I feel kind of confused about this—I agree in theory re: EV of marginal grants, but my own experience interacting with grant evaluations from people who I’ve felt were weaker has been that sometimes they’re in favor of rejecting a grant that I think would be really good, or missing a consideration that I think would make a grant pretty bad, and furthermore it’s often hard to quickly tell if this is the case, e.g. they’ll give a stylized summary of what’s going on with the applicant, but I won’t know how much to trust that summary, so feel compelled to read the full grant application (which is bad, because I already bottleneck the process so much).
I basically feel pretty confident that lowering the bar for fund managers would lead to worse grants by my lights, but I don’t think I have a great grasp on the full space of trade-offs (i.e. how much worse, exactly? is the decrease in quality worth it to be able to get through more grants in a timely way?); it’s totally plausible to me there would be some set-up that would overall be better than the current one.
Re: comparing to FTXFF and Manifund:
I think the pitch for being a regrantor for the FTXFF or Manifund is pretty different than the one for the LTFF, both in terms of structure and raw number of hours.
As a regrantor, you get to opt-in to making the grants you’re most excited about on your own time, whereas on the LTFF, you’re responsible for spending a certain number of hours per week (historically, we’ve asked for a minimum of 5, though in practice people work less than that) evaluating incoming grant applications. (As a concrete instance of this, Adam Gleave is currently a regrantor at Manifund but left the LTFF a while ago—this isn’t to cast aspersions on Adam; just to illustrate that people have differing preferences between the two.)
I do think a possible restructure for the LTFF would be to switch to an opt-in regranting set-up, but that would be a pretty different way of operating. (I’d guess a bunch of good grants coming in through our application form would be missed by default, but it could still be overall preferable from the perspective of being more sustainable for fund managers.)
I would imagine that some of the time saved in hiring expert grantmakers could be spent training junior grantmakers. (In my somewhat analogous experience running selection for a highly competitive program, I certainly notice that some considerations that I now think are very important were entirely missing from my early decision-making!) Should I think about your comment as coming from a hypothetical that is net or gross of that time investment?
As for improved set-ups, how about something like:
Junior grantmaker receives disproportionate training on downside considerations.
Junior grantmaker evaluates grants and rates downside risk.
Above some downside risk cut-off, if the junior grantmaker wants to give funding, the senior grantmaker checks in.
Below the cut-off, if the junior grantmaker wants to give funding, the funding is improved without further checks.
(If you think missing great grants is a bigger deal than accepting bad ones, analogously change the above.)
Intuitively, I would guess that this set-up could improve quite a bit on the waste-of-your-time and speed problems, without giving up too much on better-grants-by-your-lights. But I’m sure I’m missing helpful context.
Re: comparing to FTXFF and Manifund:
Definitely makes sense that the pitches are different. I guess I would have thought of this as part of “other hiring criteria you might have”—considerations that make it more challenging to select from the pool of people with some grantmaking experience, but for which some people tick the box.
Re: deemphasizing expertise:
I feel kind of confused about this—I agree in theory re: EV of marginal grants, but my own experience interacting with grant evaluations from people who I’ve felt were weaker has been that sometimes they’re in favor of rejecting a grant that I think would be really good, or missing a consideration that I think would make a grant pretty bad, and furthermore it’s often hard to quickly tell if this is the case, e.g. they’ll give a stylized summary of what’s going on with the applicant, but I won’t know how much to trust that summary, so feel compelled to read the full grant application (which is bad, because I already bottleneck the process so much).
I basically feel pretty confident that lowering the bar for fund managers would lead to worse grants by my lights, but I don’t think I have a great grasp on the full space of trade-offs (i.e. how much worse, exactly? is the decrease in quality worth it to be able to get through more grants in a timely way?); it’s totally plausible to me there would be some set-up that would overall be better than the current one.
Re: comparing to FTXFF and Manifund:
I think the pitch for being a regrantor for the FTXFF or Manifund is pretty different than the one for the LTFF, both in terms of structure and raw number of hours.
As a regrantor, you get to opt-in to making the grants you’re most excited about on your own time, whereas on the LTFF, you’re responsible for spending a certain number of hours per week (historically, we’ve asked for a minimum of 5, though in practice people work less than that) evaluating incoming grant applications. (As a concrete instance of this, Adam Gleave is currently a regrantor at Manifund but left the LTFF a while ago—this isn’t to cast aspersions on Adam; just to illustrate that people have differing preferences between the two.)
I do think a possible restructure for the LTFF would be to switch to an opt-in regranting set-up, but that would be a pretty different way of operating. (I’d guess a bunch of good grants coming in through our application form would be missed by default, but it could still be overall preferable from the perspective of being more sustainable for fund managers.)
Thank you for the helpful replies Asya.
Re: deemphasizing expertise:
I would imagine that some of the time saved in hiring expert grantmakers could be spent training junior grantmakers. (In my somewhat analogous experience running selection for a highly competitive program, I certainly notice that some considerations that I now think are very important were entirely missing from my early decision-making!) Should I think about your comment as coming from a hypothetical that is net or gross of that time investment?
As for improved set-ups, how about something like:
Junior grantmaker receives disproportionate training on downside considerations.
Junior grantmaker evaluates grants and rates downside risk.
Above some downside risk cut-off, if the junior grantmaker wants to give funding, the senior grantmaker checks in.
Below the cut-off, if the junior grantmaker wants to give funding, the funding is improved without further checks.
(If you think missing great grants is a bigger deal than accepting bad ones, analogously change the above.)
Intuitively, I would guess that this set-up could improve quite a bit on the waste-of-your-time and speed problems, without giving up too much on better-grants-by-your-lights. But I’m sure I’m missing helpful context.
Re: comparing to FTXFF and Manifund:
Definitely makes sense that the pitches are different. I guess I would have thought of this as part of “other hiring criteria you might have”—considerations that make it more challenging to select from the pool of people with some grantmaking experience, but for which some people tick the box.