Ok, thanks for clarifying. To me that sounds like a spectrum of “how much weirdness/lack of legibility are donors willing to tolerate w.r.t. the internals of an org”, and that might be correlated with whether a donor happens to be donating to the mission or to the agent(s).
I suspect another reason I’m struggling a bit with the idea is that although I consider myself a mission-oriented donor, I’m also having trouble coming up with an example of an intermediate input where finding out about it would cause me to be upset (immediately). Like, if MIRI purchased 50 dildos I wouldn’t blink twice because it’s not a significant expenditure relative to the organization’s size and I can think of a variety of plausible reasons that would make them a reasonable purchase. But if MIRI spent six figures on sex toys in one year I’d hope that there was an explanation, even if that was literally just “yeah these are actually inputs into research” or something like that. Maybe that still counts? It feels like the scale at which it starts to matter is also just another axis on that spectrum.
I guess it’s worth noting that the MIRI mission in particular is much less specific than the mission of e.g. an animal rights charity, or a person who has a specific project pitch? Like, “cause humanity to successfully navigate the acute risk period” is much more on the open-ended side of mission-space. For nearly any given X, it’s more plausible that it could be relevant to the MIRI mission than that it could be relevant to, say, someone who’s trying to build widgets.
Ok, thanks for clarifying. To me that sounds like a spectrum of “how much weirdness/lack of legibility are donors willing to tolerate w.r.t. the internals of an org”, and that might be correlated with whether a donor happens to be donating to the mission or to the agent(s).
I suspect another reason I’m struggling a bit with the idea is that although I consider myself a mission-oriented donor, I’m also having trouble coming up with an example of an intermediate input where finding out about it would cause me to be upset (immediately). Like, if MIRI purchased 50 dildos I wouldn’t blink twice because it’s not a significant expenditure relative to the organization’s size and I can think of a variety of plausible reasons that would make them a reasonable purchase. But if MIRI spent six figures on sex toys in one year I’d hope that there was an explanation, even if that was literally just “yeah these are actually inputs into research” or something like that. Maybe that still counts? It feels like the scale at which it starts to matter is also just another axis on that spectrum.
I guess it’s worth noting that the MIRI mission in particular is much less specific than the mission of e.g. an animal rights charity, or a person who has a specific project pitch? Like, “cause humanity to successfully navigate the acute risk period” is much more on the open-ended side of mission-space. For nearly any given X, it’s more plausible that it could be relevant to the MIRI mission than that it could be relevant to, say, someone who’s trying to build widgets.
Yeah, agreed, that’s definitely part of what was making it a bit ambiguous for me.