I think this would significantly depend on what the investigation ultimately showed. It would probably be hard for the average EA reader (much less a member of the general public) to reliably estimate how much personal stress, risk, cost, etc. a cooperator bore, and thus how much respect we should assign for their choice. I think many people would use the outcome as a rough proxy. If the investigation revealed only fairly-well-known structural problems plus bad judgment by a few individuals, then people may not appreciate how much of a burden it was to work with a thorough, broad-scope investigation that went down many paths that ultimately ended up being unfruitful.

The second and third possible motivations seem to have a Prisoner's Dilemma element to them. They would motivate people to talk if and only if similarly situated individuals were talking. The inability to timely determine whether others have defected from the best-for-prisoners-collectively state is pretty important to the Dilemma. 

Even worse, if other prisoners strongly oppose cooperation, they may find a way to collectively punish those who do defect. The original Dilemma only gives the jailers the ability to assign punishment based on defection/non-defection. None of that is meant to suggest that EA insiders would necessarily punish cooperators -- I have no way of knowing that. But I expect most people would consider the possibility of who might be displeased with their cooperation. 

I think it depends what sort of risks we are talking about.

Agree -- I don't think the fatalistic view applies to all Dustin-related risks, just enough to make him a suboptimal comparison here. 

To take an FTX-like situation as an example, I doubt many orgs could avoid bankruptcy if they had liability for 4-6 years' clawback of prior OP grants, and it's not clear that getting months to years' worth of advance notice and attempted mitigation would materially reduce the odds of bankruptcy. (As you note, this is extraordinarily unlikely!) 

Encouraging more people to EtG would be mitigation for the movement as a whole, but its effectiveness would be dependent on [1] the catastrophic fraud actually existing, [2] you having enough reason to believe that to recommend action to other EAs but not enough to go to the media and/or cops and get traction,^[1] [3] you persuading the would-be EtGers that circumstances warranted them choosing this path, and [4] your advocacy not indirectly causing prompt public discovery and collapse of the fraud. After all, the value would be knowing of the risk in advance to take mitigating action sufficiently in advance of public discovery. Understanding the true risk a few weeks to months in advance of everyone else isn't likely to help much at all. Those seem like difficult conditions to meet.

1. ^{^}

   Reporting, but not getting traction from external watchdogs, is possible (cf. Madoff). I have not thought through whether having enough reason to advise other EAs, but not enough to report externally, is possible. 

Right -- for these types of private investigations to be successful, there often has to be some sort of prod that convinces people to cooperate when they would not choose to do so if given a unpressured choice. For example, your employer might threaten to fire you, or the sports league might sanction your team or university for non-cooperation. A few EtGers might be able to front the money for a good investigation, but only the powers-that-be can supply the necessary prod.

I don’t think the comparison about investigating Dustin is particularly apt, as he didn’t have all the complaints/red flags that SBF did. 

And -- if we are talking about 2024 -- there's another reason it doesn't seem like a great comparison to me. Researching catastrophic risks (to one's movement or otherwise) is generally only compelling to the extent that you can mitigate the likelihood and/or effect of those risks. Given the predominance of a single funder, investigating certain risks posed by that funder may not lead to actionable information to reduce risk no matter what the facts are.^[1] At some level of vulnerability, the risk becomes akin to the risk of a massive life-extinguishing asteroid crashing into Earth in the next week; I'm just as dead if I know about it a week in advance rather than seconds in advance.

1. ^{^}

   Of course, certain ethical duties would still exist.

A name change would be a good start.

By analogy, suppose there were a Center for Medical Studies that was funded ~80% by a group interested in just cardiology. Influenced by the resultant incentives, the CMS hires a bunch of cardiologists, pushes medical students toward cardiology residencies, and devotes an entire instance of its flagship Medical Research Global conference to the exclusive study of topics in cardiology. All those things are fine, but this org shouldn't use a name that implies that it takes a more general and balanced perspective on the field of medical studies, and should make very very clear that it doesn't speak for the medical community as a whole.

It's hard to figure out the discount (or premium) rate for GiveDirectly vis-a-vis an advertiser here. I agree that the demographic mix would likely warrant a reduction in value. On the other hand, there's at least some selection for interest in philanthropy based on the user clicking on the video (and it having only a fraction of the views of an average Mr. Beast video). Moreover, GiveDirectly is getting something that seems much more valuable: an extended favorable presentation from a source who is trusted by his viewers. The advertiser is getting 6-20 seconds on a non-skippable ad -- and viewers may have some level of default skepticism toward advertisements.

Unclear -- revenue per view varies widely but 2 cents per view seems in the ballpark for YouTube general content. Close enough for a BOTEC at least. This video has 20M views, so an estimated $400K in ad revenue. There's also a sponsor, revenue unknown.

It's unclear how much the exposure to 20M viewers is worth for GiveDirectly, but my guesses would be within an OOM of the ad/sponsor revenue. Rationale: given that YouTube takes about half of ad revenue in general, the advertiser seems to valued reaching the average YouTube watcher at ~4 cents, and the video can be seen as akin to an extended-length promoted ad and so is probably worth several times that.

Depends on the subsection, at least in the US. 501(c)(3) organizations are fairly limited on political activity. While 501(c)(4) organizations are less constrained, one does not get a tax break from donating to them. So you'll see some 501(c)(3)s have an associated 501(c)(4) organization.

Relatedly, how does one guard against the risk of viewers feeling good about themselves for watching / feeling they did their part by watching a video?  If the viewer walks away from the video feeling like that, and takes no action, they may be less likely to do something actually meaningful because they feel they "did their part" by becoming educated / causing a few cents to go to Beast Philanthropy's work. Thus there is at least some possibility that watching the video was net negative!