I’m curious how we can improve the messaging around the speculative nature of Long-Term Future Fund grants. Here’s what we have on the top of the front page of LTFF:
And here’s what you see if you click through to the “learn more” link:
Risk and Risk Profiles at EA Funds
Effective Altruism Funds is dedicated to moving money to projects that aim to solve the world’s most pressing and important problems[...]
These more speculative ventures are at higher risk of having little or no impact. When Fund management teams recommend these types of grants, they’re making a bet that, while some (maybe even many) of them will have little or no impact, the best could have a very large impact. Because it’s very difficult to know in advance which approaches will have this kind of outsize impact, grantmakers may take bets . This approach is sometimes known as hits-based giving.
We want donors to feel comfortable with the level of risk that they’re taking on. That’s why all of the Funds have a risk profile, which gives a broad sense of how much risk the Fund management team will likely take on. These risk profiles are intentionally broad, intending to give a general sense of how the Fund managers are likely to make decisions. The are assessments based on both the nature of the particular field that the Funds are working in, as well as the grantmaking styles of the individual Fund managers. They are also non-binding, and sometimes Fund managers may choose to make grants that are outside their Fund’s stated risk profile.
Note that some Funds will have wider risk profiles, making some ‘safe bets’, and some high-risk/high-reward ones. You should familiarise yourself with the aims of each Fund, and decide whether donating to it is right for you.
What do we mean by ‘risk’?
At Effective Altruism Funds we distinguish between two broad types of risk in our grantmaking:
Grants that may not have an impact: The risk that a grant will have little or no impact
Grants that are net-negative: The risk that a grant will be significantly harmful or damaging, all things considered
The risk profiles below are intended to capture the former sense – i.e. grants that may have little or no positive impact. Grantmakers aim to avoid recommending grants of the latter type – i.e. those that risk causing significant harm.
Risk categories
Low-risk
Low-risk grants are those that have a solid evidence base, and are well-vetted by experienced charity evaluators.
For example, the Global Health and Development Fund has made substantial grants to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF)[...]
High-risk
High-risk grants are those which have a very low certainty of success, but are likely to have a high upside if the expectations of the grantmakers are realized.
For example, the Long-Term Future Fund has made a number of grants to independent researchers working on important problems, such as improving the safety of advanced artificial intelligence. Because of the speculative nature of the work, there’s a high chance that any given piece of research won’t end up being useful. However, if the research turns out to solve important problems, it would be particularly beneficial.
I also try my best to communicate which things we fund, anddon’t/didn’t fund. I also think I’ve been consistently candid on this issue in my private communications with donors over the last 9 months or so. So I hoped it would be clear from our public and private communication.
But hope is not a strategy. This is not the first time that people have complained about LTFF’s risk profile. Unfortunately, I would be surprised if it’s the last. Nonetheless, I’d be keen to know how we(I) can improve our communications here, to make this point as unambiguous as possible and reduce future confusions or missed expectations.
Maybe you could rename the LTFF as the Speculative Long Term Future Fund (SLTFF) or the Moonshot Fund. That is, make it clear that the LTFF is EA Funds’ “Moonshot-focused” grantmaking arm. Here’s a draft writeup you can use to replace the LTFF description:
From an EA point of view, the entire reason the LTFF exists is that some opportunities to impact the future, or impact a large portion of humanity, or both; are much more cost effective than traditional ‘bednets’ type opportunities. But the tradeoff is uncertainty. LTFF funds opportunities whose impact is much more uncertain. That is, LTFF tries to fund effective ‘moonshots’. The problems with funding moonshots, however, are:
(a) the likelihood of any particular grantee actually succeeding—that is, succeeding at a scale so as to influence events on a humanity-wide scale, is pretty low.
(b) Even if such funding opportunities exist, they are likely to need millions of dollars of funding, just because of the sheer logistics of making an impact at that scale.
However, that’s not to say that such funding opportunities don’t exist. Furthermore, even if humanity-scale impact costs millions of dollars, the LTFF can fund pilot projects that get picked up by bigger funders, and also fund individuals to contribute towards an ecosystem that can create humanity-scale impact.
I’d be interested to see explanations from the disagree-voters (even short ones would be useful). Was it the proposed renaming? The description draft? Something else?
I’m curious how we can improve the messaging around the speculative nature of Long-Term Future Fund grants. Here’s what we have on the top of the front page of LTFF:
And here’s what you see if you click through to the “learn more” link:
I also try my best to communicate which things we fund, and don’t/didn’t fund. I also think I’ve been consistently candid on this issue in my private communications with donors over the last 9 months or so. So I hoped it would be clear from our public and private communication.
But hope is not a strategy. This is not the first time that people have complained about LTFF’s risk profile. Unfortunately, I would be surprised if it’s the last. Nonetheless, I’d be keen to know how we(I) can improve our communications here, to make this point as unambiguous as possible and reduce future confusions or missed expectations.
(edited for lucidity)
Maybe you could rename the LTFF as the Speculative Long Term Future Fund (SLTFF) or the Moonshot Fund. That is, make it clear that the LTFF is EA Funds’ “Moonshot-focused” grantmaking arm. Here’s a draft writeup you can use to replace the LTFF description:
I’d be interested to see explanations from the disagree-voters (even short ones would be useful). Was it the proposed renaming? The description draft? Something else?