Open Phil is literally just Dustin’s foundation. He’s also one of the main funders of givewell’s research work and I am not a fan of how incestuous a lot of the orgs are.
The point of the link was the explanation the guy at CEA who ran the project gave. I agree it’s not good enough and have come to conclusion that this is just something xx Dustin thought would be cool, which is not very EA, but I guess his prerogative.
The contention made (far!) up-thread was "When there is a lot of money moving around, it seems inevitable that power structures will form around it."
Then somebody else said that CEA's budget was only $6m, so how bad could things get? The Wytham Abbey example was brought up just to show how much more money CEA could tap into, through its connections with other EA orgs.
But from my perspective, the EA "castle adventure" is also an excellent illustration of those power structures. Here we see a small number of people (friends, colleagues, fellow board members) take control of core EA institutions (using enormous flows of donor cash) with very little pushback from the community. And worse, they are using this money for purposes that are completely at odds with the stated principles of the EA movement.
As an outsider, if a few people with access to cash are so easily able to capture the most prominent orgs in the EA movement and make them ineffective, then that's pretty terrible for EA as a brand. This doesn't mean I'm opposed to the broader concept of "giving money effectively", but I'm definitely going to feel an aversion to anything that carries the EA label.
The point of the link was the explanation the guy at CEA who ran the project gave. I agree it’s not good enough and have come to conclusion that this is just something xx Dustin thought would be cool, which is not very EA, but I guess his prerogative.