I am extremely not Dustin, and I do not want to veer into psychologising, but I very tentatively interpret him as also conveying some mix of:
legitimately feeling that there are some things it might be bad to fund, and feeling morally responsible for making sure the money doesn’t go to such bad things, and neither trusting OP to make those judgment, nor trusting that the good and bad will essentially balance out somehow
finding it somewhat stressful and draining to be responsible (not just reputationally) for things you don’t have time to scrutinise, where those are in fact finite resources that need to be spent carefully
hoping that if other people do fill in the funding gaps, they’ll also share the load on the other tacit resources (which, to be fair, is complicated by the general problems with donor funging that do seem to have been handled suboptimally)
I reiterate that all the comments are just there on the other post for anyone to scrutinise, rather than taking my word for it. I make no claim as to whether these are cruxes. But in my estimation these are some of the implications.
I would also offer this quote, because I think the meta-dynamic here is an important piece of the puzzle:
I’m not detailing specific decisions for the same reason I want to invest in fewer focus areas: additional information is used as additional attack surface area. The attitude in EA communities is “give an inch, fight a mile”. So I’ll choose to be less legible instead.
I am extremely not Dustin, and I do not want to veer into psychologising, but I very tentatively interpret him as also conveying some mix of:
legitimately feeling that there are some things it might be bad to fund, and feeling morally responsible for making sure the money doesn’t go to such bad things, and neither trusting OP to make those judgment, nor trusting that the good and bad will essentially balance out somehow
finding it somewhat stressful and draining to be responsible (not just reputationally) for things you don’t have time to scrutinise, where those are in fact finite resources that need to be spent carefully
hoping that if other people do fill in the funding gaps, they’ll also share the load on the other tacit resources (which, to be fair, is complicated by the general problems with donor funging that do seem to have been handled suboptimally)
I reiterate that all the comments are just there on the other post for anyone to scrutinise, rather than taking my word for it. I make no claim as to whether these are cruxes. But in my estimation these are some of the implications.
I would also offer this quote, because I think the meta-dynamic here is an important piece of the puzzle: