Interesting stuff! For the sake of multi-sidedness, I’d note that this description of the shift being because of Dustin caring about his reputation is something Dustin himself repeatedly pushed back on in the original GV update comment thread, for being an oversimplification. I might also recommend Dustin’s big Medium essay on philanthropy to anyone curious about how he conceives of what he does.
I would not characterize Dustin as straightforwardly “pushing back” in the relevant comment thread, more “expressing frustration with specific misinterprations but confirming the broad strokes”. I do think he would likely take offense to some of this framing, but a lot of it is really quite close to what Dustin said himself (and my model is more that Dustin is uncomfortable owning all the implications of the things he said, though this kind of thing is hard).
Yeah, I meant that he was pushing back on the framing as an oversimplification, not that he was pushing back on the claim that reputation was part of the calculation—this I feel he did straightforwardly and consistently do, with actual substantive reasons, e.g.
“reputational risks” [..] narrows the mind too much on what is going on here
I can’t know all our grantees, and my estimation is I can’t divorce myself from responsibility for them, reputationally or otherwise. [emphasis original]
“PR risk” is an unnecessarily narrow mental frame for why we’re focusing [...] there are other bandwidth issues: energy, attention, stress, political influence. Those are more finite than capital.
Framing the costs as “PR” limits the way people think about mitigating costs. It’s not just “lower risk” but more shared responsibility and energy to engage with decision making, persuading, defending, etc.
Again, really leaning into trying to give the opposite side here, I think that rounding things off to “Dustin Moskovitz became more concerned about his reputation” is actually losing a lot of important nuance mostly in a way that makes Dustin look bad, and in a way that he correctly identified and objected to. Which is not to say there hasn’t been a cursed miasma causing who knows how much harm, but I think the differences in implication here are subtle and important.
Isn’t Dustin basically saying “We don’t care about reputation per say but the things that good reputation provides.” ? We don’t want to spend energy and attention costs that come from having a to deal with a bad reputation. We want to have a good reputation because that allows us to have more political influence.
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.
Interesting stuff! For the sake of multi-sidedness, I’d note that this description of the shift being because of Dustin caring about his reputation is something Dustin himself repeatedly pushed back on in the original GV update comment thread, for being an oversimplification. I might also recommend Dustin’s big Medium essay on philanthropy to anyone curious about how he conceives of what he does.
I would not characterize Dustin as straightforwardly “pushing back” in the relevant comment thread, more “expressing frustration with specific misinterprations but confirming the broad strokes”. I do think he would likely take offense to some of this framing, but a lot of it is really quite close to what Dustin said himself (and my model is more that Dustin is uncomfortable owning all the implications of the things he said, though this kind of thing is hard).
Yeah, I meant that he was pushing back on the framing as an oversimplification, not that he was pushing back on the claim that reputation was part of the calculation—this I feel he did straightforwardly and consistently do, with actual substantive reasons, e.g.
Again, really leaning into trying to give the opposite side here, I think that rounding things off to “Dustin Moskovitz became more concerned about his reputation” is actually losing a lot of important nuance mostly in a way that makes Dustin look bad, and in a way that he correctly identified and objected to. Which is not to say there hasn’t been a cursed miasma causing who knows how much harm, but I think the differences in implication here are subtle and important.
Isn’t Dustin basically saying “We don’t care about reputation per say but the things that good reputation provides.” ? We don’t want to spend energy and attention costs that come from having a to deal with a bad reputation. We want to have a good reputation because that allows us to have more political influence.
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: