Therefore, I expect marginal funding that we raise from other donors (i.e. you) to most likely go to the following:
Community Building Grants [...] $110,000
Travel grants for EA conference attendees [...] $295,000
EA Forum [...] [Nuño: note no mention of the cost in the EA forum paragraph]
You don’t mention the cost of the EA forum, but per this comment, which gives more details, and per your own table, the “online team”, of which the EA Forum was a large part, was spending ~$2M per year.
As such I think that your BOTECs are uninformative and might be “hiding the ask”:
This model compares a hypothetical LTFF grant to a biosecurity workshop with the labor that CEA staff spent on a similar event. It finds that the CEA expenditure is a bit more cost-effective.
This model compares CEA’s cost of producing Forum Digests to a grant that the EA Infrastructure Fund gave for creating Forum + LW summaries. It finds that CEA expenditure is more cost-effective.
we will be doing a follow-up post solely devoted to Forum fundraising
I look forward to this. In the meantime, readers can see my own take on this here: in short, I think that the value of the forum is high but the marginal value of having a massive, $2M/year, online team is very low, possibly negative.
As an illustration of the marginal value point, I don’t think that this point goes through because I think that the forum is equally capable of hosting criticism at $500k a year than at $2M/year.
I would particularly like the Forum to have diverse funding since some of its value comes from hosting criticism of “powerful” people/organizations. I’m not aware of any instances of donors e.g. pressuring CEA to remove a post that’s critical of them, but “hey can you please be a predominant funder of this thing which is critical of you” feels like an uncomfortable pitch to have to make.
As a result, I don’t think EA community members should be donating to CEA at this time.
> As such I think that your BOTECs are uninformative and might be “hiding the ask”
Thanks for the comment. Just to clarify right away: the Forum doesn’t have $2M room for more funding (it’s not the case that a huge portion of marginal donations would go to the Forum).
Responding in more detail:
I’m not sure I’m interpreting you correctly, but I think you are saying something like:
I (Ben) give three examples of where marginal funding is likely to go
The first two of these total ~$400k, whereas the total cost of the forum is ~$2M
Therefore, we should expect that 2⁄2.4 = 83% of marginal funding will go to the forum
But only one of the two BOTECs was evaluating the cost-effectiveness of a forum project
This is 50% of the BOTECs covering 83% of the expenses, which is off (since 50% < 83%)
I think (3) (if that’s what you’re saying) has a few confusions:
I expect the Forum to continue to get substantial funding from existing donors; it doesn’t have $2M room for more funding
My three examples are not intended to be exhaustive, and the BOTEC-ed projects were chosen mainly because they seemed to have an EA Funds grant we could easily compare them to
So I would expect that much less than 83% of marginal funding will go to the Forum.
I mostly want to delay a discussion about this until the post fully dedicated to the Forum, but as mentioned in this post, I’m interested in donors expressing a preference for their donations, and if you would like to donate to “everything except the forum” or something I would be interested to hear that.
Yeah, good catch, my argument has a bunch of unstated assumptions.
I think I’m saying something with an additional twist, which is: because I think that the marginal value forum funding is so low, I think the correct move is to not support CEA at all.
Consider CEA as having (numbers here are arbitrary), a core of $15M in valuable projects and $20M in “cruft”; projects that made sense when there was unlimited FTX money around but not so much now. Open Phil, seeing this, reduces funding from $35M/year to $30M, to force CEA to cull some of that cruft.
In response, CEA could protect that cruft by committing to using a “Washington monument strategy”, i.e., putting more valuable projects on the chopping block first, and asking the community for an additional $5M to save them.
Note that this here is an “unconscious economics” type argument, i.e., I am not saying that you are twirling your mustache saying “oh yes, we will do a Washington monument strategy”. I merely think that you are just failing to cut cruft, in a way which is understandable because letting go of people, and having people lose reports is hard. But by asking people for funding when you have some projects whose value is less than the value of marginal funding of projects outside of CEA, and not putting them on the chopping block, you do end up doing something functionally similar to a Washington monument strategy.
I think the answer to a Washington monument strategy is to call the bluff, and then iteratively converge to a funding amount for CEA that makes sense, and a scenario where CEA becomes smaller. This could involve other people taking over projects that CEA doesn’t fund, and Open Phil looking at the remaining projects and reducing its funding further, etc.
Some stuff which would really change my mind:
Comparing the number of CEA employees before and after FTX, and seeing that it’s the same or lower
Comparing the budget of CEA before and after FTX and seeing that it’s actually the same or lower
Taking a step back, I am suggesting that you fire a bunch of people. Might be all well and good in abstract terms but these are real people who have invested a bunch of their career capital at CEA. Maybe one way to make this less painful would be to give them exit grants with which they could attempt some altruistic project of their own, or get some runway before finding another place to work at.
CEA’s spending in 2023 is substantially lower than in 2022: down by $4.8 − 5.8 million.
The graph below shows our budget as it stood early in the year, reflecting our pre-FTX plans, and compares that to how our plans and spending have evolved as we’ve adapted to the new funding environment. This has happened during an Interim period in which we’ve tried where possible not to make hard-to-reverse changes that constrain the options of a new CEO.
We currently have the same number of Core staff that we did at the end of 2022 (37), but staff costs are a relatively small proportion of our overall spending (around 20% in 2023).
In contrast, the costs of the Online team responsible for the Forum are much more staff-heavy, and we don’t have plans to replace several people who left the team this year. We did recently hire one new person to work on Forum content.
It’s also worth noting that we postponed as much hiring as we could during our ongoing Interim period, so we expect our total number of staff to increase in 2024 relative to today’s benchmark. We expect that increasing staff costs as a proportion of our spending will increase the quality and cost-effectiveness of our programs.
In 2021, we spent $6.9m and ended the year with 29 staff. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison, because those staff include five members of what was then the CEA ops team, and is now the EV Ops team, so the more direct comparison is with 24 staff at that time.
You can see on our dashboard some of the ways our programs have changed since 2021 (three in-person EAG events compared to one, nine EAGx events compared to zero, etc).
Thanks for the clarification, but I’m still not sure I understand. I think your argument is:
CEA has projects that are worth funding (say, arbitrarily, our comms team)
Additionally, we have projects that are not worth funding (in particular: the Forum)
However to make the case for marginal funding stronger we are presenting the stuff that’s worth funding as “marginal”, and stating that the stuff that’s not worth funding isn’t “marginal”.
Is that correct?
If so, I’m confused because the Forum is included in the list of marginal projects, which seems to violate (3).
Maybe alternatively you are saying:
3′. To make the case for marginal funding stronger we are presenting BOTECs about projects other than the Forum
But again this doesn’t seem right to me because one of the BOTECs was about the forum.
I don’t think you can justify a $2M/year expenditure with an $11k/year BOTEC ($38/hour * 6 hours/week * 52 weeks), because I think that the correct level at which expenditure in the forum should be considered marginal is closer to $1M/year than $10k/year.
You don’t mention the cost of the EA forum, but per this comment, which gives more details, and per your own table, the “online team”, of which the EA Forum was a large part, was spending ~$2M per year.
As such I think that your BOTECs are uninformative and might be “hiding the ask”:
I look forward to this. In the meantime, readers can see my own take on this here: in short, I think that the value of the forum is high but the marginal value of having a massive, $2M/year, online team is very low, possibly negative.
As an illustration of the marginal value point, I don’t think that this point goes through because I think that the forum is equally capable of hosting criticism at $500k a year than at $2M/year.
As a result, I don’t think EA community members should be donating to CEA at this time.
> As such I think that your BOTECs are uninformative and might be “hiding the ask”
Thanks for the comment. Just to clarify right away: the Forum doesn’t have $2M room for more funding (it’s not the case that a huge portion of marginal donations would go to the Forum).
Responding in more detail:
I’m not sure I’m interpreting you correctly, but I think you are saying something like:
I (Ben) give three examples of where marginal funding is likely to go
The first two of these total ~$400k, whereas the total cost of the forum is ~$2M
Therefore, we should expect that 2⁄2.4 = 83% of marginal funding will go to the forum
But only one of the two BOTECs was evaluating the cost-effectiveness of a forum project
This is 50% of the BOTECs covering 83% of the expenses, which is off (since 50% < 83%)
I think (3) (if that’s what you’re saying) has a few confusions:
I expect the Forum to continue to get substantial funding from existing donors; it doesn’t have $2M room for more funding
My three examples are not intended to be exhaustive, and the BOTEC-ed projects were chosen mainly because they seemed to have an EA Funds grant we could easily compare them to
So I would expect that much less than 83% of marginal funding will go to the Forum.
I mostly want to delay a discussion about this until the post fully dedicated to the Forum, but as mentioned in this post, I’m interested in donors expressing a preference for their donations, and if you would like to donate to “everything except the forum” or something I would be interested to hear that.
Yeah, good catch, my argument has a bunch of unstated assumptions.
I think I’m saying something with an additional twist, which is: because I think that the marginal value forum funding is so low, I think the correct move is to not support CEA at all.
Consider CEA as having (numbers here are arbitrary), a core of $15M in valuable projects and $20M in “cruft”; projects that made sense when there was unlimited FTX money around but not so much now. Open Phil, seeing this, reduces funding from $35M/year to $30M, to force CEA to cull some of that cruft.
In response, CEA could protect that cruft by committing to using a “Washington monument strategy”, i.e., putting more valuable projects on the chopping block first, and asking the community for an additional $5M to save them.
Note that this here is an “unconscious economics” type argument, i.e., I am not saying that you are twirling your mustache saying “oh yes, we will do a Washington monument strategy”. I merely think that you are just failing to cut cruft, in a way which is understandable because letting go of people, and having people lose reports is hard. But by asking people for funding when you have some projects whose value is less than the value of marginal funding of projects outside of CEA, and not putting them on the chopping block, you do end up doing something functionally similar to a Washington monument strategy.
I think the answer to a Washington monument strategy is to call the bluff, and then iteratively converge to a funding amount for CEA that makes sense, and a scenario where CEA becomes smaller. This could involve other people taking over projects that CEA doesn’t fund, and Open Phil looking at the remaining projects and reducing its funding further, etc.
Some stuff which would really change my mind:
Comparing the number of CEA employees before and after FTX, and seeing that it’s the same or lower
Comparing the budget of CEA before and after FTX and seeing that it’s actually the same or lower
Taking a step back, I am suggesting that you fire a bunch of people. Might be all well and good in abstract terms but these are real people who have invested a bunch of their career capital at CEA. Maybe one way to make this less painful would be to give them exit grants with which they could attempt some altruistic project of their own, or get some runway before finding another place to work at.
CEA’s spending in 2023 is substantially lower than in 2022: down by $4.8 − 5.8 million.
The graph below shows our budget as it stood early in the year, reflecting our pre-FTX plans, and compares that to how our plans and spending have evolved as we’ve adapted to the new funding environment. This has happened during an Interim period in which we’ve tried where possible not to make hard-to-reverse changes that constrain the options of a new CEO.
We currently have the same number of Core staff that we did at the end of 2022 (37), but staff costs are a relatively small proportion of our overall spending (around 20% in 2023).
For example, we spend a lot on events, and have cut a lot of event spending, but largely by reducing passthrough costs rather than by firing people from what is already a small team relative to the scale of its activities.
In contrast, the costs of the Online team responsible for the Forum are much more staff-heavy, and we don’t have plans to replace several people who left the team this year. We did recently hire one new person to work on Forum content.
It’s also worth noting that we postponed as much hiring as we could during our ongoing Interim period, so we expect our total number of staff to increase in 2024 relative to today’s benchmark. We expect that increasing staff costs as a proportion of our spending will increase the quality and cost-effectiveness of our programs.
Nice, do you have your costs and staff numbers for 2021?
In 2021, we spent $6.9m and ended the year with 29 staff. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison, because those staff include five members of what was then the CEA ops team, and is now the EV Ops team, so the more direct comparison is with 24 staff at that time.
You can see on our dashboard some of the ways our programs have changed since 2021 (three in-person EAG events compared to one, nine EAGx events compared to zero, etc).
Thanks for the clarification, but I’m still not sure I understand. I think your argument is:
CEA has projects that are worth funding (say, arbitrarily, our comms team)
Additionally, we have projects that are not worth funding (in particular: the Forum)
However to make the case for marginal funding stronger we are presenting the stuff that’s worth funding as “marginal”, and stating that the stuff that’s not worth funding isn’t “marginal”.
Is that correct?
If so, I’m confused because the Forum is included in the list of marginal projects, which seems to violate (3).
Maybe alternatively you are saying:
3′. To make the case for marginal funding stronger we are presenting BOTECs about projects other than the Forum
But again this doesn’t seem right to me because one of the BOTECs was about the forum.
I don’t think you can justify a $2M/year expenditure with an $11k/year BOTEC ($38/hour * 6 hours/week * 52 weeks), because I think that the correct level at which expenditure in the forum should be considered marginal is closer to $1M/year than $10k/year.