Thank you for writing this. I thought I’d chime in with another example of this kind of thing I’d recently seen in (perhaps, contributed to) in our own work at Manifund.
A couple of months back, we were just kicking off our Falcon Fund (rapid grants for animal welfare, esp AI x animals) - see https://manifund.org/projects/falcon-fund. My original draft stated fairly strongly that the existing EA Animal Welfare Fund was dispensing money way too slowly eg couple months behind schedule for reviews; which was part of what we were excited to create Falcon. However, I was asked to remove this kind of internicine criticism from the launch post, on the grounds that (stylized) “everyone already knows that AWF is slow” and “we don’t to want to scare donors and reduce even further the small amount of money AW gets”
Also, one of the animal charity founders who Marcus thought was one of the best examples of donation he’s made also asked to be removed, because they did not want to be associated with EA, even though many of their donations come from EA sources.
I complied on both of these cases on a general heuristic of trying to be polite and play nice and aim to be positive sum with our counterparties, but imo these hurt Falcon’s ability to raise and Manifund’s general mission of increasing transparency in the ecosystem. I’m still not sure what the right call was.
Imagine if early EA orgs had refused to publicly criticize conventional philanthropy because they didn’t want to reduce the amount of money going to those causes. Showing why one donation opportunity is better than another is The Whole Point, and conditioning people’s access to information or opportunities on the basis of their willingness to keep quiet regarding your inefficiencies is one of the patterns upstream of failures in the traditional nonprofit ecosystem. Failures EA’s entire brand is based on criticizing.
I think the choices you and Richard have made are reasonable/locally prosocial, but the people who asked you to make them should change their behavior.
(It‘s also plausible to me that the reasons they gave you are not reflective of their true reasons, in which case they should surface their true reasons.)
Thank you for sharing that this happened, and thanks also to Richard!
Not sure the bar for ‘common’ but I’m aware of maybe half a dozen roving donation funds that don’t disclose more about themselves than is legally required (or maybe have heard a handful of different stories from different people about the same one? Unclear).
AFAIK you have to disclose to the government, so someone at your org always knows the proximal source, and an auditable paper trail usually exists back to the ultimate source (although there are probably ways to thwart this kind of tracing, even by the government, although my guess is most of these are illegal, unethical, or both; maybe there’s some way to do it that’s ~fine).
I think categorically not accepting this money might basically surrender whole cause areas to the CG brain trust, since many of the bets of anonymous donors are uncorrelated w CG grant making, which makes them especially valuable if you’re in a position to receive them (eg have already been rejected by CG, or don’t want to ask them for some other reason). It may also cause less in-community dollars to go to philanthropy, since it’s relatively common to want to bet against yourself via donation, which can create weird optics for people who are otherwise well-known to hold a particular view, but is actually just a totally coherent strategy. (Eg imagine if you’re a grant maker at CG but also independently wealthy and want to make some unrestricted calls with your own money from time to time without it changing perception of CG’s house view or your own personal view to the extent that it’s publicly known; this is an entirely fictional example, but maybe illustrates one use case for anonymous giving).
For the avoidance of doubt/admitting a COI on my part: MIRI received a sizable anonymous donation a few years ago, and another (smaller one) a few months ago. This doesn’t bother me, because MIRI has refused funding from certain sources in the past (eg Epstein), and I’ve generally seen a lot of costly high-integrity moves behind the scenes. I don’t now and probably will never know where that money came from, but Malo does and that’s good enough for me.
[importantly these are reasons it doesn’t bother ME; I’m not confident I could convince someone who doesn’t already trust Eliezer and Malo that it shouldn’t bother THEM]
@Elizabeth Disclosing funding sources enables the public to identify conflicts of interest. On the balance, I think it’s better to prevent conflicts of interest than it is to provide grantmakers with optical cover for bet-hedging (re: yams post, perhaps I don’t understand the pressures on grantmakers here).
One mechanism that could solve this without causing interpersonal grief is some sort of third party exit poll platform for funding applications, basically a “Glassdoor for Philanthropy” which would make it common knowledge which funds do fast turnarounds and other desiderata.
For the anonymous grantee thing, maybe you say something like “no more than 10% of falcon donations will be to anonymous parties”. I think it’s principled to be boundedly transparent, it’s like principled lessetarianism
That might solve the issue of applicants choosing where to apply, but I don’t think glassdoor-style data would make AWF any happier about Austin bringing up the unfavorable comparison in his marketing copy.
Totally agree—but Austin could sidestep that by just pointing to “our Gd4Phil score is really good” and not feel any need to point out anything about anyone else’s score
Thank you for writing this. I thought I’d chime in with another example of this kind of thing I’d recently seen in (perhaps, contributed to) in our own work at Manifund.
A couple of months back, we were just kicking off our Falcon Fund (rapid grants for animal welfare, esp AI x animals) - see https://manifund.org/projects/falcon-fund. My original draft stated fairly strongly that the existing EA Animal Welfare Fund was dispensing money way too slowly eg couple months behind schedule for reviews; which was part of what we were excited to create Falcon. However, I was asked to remove this kind of internicine criticism from the launch post, on the grounds that (stylized) “everyone already knows that AWF is slow” and “we don’t to want to scare donors and reduce even further the small amount of money AW gets”
Also, one of the animal charity founders who Marcus thought was one of the best examples of donation he’s made also asked to be removed, because they did not want to be associated with EA, even though many of their donations come from EA sources.
I complied on both of these cases on a general heuristic of trying to be polite and play nice and aim to be positive sum with our counterparties, but imo these hurt Falcon’s ability to raise and Manifund’s general mission of increasing transparency in the ecosystem. I’m still not sure what the right call was.
Imagine if early EA orgs had refused to publicly criticize conventional philanthropy because they didn’t want to reduce the amount of money going to those causes. Showing why one donation opportunity is better than another is The Whole Point, and conditioning people’s access to information or opportunities on the basis of their willingness to keep quiet regarding your inefficiencies is one of the patterns upstream of failures in the traditional nonprofit ecosystem. Failures EA’s entire brand is based on criticizing.
I think the choices you and Richard have made are reasonable/locally prosocial, but the people who asked you to make them should change their behavior.
(It‘s also plausible to me that the reasons they gave you are not reflective of their true reasons, in which case they should surface their true reasons.)
Thank you for sharing that this happened, and thanks also to Richard!
Is it a common thing in the EA philanthropy sphere for grantees to take funding without disclosing its source? This strikes me as very bad.
Not sure the bar for ‘common’ but I’m aware of maybe half a dozen roving donation funds that don’t disclose more about themselves than is legally required (or maybe have heard a handful of different stories from different people about the same one? Unclear).
AFAIK you have to disclose to the government, so someone at your org always knows the proximal source, and an auditable paper trail usually exists back to the ultimate source (although there are probably ways to thwart this kind of tracing, even by the government, although my guess is most of these are illegal, unethical, or both; maybe there’s some way to do it that’s ~fine).
I think categorically not accepting this money might basically surrender whole cause areas to the CG brain trust, since many of the bets of anonymous donors are uncorrelated w CG grant making, which makes them especially valuable if you’re in a position to receive them (eg have already been rejected by CG, or don’t want to ask them for some other reason). It may also cause less in-community dollars to go to philanthropy, since it’s relatively common to want to bet against yourself via donation, which can create weird optics for people who are otherwise well-known to hold a particular view, but is actually just a totally coherent strategy. (Eg imagine if you’re a grant maker at CG but also independently wealthy and want to make some unrestricted calls with your own money from time to time without it changing perception of CG’s house view or your own personal view to the extent that it’s publicly known; this is an entirely fictional example, but maybe illustrates one use case for anonymous giving).
For the avoidance of doubt/admitting a COI on my part: MIRI received a sizable anonymous donation a few years ago, and another (smaller one) a few months ago. This doesn’t bother me, because MIRI has refused funding from certain sources in the past (eg Epstein), and I’ve generally seen a lot of costly high-integrity moves behind the scenes. I don’t now and probably will never know where that money came from, but Malo does and that’s good enough for me.
[importantly these are reasons it doesn’t bother ME; I’m not confident I could convince someone who doesn’t already trust Eliezer and Malo that it shouldn’t bother THEM]
@Elizabeth Disclosing funding sources enables the public to identify conflicts of interest. On the balance, I think it’s better to prevent conflicts of interest than it is to provide grantmakers with optical cover for bet-hedging (re: yams post, perhaps I don’t understand the pressures on grantmakers here).
One mechanism that could solve this without causing interpersonal grief is some sort of third party exit poll platform for funding applications, basically a “Glassdoor for Philanthropy” which would make it common knowledge which funds do fast turnarounds and other desiderata.
For the anonymous grantee thing, maybe you say something like “no more than 10% of falcon donations will be to anonymous parties”. I think it’s principled to be boundedly transparent, it’s like principled lessetarianism
That might solve the issue of applicants choosing where to apply, but I don’t think glassdoor-style data would make AWF any happier about Austin bringing up the unfavorable comparison in his marketing copy.
Totally agree—but Austin could sidestep that by just pointing to “our Gd4Phil score is really good” and not feel any need to point out anything about anyone else’s score