Sorry for the delay, others seem to have given a lot of good responses in the meantime, but here is my current summary of those concerns:
1. Ideally, yes. If there is a lack of externally transparent evidence, there should be strong reasoning in favor of the grant.
By word-count the HPMOR writeup is (I think) among the three longest writeups that I produced for this round of grant proposals. I think my reasoning is sufficiently strong, though it is obviously difficult for me to comprehensively explain all of my background models and reasoning in a way that allows you to verify that.
The core arguments that I provided in the writeup above seem sufficiently strong to me, not necessarily to convince a completely independent observer, but I think for someone with context about community building and general work done on the long-term future, I expect it to successfully communicate the actual reasons for why I think the grant is a good idea.
I generally think grantmakers should give grants to whatever interventions they think are likely to be most effective, while not constraining themselves to only account for evidence that is easily communicable to other people. They then should also invest significant resources into communicating whatever can be communicated about their reasons and intuitions and actively seek out counterarguments and additional evidence that would change their mind.
2. I think that there is no evidence that using $28k to purchase copies of HPMOR is the most cost-effective way to encourage Math Olympiad participants to work on the long-term future or engage with the existing community. I don’t make the claim that it won’t be effective at all. Simply that there is little reason to believe it will be more effective, either in an absolute sense or in a cost-effectiveness sense, than other resources.
This one has mostly been answered by other people in the thread, but here is my rough summary of my thoughts on this objection:
I don’t think the aim of this grant should be “to recruit IMO and EGMO winners into the EA community”. I think membership in the EA community is of relatively minor importance compared to helping them get traction in thinking about the long-term-future, teach them about basic thinking tools and give them opportunities to talk to others who have similar interests.
I think from an integrity perspective it would be actively bad to try to persuade young high-school students to join the community. HPMoR is a good book to give because some of the IMO and EGMO organizers have read the book and found it interesting on its own merit, and would be glad to receive it as a gift. I don’t think any of the other books you proposed would be received in the same way and I think are much more likely to be received as advocacy material that is trying to recruit them to some kind of in-group.
Jan’s comment summarized the concerns I have here reasonably well.
As Misha said, this grant is possible because the IMO and EGMO organizers are excited about giving out HPMoRs as prizes. It is not logistically feasible to give out other material that the organizers are not excited about (and I would be much less excited about a grant that would not go through the organizers of these events)
As Ben Pace said, I think HPMoR teaches skills that math olympiad winners lack. I am confident of this both because I have participated in SPARC events that tried to teach those skills to math olympiad winners, and because impact via intellectual progress is very heavy-tailed and the absolutely best people tend to have a massively outsized impact with their contributions. Improving the reasoning and judgement ability of some of the best people on the planet strikes me as quite valuable.
3. I’m not sure about this, but this was the impression the forum post gave me. If this is not the case, then, as I said, this grant displaces some other $28k in funding. What will that other $28k go to?
Misha responded to this. There is no $28k that this grant is displacing, the counterfactual is likely that there simply wouldn’t be any books given out at IMO or EGMO. All the organizers did was to ask whether they would be able to give out prizes, conditional on them finding someone to sponsor them. I don’t see any problems with this.
4. Not necessarily that risky funds shouldn’t be recommended as go-to, although that would be one way of resolving the issue. My main problem is that it is not abundantly clear that the Funds often make risky grants, so there is a lack of transparency for an EA newcomer. And while this particularly applies to the Long Term fund, given it is harder to have evidence concerning the Long Term, it does apply to all the other funds.
My guess is that most of our donors would prefer us to feel comfortable making risky grants, but I am not confident of this. Our grant page does list the following under the section of: “Why might you choose to not donate to this fund?”
First, donors who prefer to support established organizations. The fund managers have a track record of funding newer organizations and this trend is likely to continue, provided that promising opportunities continue to exist.
This is the first and top reason we list why someone might not want to donate to this fund. This doesn’t necessarily directly translate into risky grants, but I think does communicate that we are trying to identify early-stage opportunities that are not necessarily associated with proven interventions and strong track-records.
From a communication perspective, one of the top reasons why I invested so much time into this grant writeup is to be transparent about what kind of intervention we are likely to fund, and to help donors decide whether they want to donate to this fund. At least I will continue advocating for early-stage and potentially weird looking grants as long as I am part of the LTF-board and donors should know about that. If you have any specific proposed wording, I am also open to suggesting to the rest of the fund-team that we should update our fund-page with that wording.
Sorry for the delay, others seem to have given a lot of good responses in the meantime, but here is my current summary of those concerns:
By word-count the HPMOR writeup is (I think) among the three longest writeups that I produced for this round of grant proposals. I think my reasoning is sufficiently strong, though it is obviously difficult for me to comprehensively explain all of my background models and reasoning in a way that allows you to verify that.
The core arguments that I provided in the writeup above seem sufficiently strong to me, not necessarily to convince a completely independent observer, but I think for someone with context about community building and general work done on the long-term future, I expect it to successfully communicate the actual reasons for why I think the grant is a good idea.
I generally think grantmakers should give grants to whatever interventions they think are likely to be most effective, while not constraining themselves to only account for evidence that is easily communicable to other people. They then should also invest significant resources into communicating whatever can be communicated about their reasons and intuitions and actively seek out counterarguments and additional evidence that would change their mind.
This one has mostly been answered by other people in the thread, but here is my rough summary of my thoughts on this objection:
I don’t think the aim of this grant should be “to recruit IMO and EGMO winners into the EA community”. I think membership in the EA community is of relatively minor importance compared to helping them get traction in thinking about the long-term-future, teach them about basic thinking tools and give them opportunities to talk to others who have similar interests.
I think from an integrity perspective it would be actively bad to try to persuade young high-school students to join the community. HPMoR is a good book to give because some of the IMO and EGMO organizers have read the book and found it interesting on its own merit, and would be glad to receive it as a gift. I don’t think any of the other books you proposed would be received in the same way and I think are much more likely to be received as advocacy material that is trying to recruit them to some kind of in-group.
Jan’s comment summarized the concerns I have here reasonably well.
As Misha said, this grant is possible because the IMO and EGMO organizers are excited about giving out HPMoRs as prizes. It is not logistically feasible to give out other material that the organizers are not excited about (and I would be much less excited about a grant that would not go through the organizers of these events)
As Ben Pace said, I think HPMoR teaches skills that math olympiad winners lack. I am confident of this both because I have participated in SPARC events that tried to teach those skills to math olympiad winners, and because impact via intellectual progress is very heavy-tailed and the absolutely best people tend to have a massively outsized impact with their contributions. Improving the reasoning and judgement ability of some of the best people on the planet strikes me as quite valuable.
Misha responded to this. There is no $28k that this grant is displacing, the counterfactual is likely that there simply wouldn’t be any books given out at IMO or EGMO. All the organizers did was to ask whether they would be able to give out prizes, conditional on them finding someone to sponsor them. I don’t see any problems with this.
My guess is that most of our donors would prefer us to feel comfortable making risky grants, but I am not confident of this. Our grant page does list the following under the section of: “Why might you choose to not donate to this fund?”
This is the first and top reason we list why someone might not want to donate to this fund. This doesn’t necessarily directly translate into risky grants, but I think does communicate that we are trying to identify early-stage opportunities that are not necessarily associated with proven interventions and strong track-records.
From a communication perspective, one of the top reasons why I invested so much time into this grant writeup is to be transparent about what kind of intervention we are likely to fund, and to help donors decide whether they want to donate to this fund. At least I will continue advocating for early-stage and potentially weird looking grants as long as I am part of the LTF-board and donors should know about that. If you have any specific proposed wording, I am also open to suggesting to the rest of the fund-team that we should update our fund-page with that wording.
Thanks for the response. I don’t have the time to draft a reply this week but I’ll get back to you next week.