Assume you had uncapped funding to hire staff at RP from now on. In such a scenario, how many more staff would you expect RP to have in 5 years from now? How much more funding would you expect to attract? Would you sustain your level of impact per dollar?
For instance, is it the case that you think that RP could be 2x as large in five years and do 3x as much funded work at a 1.5x current impact per dollar? Or a very different trajectory?
I ask as an attempt to gauge your perception of the potential growth of RP and this sector of EA more generally.
It’s been hard for me to make five year plans, given that we’re currently only a little less than four years old and the growth between 2018 when we started and now has already been very hard to anticipate in advance!
I do think that RP could be 2x as large in five years. I’m actually optimistic that we could double in 2-3 years!
I’m less sure about how much funded work we’d do—actually I’m not sure what you mean by funded work, do you mean work directly commissioned by stakeholders as opposed to us doing work we proactively identify?
I’m also less sure about impact per dollar. We’ve found this to be very difficult to track and quantify precisely. Perhaps as 80,000 Hours talks about “impact-adjusted career changes”, we might want to talk about “impact-adjusted decision changes”—and I’d be keen to generate more of those, even after adjusting for our growth in staff and funding. I think we’ve learned a lot more about how to unlock impact from our work and I think also there will have been more time for our past work to bear fruit.
One additional point I’ll note is that most (though not all ) of our impact comes from having a multiplier effect on the EA movement. Unlike say a charity distributing bednets, or an academic trying to answer ML questions in AI safety, our impact is inherently tied with the impact of EA overall. So an important way we’ll have a greater impact per dollar (without making many changes ourselves) is via the movement growing a lot in quantity, quality, or both.
Put another way, RP is trying to have a multiplier effect on the EA movement, but multiplication is less valuable than addition if the base is low.
A third way in which we rely on the EA movement (the second one is money) is that almost all of our hires comes from EA, so if EA outreach to research talent dries up (or decreases in quality), we’d have a harder time finding competent hires.
This is a little hard to tell, because often we receive a grant to do research, and the outcomes of that research might be relevant to the funder, but also broadly relevant to the EA community when published, etc.
But in terms of just pure contracted work, in 2021 so far, we’ve received around $1.06M of contracted work, (compared to $4.667M in donations and grants (including multi-year grants)), though much of the spending of that $1.06M will be in 2022.
In terms of expectations, I think that contracted work will likely grow as a percentage of our total revenue, but ideally we’d see growth growth in donations and grants too.
Assume you had uncapped funding to hire staff at RP from now on. In such a scenario, how many more staff would you expect RP to have in 5 years from now? How much more funding would you expect to attract? Would you sustain your level of impact per dollar?
For instance, is it the case that you think that RP could be 2x as large in five years and do 3x as much funded work at a 1.5x current impact per dollar? Or a very different trajectory?
I ask as an attempt to gauge your perception of the potential growth of RP and this sector of EA more generally.
It’s been hard for me to make five year plans, given that we’re currently only a little less than four years old and the growth between 2018 when we started and now has already been very hard to anticipate in advance!
I do think that RP could be 2x as large in five years. I’m actually optimistic that we could double in 2-3 years!
I’m less sure about how much funded work we’d do—actually I’m not sure what you mean by funded work, do you mean work directly commissioned by stakeholders as opposed to us doing work we proactively identify?
I’m also less sure about impact per dollar. We’ve found this to be very difficult to track and quantify precisely. Perhaps as 80,000 Hours talks about “impact-adjusted career changes”, we might want to talk about “impact-adjusted decision changes”—and I’d be keen to generate more of those, even after adjusting for our growth in staff and funding. I think we’ve learned a lot more about how to unlock impact from our work and I think also there will have been more time for our past work to bear fruit.
One additional point I’ll note is that most (though not all ) of our impact comes from having a multiplier effect on the EA movement. Unlike say a charity distributing bednets, or an academic trying to answer ML questions in AI safety, our impact is inherently tied with the impact of EA overall. So an important way we’ll have a greater impact per dollar (without making many changes ourselves) is via the movement growing a lot in quantity, quality, or both.
Put another way, RP is trying to have a multiplier effect on the EA movement, but multiplication is less valuable than addition if the base is low.
A third way in which we rely on the EA movement (the second one is money) is that almost all of our hires comes from EA, so if EA outreach to research talent dries up (or decreases in quality), we’d have a harder time finding competent hires.
Thanks, that’s exciting to hear!
For funded work, I wanted to know how much funding you expect to receive to do work for stakeholders.
This is a little hard to tell, because often we receive a grant to do research, and the outcomes of that research might be relevant to the funder, but also broadly relevant to the EA community when published, etc.
But in terms of just pure contracted work, in 2021 so far, we’ve received around $1.06M of contracted work, (compared to $4.667M in donations and grants (including multi-year grants)), though much of the spending of that $1.06M will be in 2022.
In terms of expectations, I think that contracted work will likely grow as a percentage of our total revenue, but ideally we’d see growth growth in donations and grants too.