I didn't think of it as sufficient, but I did think of it as momentum. "Tomorrow, there will be more of us" doesn't feel true anymore.

I wrote at length about my views on epistemic confidence here https://medium.com/@moskov/works-in-progress-the-long-journey-to-doing-good-better-9dfb68e50868

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.

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 feel quite aligned with you spiritually on this topic: we both want more diversified funding for these causes, and see Good Ventures-as-sole-funder both getting in the way of that outcome and creating a variety of second order problems. I'm sorry to hear that OP may have actively dissuaded you from pursuing diversification. Folks like you, as well as OP staff, will now spend more of their time pursuing other funding sources, and I expect that to be strongly positive for the causes and the general EA project over the long run.

In the short run, I agree we have recently lost valuable time and energy via this path, and I regret that and accept a good deal of responsibility. When FTX showed up on the scene, it felt like plurality was happening, and as soon as they went away, I became quite fixated on this topic again.

>> 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".

I proposed this myself at one point, and the team politely and quite correctly me informed me that projecting this response from critics was naive. We are ultimately responsible for the grants downstream of our decisions in the eyes of the world, regardless of who made intermediate decisions.

As an example of how this has played out in practice, we're known (and largely reviled) locally in San Francisco for supporting the controversial DA Chesa Boudin. In fact, I did not even vote for him (and did not vote in the recall), and the only association is the fact that we made a grant in 2019 to a group that supported him in later years, for totally unrelated work. We made a statement to clarify all this, which helped a little on the margin, but did not substantially change the narrative.

I'm grateful that Cari and I met Holden when we did (and grateful to Daniela for luring him to San Francisco for that first meeting). The last fourteen years of our giving would have looked very different without his work, and I don't think we'd have had nearly the same level of impact — particularly in areas like farm animal welfare and AI that other advisors likely wouldn't have mentioned.

I don't feel I have much to say about that tbh, though I did talk about auditing financials here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eRyC6FtN7QEkDEwMD/should-we-audit-dustin-moskovitz?commentId=qEzHRDMqfR5fJngoo

If we have another major donor with a more mysterious financial background than mine, we should totally pressure them to undergo an audit!

That said, I'm not convinced the next scandal will look anything like that, and the real problem to me was the lack of smoking guns. It's very hard to remove someone from power without that, as we've recently observed with sama, and continuously observe with Elon.

So the upshot is my prediction is we will again fail to identify and correct possible scandals, and I'm not sure we should beat ourselves up about it as much as we do. My post was more meant to soften the ground on that likely outcome so that we don't see it as a fatally damning tragedy when it happens, for EA or any other movement.

I understood what you meant before, but still see it as a bad analogy.

For context I saw many rounds of funding as a board member at Vicarious which was a pure lab for most of its life (and then later attempted robotics but that small revenue actually devalued it in the eyes of investors). There, what it took was someone getting excited about the story and smaller performance milestones along the way.