[reputation and popularity] probably have overlapping causes and effects, but they’re not the same.
I’m inclined to think that this is a distinction without a difference, but I’m open to having my mind changed on this. Can you expand on this point further? I’m struggling to model what an organization that has a good reputation but is unpopular, or vice versa, might look like.
If EA as a whole is unpopular, that’s also going to cause problems for well-reputed EA orgs.
Yes, I think that’s the important part, even though you’re right that we can’t do much about individual orgs choosing to associate itself with EA branding.
Yep, close to the top end of that.
That’s a really great observation. Samaritans has chosen to elide this problem simply by having no change in leadership throughout the entire run of the organization so far. They’ll have to deal with a transition soon as the founders are nearing retirement age, but I think they’ll be okay; there are lots of well aligned people in the org who have worked there for decades.
They haven’t had any major fuck ups, and there’s two main reasons for that imo:
The culture is very, very hufflepuff, and it shows. When you talk to people from Samaritans it’s very obvious that the thing they want to do the most is to do as much good as possible, in the most direct way as possible, and they are not interested in any sort of moral compromise. They’ve turned down funding from organizations that they didn’t find up to snuff. Collaborating orgs either collaborate on Samaritan’s stringent terms, or not at all.
Doing the work this way has become increasingly easier as working with Samaritans has gotten to be an increasingly stronger and valuable signal of goodness, but they didn’t make compromises even as a very young and cash strapped organization.
They have a very very slow acculturation process for staff. It’s very much one of those organizations where you have to be in it for over a decade before they start trusting you to make significant decisions, and no one who is unaligned would find working there for a decade tolerable, lol. So basically there are no unaligned rogue actors inside it at all.