly about income rather than wealth but seems customisable, so might be worth looking into it and contacting them.
I’d also guess that this is the case, but it helps create the confusion that CEA is involved.
This might be because Owen is (at least according to CEA’s website) part of CEA’s ‘team’ as a strategic advisor and trustee of CEA UK. It’s not obvious (at least not obvious enough to avoid confusion) in which capacity Owen is speaking here and assuming that’s in relation to one of his roles at CEA is not that farfetched (even if it might not be correct).
Also, CEA is not distinct from EV, they are a project/brand of EV, but legally fully part of it. (There is no such thing as a ‘fiscal sponsor’ in UK law.) It’s unclear to me how much CEA have their own governance structure.
Most of the costs of running conferences don’t come from the cost of the (pure real estate) costs of the property. (You’d still incur lots of the $2,000 if you run an event at Wytham Abbey, the only bits that you aren’t paying for are the pure capital costs for the property, part of the profit margin and costs for times the venue is otherwise empty.)
What I’m wondering is why the benifactor gave the money for the building to EV rather than buying the building themselves and just allow EV to use it for free. This would likely have avoided all the optics issues and I guess would have had some other advantages.
Your analasis ignores that the prices you quote contain a lot more than the pure real estate costs, but also running costs, that Wytham Abbey of course would also have to incure, such as:
Mainenance, renovations, etc (this can be quite a lot for an old and listed building)
Utilities, etc. (Again, this is a large old space not built to modern standards and this is probably quite high)
Costs for IT equipment that needs to be regularly replaced, furniture that needs to be replace ocasionally, any kind of office supplies etc provided
Council tax
Costs for cleaning, etc
Costs for staff managing the space
(Potentially, not sure if the prices you quote include this or not) catering and other services provided
I probably forgot something.
Also I doubt that the organisations that run these venues occur a lot of profit, so the total costs they charge are probably mainly the things above plus some capital costs for the building plus costs for the time the building is not occupied.
Seems quite implausible to me that this would have happened and unclear if it would have been good. (Assuming “larger EA community” implies more than private conversations between a few people. )
Because I do want to read community posts sometimes and sometimes I might want to read other posts and having two taps that I can choose from depending on which type of post I want to read is a great way to do that.