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!
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!