(Responding to the second point about which fund is a better fit for this, will respond to the first point separately)
I am broadly confused how to deal with the “which fund is a better fit?” question. Since it’s hard to influence the long-term future I expect a lot of good interventions to go via the path of first introducing people to the community, building institutions that can improve our decision-making, and generally opting for building positive feedback loops and resources that we can deploy as soon as concrete opportunities show up.
My current guess is that we should check in with the Meta fund and their grants to make sure that we don’t make overlapping grants and that we communicate any concerns, but that as soon as there is an application that we think is worth it from the perspective of the long-term-future that the Meta fund is not covering, that we should feel comfortable filling it, independently of whether it looks a bit like EA-Meta. But I am open to changing my mind on this.
Could this be straightforwardly simplified by bracketing out far future meta work as within the remit of the Long Term Future Fund, and all other meta work (e.g. animal welfare institution-building, global development institution-building) as within the remit of the Meta Fund?
Not sure if that would cleave reality at the joints, but seems like it might.
I actually think that as long as you communicate potential downside risks, there is a lot of value in having independent granting bodies look over the same pool of applications.
I think a single granting body is likely to end up missing a large number of good opportunities, and general intuitions arounds hits-based giving make me think that encouraging independence here is better than splitting up every grant into only one domain (this does rely on those granting bodies being able to communicate clearly around downside risk, which I think we can achieve).
Is this different from having more people on a single granting body?
Possibly with more people on a single granting body, everyone talks to each other more and so can all get stuck thinking the same thing, whereas they would have come up with more / different considerations had they been separate. But this would suggest that granting bodies would benefit from splitting into halves, going over grants individually, and then merging at the end. Would you endorse that suggestion?
I don’t think you want to go below three people for a granting body, to make sure that you can catch all the potential negative downsides of a grant. My guess is that if you have 6 or more people it would be better to split it into two independent grant teams.
I actually think that as long as you communicate potential downside risks, there is a lot of value in having independent granting bodies look over the same pool of applications.
Yes, this is a great idea to help reduce bias in grantmaking.
(Responding to the second point about which fund is a better fit for this, will respond to the first point separately)
I am broadly confused how to deal with the “which fund is a better fit?” question. Since it’s hard to influence the long-term future I expect a lot of good interventions to go via the path of first introducing people to the community, building institutions that can improve our decision-making, and generally opting for building positive feedback loops and resources that we can deploy as soon as concrete opportunities show up.
My current guess is that we should check in with the Meta fund and their grants to make sure that we don’t make overlapping grants and that we communicate any concerns, but that as soon as there is an application that we think is worth it from the perspective of the long-term-future that the Meta fund is not covering, that we should feel comfortable filling it, independently of whether it looks a bit like EA-Meta. But I am open to changing my mind on this.
Could this be straightforwardly simplified by bracketing out far future meta work as within the remit of the Long Term Future Fund, and all other meta work (e.g. animal welfare institution-building, global development institution-building) as within the remit of the Meta Fund?
Not sure if that would cleave reality at the joints, but seems like it might.
I actually think that as long as you communicate potential downside risks, there is a lot of value in having independent granting bodies look over the same pool of applications.
I think a single granting body is likely to end up missing a large number of good opportunities, and general intuitions arounds hits-based giving make me think that encouraging independence here is better than splitting up every grant into only one domain (this does rely on those granting bodies being able to communicate clearly around downside risk, which I think we can achieve).
Is this different from having more people on a single granting body?
Possibly with more people on a single granting body, everyone talks to each other more and so can all get stuck thinking the same thing, whereas they would have come up with more / different considerations had they been separate. But this would suggest that granting bodies would benefit from splitting into halves, going over grants individually, and then merging at the end. Would you endorse that suggestion?
I don’t think you want to go below three people for a granting body, to make sure that you can catch all the potential negative downsides of a grant. My guess is that if you have 6 or more people it would be better to split it into two independent grant teams.
Yes, this is a great idea to help reduce bias in grantmaking.