I would flag that I think many of us are fairly frustrated by opportunities in longtermism. There aren’t many very clear wins as we’d like, so a lot of the funding is highly speculative right now.
I worry the most about this:
I believe many donors, who think they are contributing effectively, may not be fully aware of how their money is being utilized.
You and I understand the current SotA for longtermist opportunities. The best a visitor to the EA Funds page gets is:
(includes speculative opportunities)
(In low-contrast text, no less—the rest is presented as being equivalent to the other funds). I don’t have evidence for this claim, but I’m concerned that longtermist funds are drawing false equivalences; that most funders would assume their risk profiles are merely 1-10x worse when they may be orders of magnitude worse than that.
But, on the other hand, I don’t know how bad the problem is. It feels subjectively easy to cherry-pick joke projects, but as you note, these are change on the huge amounts of money these funds have to give out. I don’t know if these projects make up the bulk of those getting this funding.
I worry the most about this:
You and I understand the current SotA for longtermist opportunities. The best a visitor to the EA Funds page gets is:
(In low-contrast text, no less—the rest is presented as being equivalent to the other funds). I don’t have evidence for this claim, but I’m concerned that longtermist funds are drawing false equivalences; that most funders would assume their risk profiles are merely 1-10x worse when they may be orders of magnitude worse than that.
But, on the other hand, I don’t know how bad the problem is. It feels subjectively easy to cherry-pick joke projects, but as you note, these are change on the huge amounts of money these funds have to give out. I don’t know if these projects make up the bulk of those getting this funding.