I think I would have some worry that if external evaluations of individual grant recipients became common, this could discourage people from applying from grants in future, for fear of being negatively judged should the project not work out.
Potential grant recipients might worry that external evaluators may not have all the information about their project or the grant makers reasoning for awarding the grant. This lack of information could then lead to unfair or incorrect evaluations. This would be more a risk if it becomes common for people to write low quality evaluations that are weakly reasoned, uncharitable or don’t respect privacy. I’m unsure whether it would be easy to encourage high quality evaluations (such as your own) without also increasing the risk of low quality evaluations.
The risk of discouraging grant applications would probably be greater for more speculative funds such as the Long Term Future Fund (LTFF), as it’s easier for projects to not work out and look like wasted funds to uninformed outsiders.
There could also be an opposite risk that by seeking to discourage low quality evaluations, we discourage people too much from evaluating and criticizing work. It might be useful to establish key principles for writing evaluations that enable people to right respectful and useful evaluations, even with limited knowledge or time.
I’m unsure where the right trade-off between usefully evaluating projects, and not discouraging grant applications would be. Thank you for your review of the LTFF recipients and for posting this question, I found both really interesting.
I think I would have some worry that if external evaluations of individual grant recipients became common, this could discourage people from applying from grants in future, for fear of being negatively judged should the project not work out.
Potential grant recipients might worry that external evaluators may not have all the information about their project or the grant makers reasoning for awarding the grant. This lack of information could then lead to unfair or incorrect evaluations. This would be more a risk if it becomes common for people to write low quality evaluations that are weakly reasoned, uncharitable or don’t respect privacy. I’m unsure whether it would be easy to encourage high quality evaluations (such as your own) without also increasing the risk of low quality evaluations.
The risk of discouraging grant applications would probably be greater for more speculative funds such as the Long Term Future Fund (LTFF), as it’s easier for projects to not work out and look like wasted funds to uninformed outsiders.
There could also be an opposite risk that by seeking to discourage low quality evaluations, we discourage people too much from evaluating and criticizing work. It might be useful to establish key principles for writing evaluations that enable people to right respectful and useful evaluations, even with limited knowledge or time.
I’m unsure where the right trade-off between usefully evaluating projects, and not discouraging grant applications would be. Thank you for your review of the LTFF recipients and for posting this question, I found both really interesting.