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Thank you, Nicole, for compiling and sharing this writeup. It sounds like you inherited a program with a lot of significant problems, and have been working hard to rectify them. I agree with many of the points you raise, and this post is a welcome improvement in transparency around EA Grants.
However, I’d like to push back against the idea that there was a “Lack of clarification about the role EA Grants played in the funding ecosystem”. I’d argue that your predecessors clearly articulated a vision of EA Grants as a major funder in the ecosystem.
See, for instance, CEA’s 2017 Annual Report:
And the former head of EA Grants commenting on that report:
And CEA’s end of 2018 fundraising appeal (which solicited donations to fund EA Grants):
Throughout 2018, CEA also repeatedly communicated that a large, open round of EA Grants would be starting soon, which turned out to be overly optimistic. (See updates in mid-February, April, and mid-August.)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure EA Grants has granted significantly less money than the public communications would suggest. Your writeup explains several reasons why that would be the case. But that doesn’t change the fact that CEA’s communications have likely led potential grantees and potential funders to overestimate how much funding was available for early stage projects. My strong intuition is that these dynamics have contributed to a funding shortage for this type of project, and that addressing this shortage should be a priority for the EA community.
I think Hauke is asking a critical question: “Would shutting down EA grants significantly reduce the overall quantity of meta funding in the community or would the freed up resources be routed into the Meta-fund?” Even if the money gets routed into the Meta Fund (and/or other funds), some of it will likely be granted to established organizations leaving less money for individuals and early stage projects.
I also wonder whether shuttering EA Grants now risks wasting the progress that’s been made in developing operational capacity (“CEA is now in a place where we are able to disburse EA Grants with correct bank information routinely within a month, sometimes quicker, putting us solidly within the norm of the grant making industry.”) Would EA Funds be able to leverage those improvements?
I hope this doesn’t come across as overly critical. I know EA Grants, and CEA as a whole, has changed leadership since most of these issues occurred. But to fix things going forward, I think it’s important to have an accurate understanding of how they worked in the past. With respect to EA Grants, the past has involved a lot of overpromising and underdelivering, which seems to be a recurring theme in feedback.
Thanks for this thoughtful comment! I agree with many of the points you raise. A few responses/clarifications:
On the role of EA Grants in the grantmaking ecosystem: While I agree with you that EA Grants projected it would disburse more money than it actually did, when I said that “the role of EA Grants in the grantmaking ecosystem was unclear” I primarily meant that there was ambiguity about which type of projects were likely to be accepted for EA Grants, and it was unclear to applicants whether they should apply to Funds or EA Grants. I also think that the hopes and plans for EA Grants were articulated but not clarified or updated, which they should have been as things evolved and EA Grants was failing to take the position in the grantmaking ecosystem it had originally claimed it would take (e.g. how much money it would disburse).
I agree that CEA’s communications have likely led to inaccurate perceptions of how much funding was available for early stage projects. It’s unclear to me how much of a shortage of funding there actually is, though, given what people expressed interest in doing this year. I think that a more important constraint in the ecosystem is not funding, but likely support and feedback for grantees and applicants. I think that it is very hard and time costly to give good feedback and support, but very important for individuals and early stage projects. This is part of why I’m excited about Charity Entrepreneurship’s incubation program. I am also exploring how the funding ecosystem may be able to provide more support to grantees to try to address this problem somewhat, though I expect this to be a hard problem to solve. On funding, if the Meta Fund sees funding shortages, I hope that they will make that known to donors, so that donors can fund the Meta Fund accordingly. To my knowledge, this has not been the case to date.
Where the freed up resources go is dependent on donors. EA Grants never had (to my knowledge) multi-year commitments. For example, since I’ve started, it’s been ~entirely funded by 1 anonymous donor.
EA Funds is already leveraging the improvements made for EA Grants. The work was not for nothing :)
I agree with this: “to fix things going forward, I think it’s important to have an accurate understanding of how they worked in the past. With respect to EA Grants, the past has involved a lot of overpromising and underdelivering, which seems to be a recurring theme in feedback.”
Thank you for your thoughtful response Nicole!
Can you share any information about how likely it is these donors will fund similar projects through alternative means if EA Grants winds down? Do you know what the 1 anonymous donor is planning?
Taking a longer perspective, my understanding is that Open Phil funded the initial 2017 round of EA Grants (~$475k), and I’d guess they wouldn’t fund small early stage projects without a mechanism like EA Grants to do so through. Then in 2018, EA Grants awarded ~$850k through the referral round and some amount (that I haven’t seen announced) during the September 2018 round. Were these also funded by Open Phil? Do you have any sense of whether the funder(s) of these rounds funded similar projects through non-EA Grants channels in 2019? If not, is there any reason to expect them to fund these types of projects in 2020 or beyond? Are you able to share the amount granted from the September 2018 round, to help the community understand how much funding would need to be replaced if other channels need to fill the role EA Grants historically played?
Unfortunately, I don’t know the identity of the anonymous donor myself, so I can’t speak to their plans for 2020 and beyond.
The most relevant question might be: if EA Grants is going to collapse into EA Funds, what would that mean in terms of funding needs for EA Funds? EA Funds grew something like 30% last year. From 2018-2019, Funds grew by $1.3M (and growth was concentrated in the Meta, Long Term Future, and Animal Welfare Funds, all of which make grants to individuals). If this growth rate remained steady through 2020, we would expect the ‘funding gap’ created by EA Grants (at the historical level of Grants funding, under $1M per year) to be covered by organic growth in EA Funds. However, if the number of strong grant opportunities also continues to increase, organic growth could still leave a similar proportion of strong opportunities going unfunded. In that case, I’d encourage Fund teams to make that known and fundraise accordingly. Of course, it’s hard to predict how much the size of the total pool of opportunities will increase in 2020 and beyond.
Thanks Nicole!
My strong prior (which it sounds like you disagree with), is that we should generally expect funding needs to increase over time. If that’s true, then EA Funds would need to grow by more than enough to offset EA Grants in order to keep pace with needs. More reliance on EA Funds would shift the mix of funding too: for instance, relatively more funding going to established organizations (which EA Grants doesn’t fund) and no natural source of funding for individuals working on Global Poverty (as that fund doesn’t grant to individuals).
I agree it would be helpful for Fund management teams to explicitly make it known if they think there are a lot of strong opportunities going unfunded. Similarly, if Fund managers think they have limited opportunities to make strong grants with additional funds, it would be good to know that too. I’ve been operating on the assumption that the funds all believe they have room for more funding; if that’s not the case, seems like an important thing to share.
In your opinion, is this a recent development or do you think feedback was a larger constraint than funding even when EA Grants was more actively funding projects? If you think it’s a recent development, was the change driven by EA Grants, EA Funds, and other grantmakers funding the most funding constrained projects, or did something else change?
I feel very uncertain. I wasn’t very involved with funding individuals and that ecosystem before taking on EA Grants, so it’s hard for me to speak to the changes over time.
No time to track down the cite now, but I recall Oliver mentioning somewhere on the Forum that he felt there was a lot of value in there being multiple independent grant-makers with overlapping focus areas, to mitigate the biases of any one decision-maker. (I agree with this.)
Thanks for raising this! I agree with this concern, and more broadly think it’s important to do work to mitigate grantmaker biases and make the grantmaking ecosystem more robust. In this particular case I think the trade-offs are too high, the biggest ones being the ability to narrow CEA’s focus (which has historically been too broad) and our staff capacity.
Got it. What could staff capacity trade off for here that feels higher priority?
Thanks for the question! My exact role is still being nailed down, but as an example, I’m likely to work on things related to risk mitigation. E.g. coordinating advice on how to give a talk to foreign government officials. Another consideration that’s related to staff capacity and is an input into this decision, is the importance of narrowing down CEA’s scope to allow more focus for the organization.
Related: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HB2zD5mu7ynXnD63u/healthy-competition
“As I consider the program’s future, my top priority is to ensure that we serve our current grantees reliably and continue to follow through on our existing commitments.”
I’m really glad to hear this, as well as hearing that you’re considering closing the program. There aren’t usually good incentives for providing consistently good service or for eliminating your own job. I’m glad you’re trying to do it anyways.
Re: future of the program & ecosystem influences.
What bad things will happen if the program is just closed
for the area overlapping with something “community building-is”, CBG will become the sole source of funding, as meta-fund does not fund that. I think at least historically CBG had some problematic influence on global development of effective altruism not because of the direct impact of funding, but because of putting money behind some specific set of advice/evaluation criteria. (To clarify what I mean: I would expect the space would be healthier if exactly the same funding decisions were made, but less specific advice what people should do was associated; the problem is also not necessarily on the program side, but can be thought about as goodharting on the side of grant applicants/grant recipients.)
for x-risk, LTFF can become too powerful source of funding for new/small projects. In practice while there are positive impacts of transparency, I would expect some problematic impacts of mainly Oli opinions and advice being associated with a lot of funding. (To clarify: I’m not worried about funding decisions, but about indirect effects of the type “we are paying you so you better listen to us”, and people intentionally or unintentionally goodharting on views expressed as grant justification)
for various things falling in between the gaps of fund scope, it may be less clear what to do
it increases the risks of trying to found something like “EA startups”
it can make the case for individual donors funding things stronger
All of that could be somewhat mitigated if rest of the funding ecosystem adapts; e.g. by creating more funds with intentional overlap, or creating others stream of funding going e.g. along geographical structures.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I agree with most of your points, (though am a bit confused on your first one and would like to understand it better if you’d have the time to elaborate. EA Grants didn’t, when I was involved, have an overlapping funding mandate with CBGs, although I think that the distinction was a bit blurrier in the past). I am keen to work with others in the funding ecosystem so it can adapt in a good, healthy way. If you have more specific thoughts on how to make this happen, would love to hear them here or in a call.
Would shutting down EA grants significantly reduce the overall quantity of meta funding in the community or would the freed up resources be routed into the Meta-fund?
As mentioned in another response, where the freed up resources go is dependent on donors. EA Grants never had (to my knowledge) multi-year commitments. For example, since I’ve started, it’s been ~entirely funded by 1 anonymous donor. On funding, if the Meta Fund sees funding shortages, I hope that they will make that known to donors, so that donors can fund the Meta Fund accordingly. To my knowledge, this has not been the case to date, even though EA Grants has been somewhat limited in its disbursements this year.
Thanks for the update, I appreciate the transparency on the project’s shortcomings.
“Upon my initial review, it had a mixed track record. Some grants seemed quite exciting, some seemed promising, others lacked the information I needed to make an impact judgment, and others raised some concerns.”
I’d be interested in what (kind of) grants you think seem great and not so great.
This is a bit hard to go into detail without investing a lot of time. On a general level, I think some grants led to people starting projects with good, impactful output on areas EA cares about (including “meta”). This only describes some of the grants, but I think this is appropriate given the hits-based approach of this style of grantmaking. There were also some grants that I think created or deepened some risks without having much positive benefit. This is not specific to the particular grants made, but some of the general types of risks I would investigate if I did a more thorough review would be: impacts on the EA ecosystem/incentives (e.g. how does funding/not funding a particular project incentivize others), impacts on nascent fields (e.g. AI safety), and infohazards.
Hi all—just a quick note to thank everyone who has commented. I’ve been out on leave for personal reasons and will respond when I’m back. Apologies for the delay!
I think the option of having (a possible renamed) EA Grants as one option in EA funds is interesting. It could preserve almost all of the benefits (one extra independent grantmaker picking different kinds of targets) while reducing maybe half the overhead, and clarifying the difference between EA Grants and EA Funds.
Thanks for the comment! I agree. I think that whether this iteration makes sense will depend on what Funds can handle and what it looks like in the future. I do like this general idea of thinking creatively about how to best integrate EA Grants into EA Funds, and would be keen to hear more ideas if you have them.
Thanks for the update. I was not aware that people could apply for EA funds. The FAQ seems to be just for donors, and I hadn’t seen anything on the EA forum about applying.
Huh, really? I’m surprised to hear that, and makes me think it might need to be much clearer on the Funds pages. Regarding things on the Forum about applying, there have been several posts that either explicitly mention applications to LTFF/Meta fund in the title (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) or else discuss the fact that you can apply to them in the post (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). (The latter list is basically all the grant writeups and one AMA.) The very first line of the most recent LTFF writeup has a link to the application.
But yeah, am surprised that you didn’t know about it.
Sorry—was writing too late at night for me—I got confused.
Seems fine :)
Different funds have application rounds open at different times. When applications are open for a Fund, we have the app open linked on the Fund’s page (e.g. on the LTFF page). We could consider moving that line higher up on the page, and we should add something to the FAQ—thanks for the suggestion!
Currently, LTFF and Animal Welfare are (as far as I’ve been told) happy to have people fill out the form anytime, while the Meta fund doesn’t have an open application form and the Global Development fund has a totally different structure for allocating funds (no open applications).
Sorry—was writing too late at night for me—I got confused.
Per the last solicitation, the Meta Fund (like the LTFF) has “rolling applications, with a window of about 3-4 months between responses.”
Could you add this link to the Meta Fund’s page? Apply to the EA Meta Fund
The application form notes “Applications are open continuously, but the deadline to be considered for our next distribution is on October 11th” so ideally it could be updated with the date of the next deadline.
I believe this has been fixed, but please let us know if you see any more issues.
Yes, this was fixed. Thanks!