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Wei_Dai comments on Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI) - Less Wrong
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Holden must believe some additional relevant statements, because A-D (with "existential risk" suitably replaced) could be applied to every other charity, as presumably no charity is perfect.
I guess what I most want to know is what Holden thinks are the reasons SI hasn't already fixed the problems P. If it's lack of resources or lack of competence, then "withholding ... while pre-committing ..." isn't going to help. If it's wrong beliefs, then arguing seems better than "incentivizing", since that provides a permanent instead of temporary solution, and in the course of arguing you might find out that you're wrong yourself. What does Holden believe that causes him to think that providing explicit incentives to SI is a good thing to do?
Thanks for making this argument!
AFAICT charities generally have perverse incentives - to do what will bring in donations, rather than what will do the most good. That can usually argue against things like transparency, for example. So I think when Holden usually says "don't donate to X yet" it's as part of an effort to make these incentives saner.
As it happens, I don't think this problem applies especially strongly to SI, but others may differ.
Relevant
That is indeed relevant, in that it describes some perverse incentives and weird behaviors of nonprofits, with an interesting example. But knowing this context without having to click the link would have been useful. It is customary to explain what a link is about rather than just drop it.
(Or at least it should be)
But C applies more to some charities than others. And evaluating how much of a charity's potential effectiveness is lost to internal flaws is a big piece of what GiveWell does.
Absolutely agreed that if D is false -- for example, if increasing SI's incentive to fix P doesn't in fact increase SI's chances of fixing P, or if a withholding+precommitting strategy doesn't in fact increase SI's incentive to fix P, or some other reason -- then the strategy I describe makes no sense.