R

RayTaylor

35 karmaJoined Mar 2015

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87

This is perhaps even more important post SBF scandal, where putting out a large amount of positive information for the public to find is quite crucial.
 

If EAs don't talk to journalists they will miss out on one really important learning:

.... how to talk to journalists!

This seems very focused on EA and policy in USA and DC, rather than EA as a whole. 

One of the original themes of EA was global health and poverty - it would be nice if you could do a part 2 with a wider focus? After all, DC has plenty of global policy think tanks, IFPRI, USAID etc.

I agree that global health and poverty need giving now, and admire your willingness with being OK to create a drop in the bucket!

I'm working on interventions that interrupt inter-generational poverty / the poverty cycle, and some excellent USAID health research has identified infant cognitive stunting as a key lock on intergenerational poverty in Africa, and aflatoxin B1 as a key cause of that stunting, along with smoke, lead and malnutrition of mothers and adolescent girls.

I think it's wise to separate the FTX and due diligence issue from the broader thesis. Here I'm just commenting on due diligence with donors.

Who was/is responsible for checking the probity or criminality of ...

 (a) FTX and Almeda?

 (b) donors to a given charity like CEA? (I put some links on this below)

(a) First it's their own board/customers/investors, but presumably supervisory responsibility is or should also be with central bank regulators, FBI, etc. If the CEO of a company is a member of Rotary, donates to Oxfam, invests in a football team, it doesn't suddenly become the primary responsibility of all of those entities (ahead of board, FBI etc) to check out his business and ethics and views, unless (and this is important) he's going to donate big and then have influence on programmes, membership etc. 

(See the links below on how both due diligence and reputational considerations* can matter a lot to the recipient charity. If there is some room for doubt about the donor, but it doesn't reach a threshold, it may be possible to create a layer of distance or supervision e.g. create a trust with it's own board, which does the donating.)

(b) Plenty of charities accepted donations from Enron, Bernie Madoff and others. 

Traditionally, their job is to do their job, not evaluate the probity of all their donors. However, there has been a change of mood since oil industry disinvestment campaigns and the opioid crisis (with the donations from the Sackler family, here in the UK at least**). Political parties are required to do checks on donors. 

Marshall Rosenberg turned down lots of people who wanted to fund NVC and the cNVC nonprofit, because he felt that taking money put him into relationship with them, and some companies he just didn't want to be in relationship with. This worked well for him, and made sure there was no pressure to shift focus, but it did frustrate his staff team quite often.

It might be possible as a matter of routine policy to ask large donors if they are happy to have their main income checked, especially if they want to be publicly associated with a particular project, or to go more discreetly to ratings agencies and so on. A central repository of donor checks could be maintained, to minimise costs. This wouldn't be perfect, but a due diligence process, ideally open and transparent, would sometimes be a good defence if problems arise later? 

These are the (more minimal) UK Charity Commission guidelines on checking out your donors, and even this might have helped if it had been done rigorously:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/550694/Tool_6.pdf 

Here's a plain English version where the overall advice is "be reasonable":

https://manchestercommunitycentral.org/sites/manchestercommunitycentral.co.uk/files/Ethical%20fundraising%20-%20how%20to%20conduct%20due%20diligence%20on%20potential%20donors_0.pdf 

**This is for bigger donations:
https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Due-diligence-processes-for-potential-donations.pdf  

*This is about how things went wrong for Prince Charles's charities:
https://www.charitytoday.co.uk/due-diligence-for-charities-ensuring-transparency-and-trustworthiness/ 

> healthy for people to separate giving to their community from altruism.

Is this realistically achievable, with the community we have now? How?


(I imagine it would take a comms team with a social psychology genius and a huge budget, and still would only work partially, and would require very strong buy in from current power players, and a revision of how EA is presented and introduced? but perhaps you think another, leaner and more viable approach is possible?)

>The simpler your path to impact is, the fewer failure points exist

That's not always true. 

Some extreme counter-examples:

a. Programmes on infant stunting keep failing, partly because an overly simple approach has been adopted (intensive infant feeding, Plumpy Nuts etc, with insufficient attention to maternal nutrition, aflatoxin removal, treating parasites in pregnancy, adolescent nutrition, conditional cash transfers etc)

b. A critical path plan was used for Apollo, and worked much better than the simpler Soviet approach, despite being much more complicated. 

c. The Brexit Leave campaign SEEMED simple but was actually formed through practice on previous campaigns, and was very sophisticated "under the hood", which made it hard to oppose.

It's also hard to call people out when a lot of you are applying to him/them for funding, and are mostly focused on trying to explain how great and deserving your project is.

One good principle here is "be picky about your funders". Smaller amounts from steady, responsible, principled and competent funders, who both do and submit to due diligence, are better than large amounts from others. 

This doesn't mean you HAVE to agree with their politics or everything they say in public - it's more about having proper governance in place, and funders being separate from boards and boards being separate from executive, so that undue influence and conflicts of interest don't arise, and decisions are made objectively, for the good of the project and the stated goals, not to please an individual funder or get kudos from EAs.

I've written more about donor due diligence in the main thread, with links.

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