Thanks for flagging this, Ozzie. I led the GCR Cause Prio team for the last year before it was wound down, so I can add some context.

The honest summary is that the team never really achieved product-market fit. Despite the name, we weren't really doing “cause prioritization” as most people would conceive of it. GCR program teams have wide remits within their areas and more domain expertise and networks than we had, so the separate cause prio team model didn't work as well as it does for GHW, where it’s more fruitful to dig into new literatures and build quantitative models. In practice, our work ended up being a mix of supporting a variety of projects for different program teams and trying to improve grant evaluation methods. GCR leadership felt that this set-up wasn’t on track to answer their most important strategy and research questions and that it wasn’t worth the opportunity cost of the people on the team. GCR leadership are considering alternative paths forward, though haven’t decided on anything yet.

I don't think there are any other comparably major structural changes at Coefficient to flag, other than that we’re trying to scale Good Ventures' giving and work with other partners, as described in our name change announcement post. I’ll also note that the Worldview Investigation team also wound down in H2, although that case was because team members left for other high-impact roles (e.g. Joe) and not through a top-down decision. This means that there's no longer much dedicated pure research capacity within GCR, though grantmaking here is fairly contiguous with research in practice. 

Do you think this is evidence that OpenPhil's GCR staff/team is doing less cause prioritization now than they were before? The specific things you say don't seem to be much evidence either way about this (and also not much evidence about whether or not they actually need to be doing more cause prioritization on the margin). Maybe you have further reason to believe this is bad?

I imagine there must have been a bunch of other major changes around Coefficient that aren't yet well understood externally. This caught me a bit off guard. 

What makes you expect this and why (assuming you do) do you expect these changes to be negative? 

Ozzie my apologies for not addressing all of your many points here,  but I do want to link you to two places where I've expressed a lot of my takes on the broad topic:
 
On medium, I talk about how I see the community at some length. tldr: aligned around the question of how to do the most good vs the answer, heterogenous, and often specifically alien to me and my values.

On the forum, I talk about the theoretical and practical difficulties of OP being "accountable to the community" (and here I also address an endowment idea specifically in a way that people found compelling). Similarly from my POV it's pretty dang hard to have the community be accountable to OP, in spite of everything people say they believe about that. Yes we can withold funding, after the fact, and at great community reputational cost. But I can't e.g. get SBF to not do podcasts nor stop the EA (or two?) that seem to have joined DOGE and started laying waste to USAID. (On Bsky, they blame EAs for the whole endeavor)

This reminds me of another related tension I've noticed. I think that OP really tries to not take much responsibility for EA organizations, and I believe that this has led to something of a vacuum of leadership. 

I think that OP has functionally has great power over EA. 

In many professional situations, power comes with corresponding duties and responsibilities.

CEOs have a lot of authority, but they are also expected to be agentic, to keep on the lookout for threats, to be in charge of strategy, to provide guidance, and to make sure many other things are carried out.

The President clearly has a lot of powers, and that goes hand-in-hand with great expectations and duties.

There's a version of EA funding where the top funders take on both leadership and corresponding responsibilities. These people ultimately have the most power, so arguably they're best positioned to take on leadership duties and responsibilities.

But I think nonprofit funders often try not to take much in terms of responsibilities, and I don't think OP is an exception. I'd also flag that I think EA Funds and SFF are in a similar boat, though these are smaller. 

My impression is that OP explicitly tries not to claim any responsibility for the EA ecosystem / environment, and correspondingly argues it's not particularly accountable to EA community members. Their role as I understand it is often meant to be narrow. This varies by OP team, but I think is true for the "GCR Capacity Building" team, which is closest to many "EA" orgs. I think this team mainly thinks of itself as a group responsible for making good decisions on a bunch of specific applications that hits their desk.

Again, this is a far narrower mandate than any conventional CEO would have. 

If we had a "CEO or President" that were both responsible for and accountable to these communities, I'd expect things like:
1. A great deal of communication with these communities.
2. Clear and open leadership structures and roles.
3. A good deal of high-level strategizing.
4. Agentic behavior, like taking significant action to "make sure specific key projects happen." 
5. When there are failures, acknowledgement of said failures, as well as plans to fix or change.

I think we basically don't have this, and none of the funders would claim to be this.

So here's a question: "Is there anyone in the EA community who's responsible for these sorts of things?"

I think the first answer I'd give is "no." The second answer is something like, "Well, CEA is sort of responsible for some parts of this. But CEA really reports to OP given their funding. CEA has very limited power of its own. And CEA has repeatedly try to express limits in its power, plus its gone through lots of management transitions."

In a well-run bureaucracy, I imagine that key duties would be clearly delegated to specific people or groups, and that groups would have the corresponding powers necessary to actually do a good job at them. You want key duties to be delegated to agents with the power to carry them out.

The ecosystem of EA organizations is not a well-organized bureaucracy. But that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of important duties to be performed. In my opinion, the fact that EA represents a highly-fragmented set of small organizations was functionally a decision by the funders (at least, they had a great deal of influence on this), so I'd hope that they would have thoughts on how to make sure the key duties get done somehow. 

This might seem pretty abstract, so I'll try coming up with some more specific examples:
1. Say a tiny and poorly-resourced org gets funded. They put together a board of their friends (the only people available), then proceed to significantly emotionally abuse their staff. Who is ultimately responsible here? I'd expect the founders would not at all want to take responsibility for this. 
2. Before the FTX Future Fund blew up, I assumed that EA leaders had vetted it. Later I find out that OP purposefully tried to keep its distance and not get involved (in this case meaning that they didn't investigate or warn anyone), in part because they didn't see it as their responsibility, and claimed that because FTX Future Fund was a "competitor", it wasn't right for them to get involved. From what I can tell now, it was no one's responsibility to vet the FTX Future Fund team or FTX organization. You might have assumed CEA, but CEA was funded by FTX and previously even had SBF as a board member - they were clearly not powerful and independent enough for this.
3. There are many people in the EA scene who invest large amounts of time and resources preparing for careers that only exist under the OP umbrella. Many or all of their future jobs will be under this umbrella. At the same time, it's easy to imagine that they have almost no idea what the power structures at the top of this umbrella are like. This umbrella could change leadership or direction at any time, with very little warning. 
4. There were multiple "EAs" on the board of OpenAI during that board member spat. That event seemed like a mess, and it negatively influenced a bunch of other EA organizations. Was that anyone's responsibility? Can we have any assurances that community members will do a better job next time? (if there is a next time)
5. I'm not sure if many people at all, in positions of power, are spending much time thinking about long-term strategic issues for EA. It seems very easy for me to imagine large failures and opportunities we're missing out on. This also is true for the nonprofit EA AI Safety Landscape - many of the specific organizations are too small and spread out to be very agentic, especially in cases of dealing with diverse and private information. I've heard good things recently about Zach Robinson at CEA, but also would note that CEA has historically been highly focused on some long-running projects (EAG, the EA Forum, Community Health), with fairly limited strategic or agentic capacity, plus being heavily reliant on OP. 
6. Say OP decides to shut down the GCR Capacity Building team one day, and gives a 2-years notice. I'd expect this to be a major mess. Few people outside OP understand how the internals of OP decisions get made, so it's hard for other EA members to see this coming or gauge how likely it is. My guess is that they don't seem like they'd do this, but I have limited confidence. As such, it's hard for me to suggest that people make long-term plans (3+ years) in this area. 
7. We know that OP generally maximizes expected value. What happens when narrow EV optimization conflicts with honesty and other cooperative values? Would they represent the same choices that other EAs might want? I believe that FTX justified their bad actions using utilitarianism, for instance, and lots of businesses and nonprofits carry out highly Machiavellian and dishonest actions to advance their interests. Is it possible that EAs working under the OP umbrella are unknowingly supporting actions they might not condone? It's hard to know without much transparency and evaluation. 

On the plus side, I think OP and CEA have improved a fair bit on this sort of thing in the last few years. OP seems to be working to assure that grantees follow certain basic managerial criteria. New hires and operations have come in, which has seemed to have helped. 

I've previously discussed my thinking on the potential limitations we're getting from having small orgs here. Also, I remember that Oliver Habryka has repeatedly mentioned the lack of leadership around this scene - I think that this topic is one thing he was sort-of referring to. 

Ultimately, my guess is that OP has certain goals they want to achieve, and it's unlikely they or the other funders will want to take many of the responsibilities that I suggest here. 

Given that, I think it would be useful for people in the EA ecosystem to understand this and respond accordingly. I think that our funding situation really needs diversification, and I think that funders willing to be more agentic in crucial areas that are currently lacking could do a lot of good. I expect that when it comes to "senior leadership", there are some significant gains to be made, if the right people and resources can come together.  

Thanks for writing this Ozzie! :) I think lots of things about the EA community are confusing for people, especially relationships between organizations. As we are currently redesigning EA.org it might be helpful for us to add some explanation on that site. (I would be interested to hear if anyone has specific suggestions!)

From my own limited perspective (I work at CEA but don’t personally interact much with OP directly), your impression sounds about right. I guess my own view of OP is that it’s better to think of them as a funder rather than a collaborator (though as I said I don’t personally interact with them much so haven’t given this much thought, and I wouldn’t be surprised if others at CEA disagree). They have their own goals as an organization, and it’s not necessarily bad if those goals are not exactly aligned with the overall EA community. My understanding is that it’s very standard for projects to adapt their pitches for funders that do not have the same goals/values as them. For example, I’m not running the Forum in a way that would maximize career changes^[1] (TBH I don’t think OP would want me to do this anyway), but it’s helpful to include data we have about how the Forum affects career changes when writing a funding proposal^[2]. In fact, no one at OP has ever asked me to maximize career changes as a requirement before or after receiving funding, nor do I recall anyone at OP ever asking me to make any changes to the Forum (OP staff do provide feedback but I personally weigh those mostly relative to how much I think they understand the Forum — for example, I’d probably weigh Lizka’s feedback higher than anyone at OP).

I acknowledge that this is complicated by the fact that CEA likely has a unique relationship with OP (due to our large size relative to other community building orgs, long history working in this space, and the fact that our current CEO used to work at OP), so I expect that my own experience with OP does not necessarily generalize to other fundees. Also OP is the overwhelmingly largest funder for EA community building, and so the extent to which they are not aligned with the overall EA community does matter, as money straightforwardly gives them power and influence, though I don’t personally have a good picture of the practical effects.

I think that having these discussions in a public community space is valuable, so I appreciate you sharing this here!

1. ^{^}

   For the sake of this comment, I'm assuming that Ozzie's description accurately describes OP's view, though I have never talked with anyone at OP about this so I don't actually know if it's accurate.

2. ^{^}

   Note that I care about improving the world, and I think that getting people to do high-impact jobs is in fact a good way to make the world better.

This seems directionally correct, but I would add more nuance.

While OP, as a grantmaker, has a goal it wants to achieve with its grants (and they wouldn't be EA aligned if they didn't), this doesn't necessarily mean they are very short term. The Open Phil EA/LT Survey seems to me to show best what they care about in outcomes (talent working in impactful areas) but also how hard it is to pinpoint the actions and inputs needed. This leads me to believe that OP instrumentally cares about the community/ecosystem/network as it needs multiple touchpoints and interactions to get most people from being interested in EA ideas to working on impactful things.

On the other side, we use the term community in confusing ways. I was on a Community Builder Grant by CEA for two years when working at EA Germany, which many call national community building. What we were actually doing was working on the talent development pipeline, trying to find promising target groups, developing them and trying to estimate the talent outcomes. 

Working on EA as a social movement/community while being paid is challenging. On one hand, I assume OP would find it instrumentally useful (see above) but still desire to track short-term outcomes as a grantmaker. As a grant recipient, I felt I couldn't justify any actions that lacked a clear connection between outcomes and impact. Hosting closed events for engaged individuals in my local community, mentoring, having one-on-ones with less experienced people, or renting a local space for coworking and group events appeared harder to measure. I also believe in the norm of doing this out of care, wanting to give back to the community, and ensuring the community is a place where people don't need to be compensated to participate.

I think this is downstream of a lot of confusion about what 'Effective Altruism' really means, and I realise I don't have a good definition any more. In fact, because all of the below can be criticised, it sort of explains why EA gets seemingly infinite criticism from all directions.

• Is it explicit self-identification?
• Is it explicit membership in a community?
• Is it implicit membership in a community?
• Is it if you get funded by OpenPhilanthropy?
• Is it if you are interested or working in some particular field that is deemed "effective"?
• Is it if you believe in totalising utilitarianism with no limits?
• To always justify your actions with quantitative cost-effectiveness analyses where you're chosen course of actions is the top ranked one?
• Is it if you behave a certain way?

Because in many ways I don't count as EA based off the above. I certainly feel less like one than I have in a long time.

For example:

I think a lot of EAs assume that OP shares a lot of the same beliefs they do.

I don't know if this refers to some gestalt 'belief' than OP might have, or Dustin's beliefs, or some kind of 'intentional stance' regarding OP's actions. While many EAs shared some beliefs (I guess) there's also a whole range of variance within EA itself, and the fundamental issue is that I don't know if there's something which can bind it all together.

I guess I think the question should be less "public clarification on the relationship between effective altruism and Open Philanthropy" and more "what does 'Effective Altruism' mean in 2025?"

I had Claude rewrite this, if the terminology is confusing. I think it's edit is decent.
---

The EA-Open Philanthropy Relationship: Clarifying Expectations

The relationship between Effective Altruism (EA) and Open Philanthropy (OP) might suffer from misaligned expectations. My observations:

1. OP funds the majority of EA activity
2. Many EAs view OP as fundamentally aligned with EA principles
3. OP deliberately maintains distance from EA and doesn't claim to be an "EA organization"
4. EAs often assume OP leadership is somewhat accountable to the EA community, while OP leadership likely disagrees
5. Many EAs see their community as a unified movement with shared goals and mutual support
6. OP appears to view EA more transactionally—as a valuable resource pool for talent, ideas, and occasionally money

This creates a fundamental tension. OP approaches the relationship through a cost-benefit lens, funding EA initiatives when they directly advance specific OP goals (like AI safety research). Meanwhile, many EAs view EA as a transformative cultural movement with intrinsic value beyond any specific cause area.

These different perspectives manifest in competing priorities:

EA community-oriented view prioritizes:

• Long-term community health and growth
• Individual wellbeing of community members
• Building EA's reputation for honesty and trustworthiness

Transactional view prioritizes:

• Short-term talent pipeline and funding opportunities
• Risk management (not wanting EA activities to wind up reflecting poorly on OP)
• Minimizing EA criticism of OP and OP activities. (This is both annoying to deal with, and could hurt their specific activities) 

This disconnect explains why some people might feel betrayed by EA. Recruiters often promote EA as a supportive community/movement (which resonates better), but if the funding reality treats EA more as a talent network, there's a fundamental misalignment.

Another thought I've had: "EA Global has major community and social movement vibes, but has the financial incentives in line with a recruiting fair."

Both perspectives can coexist, but greater clarity could be really useful here. 

On the positive front, I know its early days but GWWC have really impressed me with their well produced, friendly yet honest public facing stuff this year - maybe we can pick up on that momentum?

Also EA for Christians is holding a British conference this year where Rory Stewart and the Archbishop of Canterbury (biggest shot in the Anglican church) are headlining which is a great collaboration with high profile and well respected mainstream Christian / Christian-adjacent figures.

(Jumping in for our busy comms/exec team) Understanding the status of the EA brand and working to improve it is a top priority for CEA :) We hope to share more work on this in future.

I wrote a downvoted post recently about how we should be warning AI Safety talent about going into labs for personal branding reasons (I think there are other reasons not to join labs, but this is worth considering). 

I think people are still underweighting how much the public are going to hate labs in 1-3 years.

Very sorry to hear these reports, and was nodding along as I read the post.

If I can ask, how do they know EA affiliation was the decision? Is this an informal 'everyone knows' thing through policy networks in the US? Or direct feedback for the prospective employer than EA is a PR-risk?

Of course, please don't share any personal information, but I think it's important for those in the community to be as aware as possible of where and why this happens if it is happening because of EA affiliation/history of people here.

(Feel free to DM me Ozzie if that's easier)

I think that certain EA actions in ai policy are getting a lot of flak.

Also, I suspect that the current EA AI policy arm could find ways to be more diplomatic and cooperative

Would you be happy to expand on these points?

I hope my post was clear enough that distance itself is totally fine (and you give compelling reasons for that here). It's ~implicitly denying present knowledge or past involvement in order to get distance that seems bad for all concerned. The speaker looks shifty and EA looks like something toxic you want to dodge. 

Responding to a direct question by saying "We've had some overlap and it's a nice philosophy for the most part, but it's not a guiding light of what we're doing here" seems like it strictly dominates. 

Do you think that distancing is ever not in the interest of both parties? If so, what is special about Anthropic/EA?

(I think it's plausible that the answer is that distancing is always good; the negative risks of tying your reputation to someone always exceed the positive. But I'm not sure.)

I've just ran into this, so excuse a bit of grave digging. As someone who has entered the EA community with prior career experience I disagree with your premise

"It's very awkward to go from "manager of a small team" to "intern," but that can be necessary if you want to learn a new domain, for instance."

To me this kind of situation just shouldn't happen. It's not a question of status, it's a question of inefficiency. If I have managerial experience and the organization I'd be joining can only offer me the exact same job they'd be offering to a fresh grad, then they are simply wasting my potential. I'd be better off at a place which can appreciate what I bring and the organization would be better off with someone who has a fresher mind and less tempting alternatives.

IMO the problem is not with the fact that people are unwilling to take a step down. The problem is with EA orgs unwilling or unable to leverage the transferrable skills of experienced professionals, forcing them into entry-level positions instead.

Pragmatically, I think many of the old folks around EA are either doing very well, or are kind of lost/exploring other avenues. Other areas allow people to have more reputable positions, but these are typically not very EA/effective areas. Often E2G isn't very high-status in these clusters, so I think a lot of these people just stop doing much effective work.

I haven't really noticed this happening very much empirically, but I do think the effect you are talking about is quite intuitive. Have you seen many cases of this that you're confident are correct (e.g. they aren't lost for other reasons like working on non-public projects or being burnt out)? No need to mention specific names.


In theory, EAs are people who try to maximize their expected impact. In practice, EA is a light ideology that typically has a limited impact on people. I think that the EA scene has demonstrated success at getting people to adjust careers (in circumstances where it's fairly cheap and/or favorable to do so)

This seems incorrect to me, in absolute terms. By the standards of ~any social movement, EAs are very sacrificial and focused on increasing their impact. I suspect you somewhat underrate how rare it is outside of EA to be highly committed to ~any non-self-serving principles seriously enough to sacrifice significant income and change careers, particularly in new institutions/movements.
 

A related issue I have actually encountered is something like "but you seem overqualified for this role we are hiring for". Even if previously successful people wanted to take a "less prestigious" role, they might encounter real problems in doing so. I hope the EA eco system might have some immunity to this though - as hopefully the mission alignment will be strong enough evidence of why such a person might show interest in a "lower" role.

Thanks for writing this, this is also something I have been thinking about and you've expressed it more eloquently.

One thing I have thought might be useful is at times showing restraint with job titling. I've observed cases where people have had a title for example Director in a small org or growing org, and in a larger org this role might be a coordinator, lead, admin. 

I've thought at times this doesn't necessarily set people up for long term career success as the logical career step in terms of skills and growth, or a career shift, often is associated with a lower sounding title. Which I think decreases motivation to take on these roles.

At the same time I have seen people, including myself, take a decrease in salary and title, in order to shift careers and move forward.

I agree with you. I think in EA this is especially the case because much of the community-building work is focused on universities/students, and because of the titling issue someone else mentioned. I don't think someone fresh out of uni should be head of anything, wah. But the EA movement is young and was started by young people, so it'll take a while for career-long progression funnels to develop organically. 

I don't comment or post much on the EA forum because the quality of discourse on the EA Forum typically seems mediocre at best. This is especially true for x-risk.

I think this has been true for a while.

Very little biorisk content here, perhaps because of info-hazards.

When I write biorisk-related things publicly I'm usually pretty unsure of whether the Forum is a good place for them. Not because of info-hazards, since that would gate things at an earlier stage, but because they feel like they're of interest to too small a fraction of people. For example, I could plausibly have posted Quick Thoughts on Our First Sampling Run or some of my other posts from https://data.securebio.org/jefftk-notebook/ here, but that felt a bit noisy?

It also doesn't help that detailed technical content gets much less attention than meta or community content.  For example, three days ago I wrote a comment on @Conrad K.'s thoughtful Three Reasons Early Detection Interventions Are Not Obviously Cost-Effective, and while I feel like it's a solid contribution only four people have voted on it.  On the other hand, if you look over my recent post history at my comments on Manifest, far less objectively important comments have ~10x the karma. Similarly the top level post was sitting at +41 until Mike bumped it last week, which wasn't even high enough that (before I changed my personal settings to boost biosecurity-tagged posts) I saw it when it came out.  I see why this happens--there are a lot more people with the background to engage on a community topic or even a general "good news" post--but it still doesn't make me as excited to contribute on technical things here.

I wonder if the forum is even a good place for a lot of these discussions? Feels like they need some combination of safety / shared context, expertise, gatekeeping etc?

I don't know about you but I just learned about one of the biggest updates to OPs grantmaking in a year on the Forum.

That said, the data does show some agreement with your and commenters vibe of lowering quantity.

I agree that the Forum could be a good place for a lot of these discussions. Some of them aren't happening at all to my knowledge.^[1] Some of those should be, and should be discussed on the Forum. Others are happening in private and that's rational, although you may be able to guess that my biased view is that a lot more should be public, and if they were, should be posted on the Forum.

Broadly: I'm quite bullish on the EA community as a vehicle for working on the world's most pressing problems, and of open online discussion as a piece of our collective progress. And I don't know of a better open place on the internet for EAs to gather.

1. ^{^}

   Part of that might be because as EA gets older the temperature (in the annealing sense) rationally lowers.

Yeah even on the global health front the last 3 months or so have felt especially quiet

So I did used to do more sort of back of the envelope stuff, but it didn't get much traction and people seemed to think it was unfished (it was) so I guess I had less enthusiasm.

As a random datapoint, I'm only just getting into the AI Governance space, but I've found little engagement with (some) (of^[1]) (the) (resources) I've shared and have just sort of updated to think this is either not the space for it or I'm just not yet knowledgeable enough about what would be valuable to others. 

 

1. ^{^}

   I was especially disappointed with this one, because this was a project I worked on with a team for some time, and I still think it's quite promising, but it didn't receive the proportional engagement I would have hoped for. Given I optimized some of the project for putting out this bit of research specifically, I wouldn't do the same now and would have instead focused on other parts of the project. 

It seems from the comments that there's a chance that much of this is just timing - i.e. right now is unusually quiet. It is roughly mid-year, maybe people are on vacation or something, it's hard to tell.

I think that this is partially true. I'm not interested in bringing up this point to upset people, but rather to flag that maybe there could be good ways of improving this (which I think is possible!)

Yeah I agree that funding diversification is a big challenge for EA, and I agree that OP/GV also want more funders in this space. In the last MCF, which is run by CEA, the two main themes were brand and funding, which are two of CEA’s internal priorities. (Though note that in the past year we were more focused on hiring to set strong foundations for ops/systems within CEA.) Not to say that CEA has this covered though — I'd be happy to see more work in this space overall!

Personally, I worry that funding diversification is a bit downstream of improving the EA brand — it may be hard for people to be excited to support EA community building projects if they feel like others dislike it, and it may be hard to convince new people/orgs to fund EA community things if they read stuff about how EA is bad. So I’m personally more optimistic about prioritizing brand-related work (one example being highlighting EA Forum content on other platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Substack).

I'd love to see some other EA donors and community members step up here. I think it's kind of damning how little EA money comes from community members or sources other than OP right now. Long-term this seems pretty unhealthy. 

There was some prior relevant discussion in November 2023 in this CEA fundraising thread, such as my comment here about funder diversity at CEA. Basically, I didn't think that there was much meaningful difference between a CEA that was (e.g.) 90% OP/GV funded vs. 70% OP/GV funded. So I think the only practical way for that percentage to move enough to make a real difference would be both an increase in community contributions/control and CEA going on a fairly severe diet. 

As for EAIF, expected total grantmaking was ~$2.5MM for 2025. Even if a sizable fraction of that went to CEA, it would only be perhaps 1-2% of CEA's 2023 budget of $31.4MM.

I recall participating in some discussions here about identifying core infrastructure that should be prioritized for broad-based funding for democratic and/or epistemic reasons. Identifying items in the low millions for more independent funding seems more realistic than meaningful changes in CEA's funding base. The Forum strikes me as an obvious candidate, but a community-funded version would presumably need to run on a significantly leaner budget than I understand to be currently in place. 

I want to see more discussion on how EA can better diversify and have strategically-chosen distance from OP/GV.

One reason is that it seems like multiple people at OP/GV have basically said that they want this (or at least, many of the key aspects of this). 

I agree with the approach's direction, but this premise doesn't seem very helpful in shaping the debate. It doesn't seem that there is a right level of funding for meta EA or that this is what we currently have. 

My perception is that OP has specific goals, one of which is to reduce GCR risk. As there are not so many high absorbency funding opportunities and a lot of uncertainty in the field, they focus more on capacity building, of which EA has proven to be a solid investment in talent pipeline building.

If this is true, then the level of funding we are currently seeing is downstream from OP's overall yearly spending and their goals. Other funders will come to very different conclusions as to why they would want to fund EA meta and to what extent.

If you're a meta funder who agrees with GCR risks, you might see opportunities that either don't want OPs' money, that OP doesn't want to fund, or that want to keep OPs' funding under a certain bar. These are more neglected, but they are more cost-effective for you as they are not as fungible.

At the last, MCF funding diversification and the EA brand were the two main topics, but to me, meta-funding diversification seems much harder, especially for areas under the EA brand.

I mean Dustin Moskovitz used to come on the forum and beg people to do earn to give yet I don't think the number of donors has grown that much. More people should go to Jane Street and do Y-Combinator but it feels as though that's taboo to say for some reason.

I think its better to start something new. Reform is hard but no one is going to stop you from making a new charity. The EA brand isn't in the best shape. Imo the "new thing" can take money from individual EAs but shouldn't accept anything connected to OpenPhil/CEA/Dustin/etc. 

If you start new you can start with a better culture. 

I have said this in other spaces since the FTX collapse: The original idea of EA, as I see it, was that it was supposed to make the kind of research work done at philanthropic foundations open and usable for well-to-do-but-not-Bill-Gates-rich Westerners. While it's inadvisable to outright condemn billionaires using EA work to orient their donations for... obvious reasons, I do think there is a moral hazard in billionaires funding meta EA. Now, the most extreme policy would be to have meta EA be solely funded by membership dues (as plenty organizations are!). I'm not sure if that would really be workable for the amounts of money involved, but some kind of donation cap could be plausibly envisaged.