I think we should think carefully about the norm being set by the comments here.
This is an exceptionally transparent and useful grant report (especially Oliver Habryka’s). It’s helped me learn a lot about how the fund thinks about things, what kind of donation opportunities are available, and what kind of things I could (hypothetically if I were interested) pitch the LTF fund on in the future. To compare it to a common benchmark, I found it more transparent and informative than a typical GiveWell report.
But the fact that Habryka now must defend all 14 of his detailed write-ups against bikeshedding, uncharitable, and sometimes downright rude commenters seems like a strong disincentive against producing such reports in the future, especially given that the LTF fund is so time constrained.
If you value transparency in EA and want to see more of it (and you’re not a donor to the LTF fund), it seems to me like you should chill out here. That doesn’t mean don’t question the grants, but it does mean you should:
Apply even more principle of charity than usual
Take time to phrase your question in the way that’s easiest to answer
Apply some filter and don’t ask unimportant questions
Use a tone that minimizes stress for the person you’re questioning
I strongly agree with this. EA funds seemed to have a tough time finding grant makers who were both qualified and had sufficient time, and I would expect that to be partly because of the harsh online environment previous grant makers faced. The current team seems to have impressively addressed the worries people had in terms of donating to smaller and more speculative projects, and providing detailed write-ups on them. I imagine that in depth, harsh attacks on each grant decision will make it still harder to recruit great people for these committees, and mean those serving on them are likely to step down sooner. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be discussing the grants—presumably it’s useful for the committee to hear other people’s views on the grants to get more information about them. But following Ben’s suggestions seems crucial to EA funds continuing to be a useful way of donating into the future. In addition, to try to engage more in collaborative truthseeking rather than adversarial debate, we might try to:
Focus on constructive information / suggestions for future grants rather than going into depth on what’s wrong with grants already given.
Spend at least as much time describing which grants you think are good and how, so that they can be built on, as on things you disagree with.
I don’t get compensated, though I also don’t think compensation would make much of a difference for me or anyone else on the fund (except maybe Alex).
Everyone on the fund is basically dedicating all of their resources towards EA stuff, and is generally giving up most of their salary potential for working in EA. I don’t think it would make super much sense for us to get more money, given that we are already de-facto donating everything above a certain threshold (either literally in the case of the two Matts, or indirectly by taking a paycut and working in EA).
I think if people give more money to the fund because they come to trust the decisions of the fund more, then that seems like it would incentivize more things like this. Also if people bring up strong arguments against any of the reasoning I explained above, then that is a great win, since I care a lot about our fund distributions getting better.
The reason compensation seems good is that it formalizes the duty of engaging with the community’s discourse, which probably pushes us further towards the above regime.
Right now, the community is basically banking on you & other fund managers caring a lot about engaging with the community. This is great, and it’s great that you do.
Layering on compensation seems like a way of bolstering this engagement. If someone is compensated to do this engagement, then there’s increased incentive for them to do it. (Though there’s probably some weirdness around Goodhart-ing here.)
Compensation is also good in case you ever retire and someone else with different financial needs takes over (but it doesn’t seem super important—there are other things you could solve first).
I think that makes sense but in practice is something that makes more sense to handle through their day jobs. (If they went the route of hiring someone for whom managing the fund was their actual day job I’d agree that generally higher salaries would be good, for mostly the same reason they’d be good across the board in EA)
Now that the dust has settled a bit, I’m curious what Habryka & the other fund managers think of the level of community engagement that occurred on this report...
What kinds of engagement seemed helpful?
What kinds of engagement seemed unnecessary?
What kinds of engagement were emotionally expensive to address?
Does it seem sustainable to write up grantmaker reasoning at this level of detail, for each grantmaking round going forward?
Does it seem sustainable to engage with questions & comments from the community at this level of detail, for each grantmaking round going forward?
I have a bunch of complicated thoughts here. Overall I have been quite happy with the reception to this, and think the outcomes of the conversations on the post have been quite good.
I am a bit more time-strapped than usual, so I will probably wait on writing a longer retrospective until I set aside a bunch of time to answer questions on the next set of writeups.
I think that people should feel comfortable sharing their system-1 expressions, in a way that does not immediately imply judgement.
I am thinking of stuff like the non-violent communication patterns, where you structure your observation in the following steps:
1. List a set of objective observations
2. Report your experience upon making those observations
3. Then your personal interpretations of those experiences and what they imply about your model of the world
4. Your requests that follow from those models
I think it’s fine to stop part-way through this process, but that it’s generally a good idea to not skip any steps. So I think it’s fine to just list observations, and it’s fine to just list observations and then report how you feel about those things, as long as you clearly indicate that this is your experience and doesn’t necessarily involve judgement. But it’s a bad idea to immediately skip to the request/judgement step.
OK, that is clarifying. Maybe your original comment could have been clearer, since this framing is quite different.
The issue that you raise in this comment is a big debate, and this is maybe not the place to discuss it in detail. In any case, as stated my view is that people should think carefully before they comment, and not run with their immediate feelings on sensitive topics.
I think we should think carefully about the norm being set by the comments here.
This is an exceptionally transparent and useful grant report (especially Oliver Habryka’s). It’s helped me learn a lot about how the fund thinks about things, what kind of donation opportunities are available, and what kind of things I could (hypothetically if I were interested) pitch the LTF fund on in the future. To compare it to a common benchmark, I found it more transparent and informative than a typical GiveWell report.
But the fact that Habryka now must defend all 14 of his detailed write-ups against bikeshedding, uncharitable, and sometimes downright rude commenters seems like a strong disincentive against producing such reports in the future, especially given that the LTF fund is so time constrained.
If you value transparency in EA and want to see more of it (and you’re not a donor to the LTF fund), it seems to me like you should chill out here. That doesn’t mean don’t question the grants, but it does mean you should:
Apply even more principle of charity than usual
Take time to phrase your question in the way that’s easiest to answer
Apply some filter and don’t ask unimportant questions
Use a tone that minimizes stress for the person you’re questioning
I strongly agree with this. EA funds seemed to have a tough time finding grant makers who were both qualified and had sufficient time, and I would expect that to be partly because of the harsh online environment previous grant makers faced. The current team seems to have impressively addressed the worries people had in terms of donating to smaller and more speculative projects, and providing detailed write-ups on them. I imagine that in depth, harsh attacks on each grant decision will make it still harder to recruit great people for these committees, and mean those serving on them are likely to step down sooner. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be discussing the grants—presumably it’s useful for the committee to hear other people’s views on the grants to get more information about them. But following Ben’s suggestions seems crucial to EA funds continuing to be a useful way of donating into the future. In addition, to try to engage more in collaborative truthseeking rather than adversarial debate, we might try to:
Focus on constructive information / suggestions for future grants rather than going into depth on what’s wrong with grants already given.
Spend at least as much time describing which grants you think are good and how, so that they can be built on, as on things you disagree with.
+1
I think it’s great that the Fund is trending towards more transparency & a broader set of grantees (cf. November 2018 grant report, cf. July 2018 concerns about the Fund).
And I really appreciate the level of care & attention that Oli is putting towards this thread. I’ve found the discussion really helpful.
Relatedly, is Oli getting compensated for the work he’s putting in to the Longterm Future Fund?
Seems good to move towards a regime wherein:
The norm is to write up detailed, public grant reports
Community members ask a bunch of questions about the grant decisions
The norm is that a representative of the grant-making staff fields all of these questions, and is compensated for doing so
I don’t get compensated, though I also don’t think compensation would make much of a difference for me or anyone else on the fund (except maybe Alex).
Everyone on the fund is basically dedicating all of their resources towards EA stuff, and is generally giving up most of their salary potential for working in EA. I don’t think it would make super much sense for us to get more money, given that we are already de-facto donating everything above a certain threshold (either literally in the case of the two Matts, or indirectly by taking a paycut and working in EA).
I think if people give more money to the fund because they come to trust the decisions of the fund more, then that seems like it would incentivize more things like this. Also if people bring up strong arguments against any of the reasoning I explained above, then that is a great win, since I care a lot about our fund distributions getting better.
Got it.
The reason compensation seems good is that it formalizes the duty of engaging with the community’s discourse, which probably pushes us further towards the above regime.
Right now, the community is basically banking on you & other fund managers caring a lot about engaging with the community. This is great, and it’s great that you do.
Layering on compensation seems like a way of bolstering this engagement. If someone is compensated to do this engagement, then there’s increased incentive for them to do it. (Though there’s probably some weirdness around Goodhart-ing here.)
cf. Role of ombudsperson in public governance
Compensation is also good in case you ever retire and someone else with different financial needs takes over (but it doesn’t seem super important—there are other things you could solve first).
I think that makes sense but in practice is something that makes more sense to handle through their day jobs. (If they went the route of hiring someone for whom managing the fund was their actual day job I’d agree that generally higher salaries would be good, for mostly the same reason they’d be good across the board in EA)
Now that the dust has settled a bit, I’m curious what Habryka & the other fund managers think of the level of community engagement that occurred on this report...
What kinds of engagement seemed helpful?
What kinds of engagement seemed unnecessary?
What kinds of engagement were emotionally expensive to address?
Does it seem sustainable to write up grantmaker reasoning at this level of detail, for each grantmaking round going forward?
Does it seem sustainable to engage with questions & comments from the community at this level of detail, for each grantmaking round going forward?
I have a bunch of complicated thoughts here. Overall I have been quite happy with the reception to this, and think the outcomes of the conversations on the post have been quite good.
I am a bit more time-strapped than usual, so I will probably wait on writing a longer retrospective until I set aside a bunch of time to answer questions on the next set of writeups.
Agree with this, especially the comments about rudeness. This also means that I disagree with Oli’s comment elsewhere in this thread:
In line with what Ben says, I think people should apply a filter to their system-1 level reactions, and not express them whatever they are.
I think that people should feel comfortable sharing their system-1 expressions, in a way that does not immediately imply judgement.
I am thinking of stuff like the non-violent communication patterns, where you structure your observation in the following steps:
1. List a set of objective observations
2. Report your experience upon making those observations
3. Then your personal interpretations of those experiences and what they imply about your model of the world
4. Your requests that follow from those models
I think it’s fine to stop part-way through this process, but that it’s generally a good idea to not skip any steps. So I think it’s fine to just list observations, and it’s fine to just list observations and then report how you feel about those things, as long as you clearly indicate that this is your experience and doesn’t necessarily involve judgement. But it’s a bad idea to immediately skip to the request/judgement step.
OK, that is clarifying. Maybe your original comment could have been clearer, since this framing is quite different.
The issue that you raise in this comment is a big debate, and this is maybe not the place to discuss it in detail. In any case, as stated my view is that people should think carefully before they comment, and not run with their immediate feelings on sensitive topics.