Re: information being up to date on websites being a signal that CEA is making progress on this problem...
I was glad to see that the Meta Fund page was updated to include a link where people can apply. And more generally, I’m happy CEA is working to improve EA Funds and expect the recent design changes to the EA Funds pages to improve users’ experience.
However, I’m quite frustrated that the new “Grantmaking and Impact” section is written in a way that’s likely to be confusing or misleading for donors. In the OP, I noted concerns about concentration in the Meta Fund’s grantmaking. The two largest grantees (by a wide margin) are Founders Pledge and 80K, which have each received roughly half a million in grants.
But the Grantmaking and Impact section doesn’t mention this, instead referring to grants of “$250k+ to 80,000 Hours” and “$120k+ to Founders Pledge”. It may be technically accurate to describe ~$500k grants as “$250k+” or “$120k+”, but it’s hard to expect people to read those descriptions and get an accurate sense of how much money the largest grantees have received or how concentrated the Meta Fund’s grant history has been historically. If one reads only the Grantmaking and Impact section, they’d get the impression that the largest grants were a few hundred thousand out of a total of “several million” granted, when the reality is that Founders Pledge and 80K together account for about half of the $2.05 million the Meta Fund has granted to date.
The Grantmaking and Impact section is problematic for all the funds, not just the Meta Fund, and generally appears to give a distorted picture of what the largest grantees have been (and no information on “impact”):
The Animal Fund describes “$250k+ to support research related to improving animal welfare”. ACE and Rethink Priorities both focus on this type of research, and have received grants of $500k and $475k respectively which aren’t mentioned.
The Long-term Future Fund lists “$440k+ to support researchers working on relevant topics” as its largest category, and the copy clarifies that these grants “support individual researchers – both those working in academia, and alongside it – to skill up, and to work on key problems.” There’s no mention of MIRI (~$580k in grants) or CFAR (~$325k in grants, plus another $150k that was recommended but not granted since another funder stepped in before the grant was made).
The Global Development Fund mentions “$3m+ to malaria prevention”. This significantly overstates (by ~$1 million) the amount the fund has actually granted to malaria prevention ($1.7 million to Malaria Consortium and $330k to AMF).
I support the intention of trying to give donors more clarity on the types of grants each EA Fund makes, but the current implementation of the Grantmaking and Impact section doesn’t really achieve that. It will also likely be hard to keep up to date.
I suggest creating a google sheet with: a list of all grants, the fund the grant came from, the date, a categorization (which would vary by fund but could be similar to the categories used in the Grantmaking and Impact section), and a subtotal for each category. That would make it easy to see all grants in one place (rather than clicking through each payout report), the categorization would be transparent, and the subtotals would update automatically as new grants were made.
I suggest creating a google sheet with: a list of all grants, the fund the grant came from, the date, a categorization (which would vary by fund but could be similar to the categories used in the Grantmaking and Impact section), and a subtotal for each category. That would make it easy to see all grants in one place (rather than clicking through each payout report), the categorization would be transparent, and the subtotals would update automatically as new grants were made.
+1, this seems like a good idea & quick to implement.
The Long-term Future Fund lists “$440k+ to support researchers working on relevant topics” as its largest category, and the copy clarifies that these grants “support individual researchers – both those working in academia, and alongside it – to skill up, and to work on key problems.” There’s no mention of MIRI (~$580k in grants) or CFAR (~$325k in grants, plus another $150k that was recommended but not granted since another funder stepped in before the grant was made).
The $440k section is intended to refer to funding for individual researchers, so not mentioning MIRI is intentional there. The title should probably be adjusted to say “$440k+ to support individual researchers and small organizations working on relevant topics”.
I feel a bit confused about how to list the $580k in grants to MIRI, since most of that was under the previous management of the fund (by Nick Beckstead) and the new fund team has given proportionally much less money to MIRI and other established organizations, and has instead focused more on funding smaller projects and individuals, since we think that area has larger room for funding, and higher expected value.
I think the current list is designed to help people get a sense of where their money is likely to go in the future, and so is mostly restricted to grants that were made under the current management. It seems good to make that more clear.
Listing the $300k recommended to CFAR under the current fund management seems reasonable to me.
I support having a spreadsheet with all the fund payouts. I actually would have found that useful myself a few times.
Distinguishing between grants made by the current management team and previous management makes sense (though it’d be good to state this methodology explicitly). If a spreadsheet does get built, the management regime would be a good piece of info to capture.
FWIW, for the Meta Fund “120k+ to Founders Pledge” looks quite reasonable if we only look at grants from the management team, but “250k+ to 80K” still seems like a poor way to describe the $415k granted to 80k by the team.
Thanks again for the thoughtful comments. I agree that the numbers should have been higher; that was an oversight (and perhaps speaks to the difficulty of keeping these numbers accurate longer term). I’m not sure how I missed the extra 80K and Founders Pledge grants (I think they came from an earlier payout report that I forgot to include in my calculations). I’m sorry that this wasn’t done correctly the first time around.
I’ve since removed the grant amounts (leaving just the grantees/grant categories), and I might re-title the field to just be called ‘Past Grantmaking’ or something similar. We’ve also created a public spreadsheet of all of the EA Funds grants, so they’re accessible in once place.
I added the ‘Grantmaking and Impact’ section to the Funds pages in response to feedback that it was hard to get a feel for what each Fund did in a tangible way, especially for newer donors who hadn’t been following the Funds over time and hadn’t yet dived into the payout reports. The idea here was to give a flavour of the kinds of things that each Fund had granted to, rather than to provide an exhaustive list (that’s what the payout reports are for). I still think that this is valuable, but I agree that keeping the numbers accurate has some problems, so for now we’ll remove them.
Thanks for cleaning up this data Sam! I also appreciate your putting together that spreadsheet. It’d be great if the fund pages could link to it to make that info more easily accessible. And over time, I’d love to see that file evolve to include additional data about each funds’ grants with corresponding subtotals. I think that would be a big aid for donors trying to understand what types of grants each fund makes.
Re: information being up to date on websites being a signal that CEA is making progress on this problem...
I was glad to see that the Meta Fund page was updated to include a link where people can apply. And more generally, I’m happy CEA is working to improve EA Funds and expect the recent design changes to the EA Funds pages to improve users’ experience.
However, I’m quite frustrated that the new “Grantmaking and Impact” section is written in a way that’s likely to be confusing or misleading for donors. In the OP, I noted concerns about concentration in the Meta Fund’s grantmaking. The two largest grantees (by a wide margin) are Founders Pledge and 80K, which have each received roughly half a million in grants.
But the Grantmaking and Impact section doesn’t mention this, instead referring to grants of “$250k+ to 80,000 Hours” and “$120k+ to Founders Pledge”. It may be technically accurate to describe ~$500k grants as “$250k+” or “$120k+”, but it’s hard to expect people to read those descriptions and get an accurate sense of how much money the largest grantees have received or how concentrated the Meta Fund’s grant history has been historically. If one reads only the Grantmaking and Impact section, they’d get the impression that the largest grants were a few hundred thousand out of a total of “several million” granted, when the reality is that Founders Pledge and 80K together account for about half of the $2.05 million the Meta Fund has granted to date.
The Grantmaking and Impact section is problematic for all the funds, not just the Meta Fund, and generally appears to give a distorted picture of what the largest grantees have been (and no information on “impact”):
The Animal Fund describes “$250k+ to support research related to improving animal welfare”. ACE and Rethink Priorities both focus on this type of research, and have received grants of $500k and $475k respectively which aren’t mentioned.
The Long-term Future Fund lists “$440k+ to support researchers working on relevant topics” as its largest category, and the copy clarifies that these grants “support individual researchers – both those working in academia, and alongside it – to skill up, and to work on key problems.” There’s no mention of MIRI (~$580k in grants) or CFAR (~$325k in grants, plus another $150k that was recommended but not granted since another funder stepped in before the grant was made).
The Global Development Fund mentions “$3m+ to malaria prevention”. This significantly overstates (by ~$1 million) the amount the fund has actually granted to malaria prevention ($1.7 million to Malaria Consortium and $330k to AMF).
I support the intention of trying to give donors more clarity on the types of grants each EA Fund makes, but the current implementation of the Grantmaking and Impact section doesn’t really achieve that. It will also likely be hard to keep up to date.
I suggest creating a google sheet with: a list of all grants, the fund the grant came from, the date, a categorization (which would vary by fund but could be similar to the categories used in the Grantmaking and Impact section), and a subtotal for each category. That would make it easy to see all grants in one place (rather than clicking through each payout report), the categorization would be transparent, and the subtotals would update automatically as new grants were made.
+1, this seems like a good idea & quick to implement.
The $440k section is intended to refer to funding for individual researchers, so not mentioning MIRI is intentional there. The title should probably be adjusted to say “$440k+ to support individual researchers and small organizations working on relevant topics”.
I feel a bit confused about how to list the $580k in grants to MIRI, since most of that was under the previous management of the fund (by Nick Beckstead) and the new fund team has given proportionally much less money to MIRI and other established organizations, and has instead focused more on funding smaller projects and individuals, since we think that area has larger room for funding, and higher expected value.
I think the current list is designed to help people get a sense of where their money is likely to go in the future, and so is mostly restricted to grants that were made under the current management. It seems good to make that more clear.
Listing the $300k recommended to CFAR under the current fund management seems reasonable to me.
I support having a spreadsheet with all the fund payouts. I actually would have found that useful myself a few times.
Distinguishing between grants made by the current management team and previous management makes sense (though it’d be good to state this methodology explicitly). If a spreadsheet does get built, the management regime would be a good piece of info to capture.
FWIW, for the Meta Fund “120k+ to Founders Pledge” looks quite reasonable if we only look at grants from the management team, but “250k+ to 80K” still seems like a poor way to describe the $415k granted to 80k by the team.
[meta: apologies for the belated response]
Thanks again for the thoughtful comments. I agree that the numbers should have been higher; that was an oversight (and perhaps speaks to the difficulty of keeping these numbers accurate longer term). I’m not sure how I missed the extra 80K and Founders Pledge grants (I think they came from an earlier payout report that I forgot to include in my calculations). I’m sorry that this wasn’t done correctly the first time around.
I’ve since removed the grant amounts (leaving just the grantees/grant categories), and I might re-title the field to just be called ‘Past Grantmaking’ or something similar. We’ve also created a public spreadsheet of all of the EA Funds grants, so they’re accessible in once place.
I added the ‘Grantmaking and Impact’ section to the Funds pages in response to feedback that it was hard to get a feel for what each Fund did in a tangible way, especially for newer donors who hadn’t been following the Funds over time and hadn’t yet dived into the payout reports. The idea here was to give a flavour of the kinds of things that each Fund had granted to, rather than to provide an exhaustive list (that’s what the payout reports are for). I still think that this is valuable, but I agree that keeping the numbers accurate has some problems, so for now we’ll remove them.
Thanks for cleaning up this data Sam! I also appreciate your putting together that spreadsheet. It’d be great if the fund pages could link to it to make that info more easily accessible. And over time, I’d love to see that file evolve to include additional data about each funds’ grants with corresponding subtotals. I think that would be a big aid for donors trying to understand what types of grants each fund makes.