> As such I think that your BOTECs are uninformative and might be âhiding the askâ
Thanks for the comment. Just to clarify right away: the Forum doesnât have $2M room for more funding (itâs not the case that a huge portion of marginal donations would go to the Forum).
Responding in more detail:
Iâm not sure Iâm 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 2â2.4 = 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 thatâs what youâre saying) has a few confusions:
I expect the Forum to continue to get substantial funding from existing donors; it doesnât 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, Iâm interested in donors expressing a preference for their donations, and if you would like to donate to âeverything except the forumâ or something I would be interested to hear that.
Yeah, good catch, my argument has a bunch of unstated assumptions.
I think Iâm 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 âcruftâ; projects that made sense when there was unlimited FTX money around but not so much now. Open Phil, seeing this, reduces funding from $35M/âyear to $30M, to force CEA to cull some of that cruft.
In response, CEA could protect that cruft by committing to using a âWashington monument strategyâ, 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 âunconscious economicsâ type argument, i.e., I am not saying that you are twirling your mustache saying âoh yes, we will do a Washington monument strategyâ. 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 doesnât 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 itâs the same or lower
Comparing the budget of CEA before and after FTX and seeing that itâs 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.
CEAâs spending in 2023 is substantially lower than in 2022: down by $4.8 â 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 weâve adapted to the new funding environment. This has happened during an Interim period in which weâve 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 donât have plans to replace several people who left the team this year. We did recently hire one new person to work on Forum content.
Itâs 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 todayâs 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 Iâm 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 thatâs worth funding as âmarginalâ, and stating that the stuff thatâs not worth funding isnât âmarginalâ.
Is that correct?
If so, Iâm confused because the Forum is included in the list of marginal projects, which seems to violate (3).
Maybe alternatively you are saying:
3â˛. To make the case for marginal funding stronger we are presenting BOTECs about projects other than the Forum
But again this doesnât seem right to me because one of the BOTECs was about the forum.
I donât think you can justify a $2M/âyear expenditure with an $11k/âyear BOTEC ($38/âhour * 6 hours/âweek * 52 weeks), because I think that the correct level at which expenditure in the forum should be considered marginal is closer to $1M/âyear than $10k/âyear.
> As such I think that your BOTECs are uninformative and might be âhiding the askâ
Thanks for the comment. Just to clarify right away: the Forum doesnât have $2M room for more funding (itâs not the case that a huge portion of marginal donations would go to the Forum).
Responding in more detail:
Iâm not sure Iâm 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 2â2.4 = 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 thatâs what youâre saying) has a few confusions:
I expect the Forum to continue to get substantial funding from existing donors; it doesnât 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, Iâm interested in donors expressing a preference for their donations, and if you would like to donate to âeverything except the forumâ or something I would be interested to hear that.
Yeah, good catch, my argument has a bunch of unstated assumptions.
I think Iâm 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 âcruftâ; projects that made sense when there was unlimited FTX money around but not so much now. Open Phil, seeing this, reduces funding from $35M/âyear to $30M, to force CEA to cull some of that cruft.
In response, CEA could protect that cruft by committing to using a âWashington monument strategyâ, 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 âunconscious economicsâ type argument, i.e., I am not saying that you are twirling your mustache saying âoh yes, we will do a Washington monument strategyâ. 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 doesnât 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 itâs the same or lower
Comparing the budget of CEA before and after FTX and seeing that itâs 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.
CEAâs spending in 2023 is substantially lower than in 2022: down by $4.8 â 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 weâve adapted to the new funding environment. This has happened during an Interim period in which weâve 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 donât have plans to replace several people who left the team this year. We did recently hire one new person to work on Forum content.
Itâs 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 todayâs 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 Iâm 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 thatâs worth funding as âmarginalâ, and stating that the stuff thatâs not worth funding isnât âmarginalâ.
Is that correct?
If so, Iâm confused because the Forum is included in the list of marginal projects, which seems to violate (3).
Maybe alternatively you are saying:
3â˛. To make the case for marginal funding stronger we are presenting BOTECs about projects other than the Forum
But again this doesnât seem right to me because one of the BOTECs was about the forum.
I donât think you can justify a $2M/âyear expenditure with an $11k/âyear BOTEC ($38/âhour * 6 hours/âweek * 52 weeks), because I think that the correct level at which expenditure in the forum should be considered marginal is closer to $1M/âyear than $10k/âyear.