EA folks most often single out to express frustration & disappointment about

I've never seen anyone express frustration or disappointment about Dustin, except for Habryka. However, Habryka seems to be frustrated with most people who fund anything / do anything that's not associated with Lightcone and its affiliates, so I don't know if he should count as expressing frustration at Dustin in particular.

Are you including things like criticizing OP for departing grantees too quickly and for not departing grantees quickly enough, or do you have something else in mind?

I view Dustin and OP as quite separate, especially before Holden's departure, so that might also explain our different experience.

Edit: I retracted the below because I think it is unkind and wasn't truth-seeking enough. I apologise if I caused too much stress to @Dustin Moskovitz or @Alexander_Berger, even if I have disagreements with GVF/OP about things I very much appreciate what both of you are doing for the world, let alone 'EA' or its surrounding community.

Wait what, we're (or GV is) defunding animal stuff to focus more on AI stuff? That seems really bad to me, I feel like 'PR' damage to EA is much more coming from the 'AI eschaton' side than the 'help the animals' side (and also that interventions on animal welfare are plausibly much more valuable than AI)^[1]

1. ^{^}

   e.g. here and here

(I don't want to spend too much time psychologizing here, though I do think a root cause analysis is useful, so I will comment a bit, but will bow out if this gets too much)

I feel like this doesn't really match with Dustin's other comments about repeatedly emphasizing non-financial concrete costs. I think Dustin's model is closer to "every time I fund something I don't endorse, I lose important forms of social capital, political capital, and feel a responsibility to defend and explain my choices towards others, for which I only have limited bandwidth and don't have time or energy for. As a result, I am restricting my giving to things that I feel excited to stand behind, which is a smaller set, and where I feel good about the tradeoffs of financial and non-financial costs".

The point of Lightspeed Grants was explicitly to create a product that would allow additional funders (beyond Jaan) to distribute funding to important causes. 

It also had the more immediate positive effect of increasing the diversity and impact of Jaan's funding, though that's not where I expected the big wins to come from and not my primary motivation for working on it. I still feel quite excited about this, but stopped working on it in substantial parts because Open Phil cut funding for all non-LW programs to Lightcone.

The ask here was for development cost and operations, not for any regranting money.

Was the idea that, with more funding, these programs could be more successful and attract more mega donors from outside the community?

Basically.

To be clear, I think it's not a crazy decision for Open Phil to think that Jaan is in a better position to fund our SFF and Lightspeed work (though not funding us for Lightspeed did have a pretty substantial effect on our ability to work on it). The bigger effect came from both the implicit and explicit discouragement of working on SFF and Lightspeed over the years, mostly picked up from random conversations with Open Phil staff and peop... (read more)

I generally believe they are all valuable (in expectation anyway).

Your second statement is basically right, though my personal view is they impose costs on the movement/EA brand and not just us personally. Digital minds work, for example, primes the idea that our AI safety concerns are focused on consciousness-driven catalysts ("Terminator scenarios"), when in reality that is just one of a wide variety of ways AI can result in catastrophe.

[What I thought I was affirming here seems to be universally misunderstood by readers, so I'm taking it back.]

I hope to see everything funded by a more diverse group of actors, so that their dollar and non-dollar costs are more distributed. Per my other comment, I believe you (Oliver) want that too.

I wonder if this is an argument for Good Ventures funding more endowments. If they endow a re-granter that funds something weird, they can say "well the whole point of this endowment was to diversify decision-making; it's out of our hands at this point". From the perspective of increasing the diversity of the funding landscape, a no-strings endowment seems best, although it could have other disadvantages.

[By 'endowment' I'm suggesting a large, one-time lump sum given to a legally independent organization. That organization could choose to give away the endowment quickly and then dissolve, or give some legally mandated minimum disbursement every year, or anything in between.]

(Mostly agreeing)

I feel like:
1. I haven't seen any writing about how disagreements between Dustin/Cari, and other OP execs, have changed priorities. (Or how other "political" considerations changed priorities)
2. I'm sure that there have been disagreements between them, that have changed priorities.
3. I would naively expect many organizations to swipe "changes made, just because some other exec wanted them" under the rug of some other reason or other, like, "Well, we have a lot of uncertainty on this topic." Likewise, I don't trust the reasons that many organizations give to many of their non-obvious high-level decisions. 

Therefore, I think it's pretty natural to conclude that there's probably something funky going on, as I'd similar expect for other institutions. That some/many of the reasons for high-level decisions are political instead of epistemic.

I'd similarly assume that many high-level people at OP would like to signal these differences, but it would be difficult for them to do so (as is usually the case), so wouldn't mind EAs making conclusions like this. 

That said - if it is the case that there are important political reasons for things, I think it would be reall... (read more)

Hi Ozzie,

My personal model is that most of that can be figured out post-AGI

One could also have argued for figuring out farmed animal welfare after cheap animal food (produced in factory-farms) is widely available? Now that lots of people are eating factory-farmed animals, it is harder to role back factory-farming.

I encouraged people against earning to give before (though I updated sharply after 2022), and I largely regret that move. (I don't think of myself as senior, especially at the time, but I'm unusually vocal online so I wouldn't be surprised if I had a disproportionate influence).