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.
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.