(This comment is written quickly, without too much thought. Sorry)
It’s always been odd to me what grant-making orgs mean when they say now is a good time to hire more grant makers or they’re grantmaker-constrained. When is it not a good time to hire more grant makers? What are the signs that we are actually grantmaker-constrained, and that scaling up grantmakers would clearly lead to more impact? And then does our current situation match one of those situations?
Scenario A: There are many strong applicants, but not very much money. We need grant makers to play the role of figuring out how to prioritize who to give money to. It seems like grant makers are pretty important in this situation, but also maybe you don’t need that many of them.
Scenario B: There are many strong applicants and lots of money. I would assume we don’t need very many grant makers because the existing grant makers can just have a low-ish bar and this be fine because there are many strong applicants. But there’s an argument that we should have more grant makers in this situation in order to make sure we don’t fund net negative projects. Also, the overall demand for grant making is simply higher, both from applicants and from higher-up funders. So I would imagine grant-making orgs would try to hire in this environment.
Scenario C: There are not very many strong applicants and not very much money. I guess the grant makers should try to do direct work and solve the fact that there aren’t very many strong applicants. Maybe they should try to fundraise.
Scenario D: There are not very many strong applicants but lots of money. It’s not obvious what grantmakers should be doing in this situation. Sounds like there isn’t much work to do—grantmakers should stop hiring and their people should switch to direct work. Or maybe not?
As far as I can tell, Scenario D is the closest to describing the current situation where CG has lots of money and some orgs/applicants that CG is happy to fund; but CG is not able to give out as much money as it would like to because there are not enough obviously strong applicants. There is an excess amount of money compared to projects CG thinks will succeed/be good. It seems that CG’s response to this scenario is what Luke calls “3 strategy-driven creation of new grantees.” It’s also sometimes called active grant making.
As our AI timelines shorten, we’ve shifted more focus to (3) since many critical gaps remain that we haven’t gotten good applications for. We’ve had strong success with this so far, but the strategy work and headhunting of (3) requires far more staff capacity per dollar moved than (1) or (2) do, so we need to grow our grantmaker capacity as quickly as we can.
Personally, if I were considering joining, I would want much more evidence about how successful active grant making has been and how successful you expect it to be in the future. It seems like “whether active grant making works” is the key question for how good additional grantmakers are. My prior is that active grant making is very hard because most field building is very hard in my experience. In fact, maybe instead of active grant making, I would just go harder on funding normal field building efforts?
Perhaps CG or others have an internal production function relating applicants, funding, and grantmakers together to create impact. Without such a function, I think we should be skeptical when grantmakers say that they need more capacity. ~Everyone thinks they need more capacity. While I’m pretty sure Scenario D describes the current environment, I don’t actually know what the correct hiring reaction to that environment is. Active grant making is one answer and a reasonable one, but it should require having confident beliefs about how effective this is. I have not myself seen evidence that justifies such beliefs.
Scenario B: … the existing grant makers can just have a low-ish bar and this be fine because there are many strong applicants
the major problem w/ this is that grants are often disbursed within a bunch of random constraints, e.g. grants must be made with an overhead acceptable to the original funder, grants must be within the philanthropic remit of the organization giving them, grants should not be made in ways that unduly put the original grantmaker’s reputation at risk, etc.
a lesser problem but a still important one is operational overhead. There’s a reason that it’s taken so long for exchanges to operate ~24/5, despite arguably having been able to automate a bunch of the backend related to trading for many years now.
legal risk / operational cost for a grantmaking operation increases ~ linearly with the number of grants, irrespective of size of the grants (and there are a bunch of hidden cost factors, e.g. if the grant is going to an individual, if the grant is going overseas, if the grant needs to be given with restrictions because you don’t trust the individual very much). I think this is somewhat unintuitive to people.
Scenario D: There are not very many strong applicants but lots of money. It’s not obvious what grantmakers should be doing in this situation. Sounds like there isn’t much work to do—grantmakers should stop hiring and their people should switch to direct work. Or maybe not?
this is pretty reasonable
It seems like “whether active grant making works” is the key question for how good additional grantmakers are. My prior is that active grant making is very hard because most field building is very hard in my experience. In fact, maybe instead of active grant making, I would just go harder on funding normal field building efforts?
this is pretty reasonable
overall, maybe we’re in scenario B (depends on a lot of things, including how effective you think ‘defense in depth’ interventions are that people who don’t necessarily have high credence on advanced ai soon still have high conviction in).
If we’re in scenario D, agree that things are pretty confused. total lack of clarity re: active grantmaking. you might suspect that e.g. evidence from the for-profit world cuts against the likelihood that active grantmaking works. IDK man, do think it’s confused. There are definitely several live case studies here for successes of the active grantmaking model, e.g. arguably ProEquip, many convergent research FROs, some projects from the launch sequence, some cG teams have done this, Forethought has done this like once, etc.
(This comment is written quickly, without too much thought. Sorry)
It’s always been odd to me what grant-making orgs mean when they say now is a good time to hire more grant makers or they’re grantmaker-constrained. When is it not a good time to hire more grant makers? What are the signs that we are actually grantmaker-constrained, and that scaling up grantmakers would clearly lead to more impact? And then does our current situation match one of those situations?
Scenario A: There are many strong applicants, but not very much money. We need grant makers to play the role of figuring out how to prioritize who to give money to. It seems like grant makers are pretty important in this situation, but also maybe you don’t need that many of them.
Scenario B: There are many strong applicants and lots of money. I would assume we don’t need very many grant makers because the existing grant makers can just have a low-ish bar and this be fine because there are many strong applicants. But there’s an argument that we should have more grant makers in this situation in order to make sure we don’t fund net negative projects. Also, the overall demand for grant making is simply higher, both from applicants and from higher-up funders. So I would imagine grant-making orgs would try to hire in this environment.
Scenario C: There are not very many strong applicants and not very much money. I guess the grant makers should try to do direct work and solve the fact that there aren’t very many strong applicants. Maybe they should try to fundraise.
Scenario D: There are not very many strong applicants but lots of money. It’s not obvious what grantmakers should be doing in this situation. Sounds like there isn’t much work to do—grantmakers should stop hiring and their people should switch to direct work. Or maybe not?
As far as I can tell, Scenario D is the closest to describing the current situation where CG has lots of money and some orgs/applicants that CG is happy to fund; but CG is not able to give out as much money as it would like to because there are not enough obviously strong applicants. There is an excess amount of money compared to projects CG thinks will succeed/be good. It seems that CG’s response to this scenario is what Luke calls “3 strategy-driven creation of new grantees.” It’s also sometimes called active grant making.
Personally, if I were considering joining, I would want much more evidence about how successful active grant making has been and how successful you expect it to be in the future. It seems like “whether active grant making works” is the key question for how good additional grantmakers are. My prior is that active grant making is very hard because most field building is very hard in my experience. In fact, maybe instead of active grant making, I would just go harder on funding normal field building efforts?
Perhaps CG or others have an internal production function relating applicants, funding, and grantmakers together to create impact. Without such a function, I think we should be skeptical when grantmakers say that they need more capacity. ~Everyone thinks they need more capacity. While I’m pretty sure Scenario D describes the current environment, I don’t actually know what the correct hiring reaction to that environment is. Active grant making is one answer and a reasonable one, but it should require having confident beliefs about how effective this is. I have not myself seen evidence that justifies such beliefs.
Scenario B: … the existing grant makers can just have a low-ish bar and this be fine because there are many strong applicants
the major problem w/ this is that grants are often disbursed within a bunch of random constraints, e.g. grants must be made with an overhead acceptable to the original funder, grants must be within the philanthropic remit of the organization giving them, grants should not be made in ways that unduly put the original grantmaker’s reputation at risk, etc.
a lesser problem but a still important one is operational overhead. There’s a reason that it’s taken so long for exchanges to operate ~24/5, despite arguably having been able to automate a bunch of the backend related to trading for many years now.
legal risk / operational cost for a grantmaking operation increases ~ linearly with the number of grants, irrespective of size of the grants (and there are a bunch of hidden cost factors, e.g. if the grant is going to an individual, if the grant is going overseas, if the grant needs to be given with restrictions because you don’t trust the individual very much). I think this is somewhat unintuitive to people.
Scenario D: There are not very many strong applicants but lots of money. It’s not obvious what grantmakers should be doing in this situation. Sounds like there isn’t much work to do—grantmakers should stop hiring and their people should switch to direct work. Or maybe not?
this is pretty reasonable
It seems like “whether active grant making works” is the key question for how good additional grantmakers are. My prior is that active grant making is very hard because most field building is very hard in my experience. In fact, maybe instead of active grant making, I would just go harder on funding normal field building efforts?
this is pretty reasonable
overall, maybe we’re in scenario B (depends on a lot of things, including how effective you think ‘defense in depth’ interventions are that people who don’t necessarily have high credence on advanced ai soon still have high conviction in).
If we’re in scenario D, agree that things are pretty confused. total lack of clarity re: active grantmaking. you might suspect that e.g. evidence from the for-profit world cuts against the likelihood that active grantmaking works. IDK man, do think it’s confused. There are definitely several live case studies here for successes of the active grantmaking model, e.g. arguably ProEquip, many convergent research FROs, some projects from the launch sequence, some cG teams have done this, Forethought has done this like once, etc.