Pronouns: she/her or they/them.
I got interested in EA back before it was called EA, back before Giving What We Can had a website. Later on, I got involved in my university EA group and helped run it for a few years. Now I’m trying to figure out where EA can fit into my life these days and what it means to me.
This post is about criticism of EA organizations, so it doesn’t apply to OpenAI or the U.S. government.
I interpreted this post as mostly being about charities with a small number of employees and relatively small budgets that either actively associate themselves with EA or that fall into a cause area EA generally supports, such as animal welfare or global poverty.
For example, if you wanted to criticize 80,000 Hours, New Harvest, or one of these charities focusing on mental health in poor countries, then I’d say you should send them a copy of your criticism before publishing and give them a chance to prepare a reply before you post. These organizations are fairly small in terms of their staff, have relatively little funding, and aren’t very well-known. So, I think it’s fair to give them more of an opportunity to defend their work.
If you wanted to criticize Good Ventures, Open Philanthropy, GiveWell, GiveDirectly, or the Against Malaria Foundation, then I think you could send them a courtesy email if you wanted, but they have so much funding and — in the case of Open Philanthropy at least — a large staff. They’re also already the subject of media attention and public discourse. With one of the smaller charities, you could plausibly hurt them with your post, so I think more caution is warranted. With these larger charities with more resources that are already getting debated and criticized a lot, an EA Forum post has a much lower chance of doing accidental harm.