Please downvote this comment if you want to signal boost the organisations in the OP without giving me unearned karma.

IIRC it was done under the name 'CEA' when that name covered both the current org and what is now 'Effective Ventures'.  It was done at the impetus of a trustee of CEA-EV who, since they were the same legal entity, was also a trustee of CEA-CEA (I believe it's still true that they're currently the same organisation, CEA-CEA's plans to spin off notwithstanding). I can't find the initial announcement from CEA, but the justification was to host EA events and conferences there. Since by far the primary EA-event-and-conference-hosting organisation is CEA-CEA, it seems likely they were the primary beneficiary of the purchase.

I'm not really sure whether this technically qualifies as 'only fiscally sponsoring Wytham' (I doubt there's a simple yes-no answer to the question), but there's clearly a lot of entanglement with the organisation and people who a) are supposed to represent the EA community and b) benefited from the project. Even/especally if this entanglement is all perfectly innocent and well thought through, greater transparency would have made that more obvious and prevented much of the consequent muckraking of the movement by its critics.

Even when that's true, the org could specify all the other sources of funding, and separate out 'anonymous donations' into either one big slice or one-slice-per-donor.

To be clear, I don't mean 'graph of how the expected multiplier on a dollar changes over time', I mean 'graph of how the expected donations generated by a dollar given are distributed over time' (before any discounting).

We estimate that GWWC's marginal 2025 giving multiplier is around 14x

I think it would be really helpful to graph this over time. If the majority of it manifests in 10 years, that's very different than e.g. if it assumes pledgers' will be young, have increasing salaries over their careers, and give the majority of it in 40-50 years time.

(and AI doomers will probably think that even 10 years is an irrelevant timespan, and it only really matters how much is moved in the next 1-5 years)

This is a shining example of how EA should operate. I feel like we might even cultivate an ethos of 'if you're not looking for excuses to "demote" yourself every couple of years, your incentives are probably wrong' (which is a lot easier with a salary structure like the one you describe).

I wouldn't say they're all top priority right now either fwiw. What I'd like is some kind of public commitment to stuff like this as at least nice-to-haves, rather than something they seem to feel no obligation about at all. That's all any of these 'principles' can be - a directional statement about culture. But CEA has been around for over a decade, with an average annual budget that must be well into the millions, so even 'not top priority' concerns could easily have been long since addressed if they'd had a historical interest in doing so.

I'm not sure I agree with that characterisation of Wytham Abbey. It was orchestrated by one of the trustees of the org on behalf of the org, with intended beneficiaries being more or less a subset of the org's proxy beneficiaries. And this was done under their current moniker, which per agb/Jason's comment elsewhere in this discussion, is highly misleading - especially when they're involved in projects like this. Consequently, when Wytham Abbey became a PR disaster, it helped bring the whole movement into disrepute. Arguably the main lesson was just 'don't use the public face of EA for black box projects', but I think the backup lesson was 'if you do, at least show enough of your working to prove to reasonable critical observers that it isn't a backdoor way of giving the trustees a summer home.'

Hey Chris :)

some points are likely due to an incomplete understanding of the top-level post

I'm not sure if you mean this question to be covered in the rest of your reply? If not, could you say concretely what you think I misunderstood? If so, I respectfully disagree that I misunderstood it:

The concretization of these principles is laid out in much more detail in resources that both of us are familiar with. There is no need for Zachary to have gone into more detail here 

Maybe I'm less familiar with the resources than you think? I know huge amounts have been written on these notions, but I know of nothing that would fix my  problem of 'I don't see how stating these principles gives me any meaningful information about CEA's future behaviour'.

The mission is obviously more important than us. That should be uncontroversial.

I think that's entirely consistent with what I've said. An organisation that aims to effect Y via X cannot afford to relegate X to an afterthought, or largely ignore the views of people strongly involved with X.

the importance of transparency is significantly complicated by the concept of infohazards in areas like biohazards or AI safety

I'm concerned that 'infohazards' get invoked far too often, especially to deflect concerns about (non)transparency. In CEA's case in particular, it doesn't seem like they deal with biohazards or AI safety at a level necessitating high security, and even if they do have some kind of black ops program dealing with those things that they're not telling us about, that isn't the transparency I'm concerned about. Just a general commitment to sharing info guiding key decisions about the community with the community, such as

• sharing forum changes they're considering, and the case for/against them
• making all their hires open, or giving clear reasons why when they don't
• describing what their prioritisation process actually is, inasmuch as it can be formalised, between e.g. longtermism and animal welfare/other considerations
• when they're considering buying mansions in the Oxford countryside/other controversial multimillion dollar calculations, publishing the cost-benefit calculation rather than merely asserting its existence
• giving the breakdown of their funding sources
• publishing the breakdown of their budget for EAGs
• open-sourcing forum data (IIRC they might technically have done this? But with no documentation, and an API that you have to direct-link to)
• avoiding behind-the-scenes work that they'd be embarrassed to have publicised (e.g. PELTIV scores)
• generally cultivating a culture of directly engaging in discussion with the community more - eg. regular office hours, rather than highly intermittent AMAs, and in threads like this, sticking around for a discussion rather than posting a top-down announcement and then entirely ignoring the comments.

With the princely allocation of $600 I received, I've been going through the list with my partner and discussing the pros and cons as we see them of each project before allocating them. Obviously the majority of these discussions are going to end in no donation, so I wonder if Austin thinks (or any of the individual grant requestors, if you're reading this would like) us to comment on why we're not funding those we don't, if we feel like we have anything to say?

Please keep in mind if we did that there are dozens of projects and we don't want to much extra bandwidth on this, so if we made such comments they would more or less be a C&P of our personal notes, and not edited to spare anyone's feelings.

Both Givewell and GWWC want to shift donation money to effective charities, which is why they have to make a compelling case for donors. Transparency seems to be a good tool for this. The analogy here would be CEA making the case for them to get funded for their work. Zach has written a bit about how they engage with funders.

That undermines the first motivation for I gave for transparency, but I don't think it really touches on the other four. And as you say, it only undermines the first to the extent that we don't think it would be better that they get more diverse funding.

I think if only for feedback-loop reasons, it would be far better for CEA to get more from the community - if they're struggling to do so, that could be considered an important form of feedback in itself.

However, I can also see that the EV of this might be lower than that of engaging with a smaller set of funders. Transparency and engaging with a broad audience can be pretty time-consuming and thus lower the cost-effectiveness of your approach.

I feel like this proves too much. Givewell's potential donors could make exactly the same claim, but Givewell repeatedly reinforced their belief that greater transparency is necessary to have high credence that the organisation in question is doing a good job. The fact that CEA's outputs are less concrete/measurable/directly tied to human welfare if anything makes me think it's more important that feedback loops are tightened than for Givewell evaluands.