EDIT: I would be curious to hear from disagree voters what is missing from my list of 4 good justifications to donate in this situation
I’m sorry to hear that CAIP is in the situation, and this is not at all my area of expertise/I don’t know much about CAIP specifically, so I do not feel qualified to judge this myself.
That said, I will note on the meta level that there is major adverse selection when funding an org in a bad situation that all other major funders have passed on funding, and I would be personally quite hesitant to fund CAIP here without thinking hard about it or getting more info.
Funders typically have more context and private info than me, and with prominent orgs like this there’s typically a reason, but funders are strongly disincentived from making the criticism public. In this case, one of the stated reasons CAIP quotes is “had heard from third parties that CAIP was not a valuable funding opportunity” can be a very good reason if the third party is trustworthy and well informed, and often critics would prefer to be anonymous. I would love to hear more about the exact context here, and why CAIP believes they are making a mistake that readers should ignore, to assuage fears of adverse selection
I generally only recommend donating this when you are:
Confident the opportunity is low downside (which seems false in the context of political advocacy)
If you have a decent idea of why those funders declined that you disagree with
Or you think sufficiently little of all mentioned funders (Open Philanthropy, Longview Philanthropy, Macroscopic Ventures, Long-Term Future Fund, Manifund, MIRI, Scott Alexander, and JueYan Zhang) that you don’t update much
You feel you have enough context to make an informed judgement yourself, and grant makers are not meaningfully more well informed than you
I’m skeptical that the reason is really just that it’s politically difficult for most funders to fund political advocacy. It’s harder, but there’s a fair amount of risk tolerant private donors, at least. If it were, I expect they would be back channelling to other less constrained funders that CAIP is a good opportunity, or possibly making public that they did not have an important reason to decline/think the org does good work (as Eli Rose did for Lightcone). I would love for any to reply to my comment saying this is all paranoia! There are other advocacy orgs that are not in as dire a situation.
EDIT: I would be curious to hear from disagree voters what is missing from my list of 4 good justifications to donate in this situation
I’m sorry to hear that CAIP is in the situation, and this is not at all my area of expertise/I don’t know much about CAIP specifically, so I do not feel qualified to judge this myself.
That said, I will note on the meta level that there is major adverse selection when funding an org in a bad situation that all other major funders have passed on funding, and I would be personally quite hesitant to fund CAIP here without thinking hard about it or getting more info.
Funders typically have more context and private info than me, and with prominent orgs like this there’s typically a reason, but funders are strongly disincentived from making the criticism public. In this case, one of the stated reasons CAIP quotes is “had heard from third parties that CAIP was not a valuable funding opportunity” can be a very good reason if the third party is trustworthy and well informed, and often critics would prefer to be anonymous. I would love to hear more about the exact context here, and why CAIP believes they are making a mistake that readers should ignore, to assuage fears of adverse selection
I generally only recommend donating this when you are:
Confident the opportunity is low downside (which seems false in the context of political advocacy)
If you have a decent idea of why those funders declined that you disagree with
Or you think sufficiently little of all mentioned funders (Open Philanthropy, Longview Philanthropy, Macroscopic Ventures, Long-Term Future Fund, Manifund, MIRI, Scott Alexander, and JueYan Zhang) that you don’t update much
You feel you have enough context to make an informed judgement yourself, and grant makers are not meaningfully more well informed than you
I’m skeptical that the reason is really just that it’s politically difficult for most funders to fund political advocacy. It’s harder, but there’s a fair amount of risk tolerant private donors, at least. If it were, I expect they would be back channelling to other less constrained funders that CAIP is a good opportunity, or possibly making public that they did not have an important reason to decline/think the org does good work (as Eli Rose did for Lightcone). I would love for any to reply to my comment saying this is all paranoia! There are other advocacy orgs that are not in as dire a situation.