I was initially in favor of the change, but after reading comments from the people who are against it, I’m less sure.
I do currently donate to MIRI. I do this somewhat cautiously—there are good reasons to still be skeptical. If I didn’t donate to MIRI, I’d still think that global poverty would likely not be the best contender for “top charity”, except for PR reasons.
But I do acknowledge that there are already good flagship organizations and networks for non-Global-Poverty EA, and it may be important to preserve the brand integrity of GWWC and not having it bend towards “the generic EA ‘donate a lot of money’ charity.”
The flipside is it is good for the EA community to have a standard of giving larger amounts, and having GWWC represent that has been helpful.
I’m not certain, just wanted to note that as a “Future People” donor, there’s room to think that this is at least an open question.
This is super important, but I think there’s actually another failure mode to worry about: at some point people in my communities started talking more openly about feeling pressure / burn-out. This was helpful. But then, when a bunch of people burned out at one, the result was that several people I knew were frequently very negative (myself included), and this created a cycle of despair.
My tentative solution is that if a community or organization seems at high risk of that, people should take vacations and/or change their environment more, so that the negative feelings don’t all get concentrated in one place.