Yeah, I somewhat agree this would be a challenge, and there is a trade off between the time needed to do this well and carefully (as it would need to be done well and carefully) and other things that could be done.
I think it would surprise a lot if the various issues were insurmountable. I am not an expert in how to publish public evaluations of organisations without upsetting those organisations or misleading people but connected orgs like GiveWell do this frequently enough and must have learnt a thing or two about it in the past few years. To take one the concerns you raise: if you are worried about people reading too much into the list and judging the organisations who requested the grants rather than specific grants you could publish the list in a pseudoanonymised way where you remove names of organisations and exact amounts of funding – sure people could connect the dots but it would help prevent misunderstanding and make it clearer judgement is for grants not organisations.
Anyway to answer your questions:
On creating new projects – it is easier for the Charity Entrepreneurship research team to know how to asses funding availability and the bar to beat for global health projects than for biosecurity projects. Sure we can look at where OpenPhil have given but there is no detail there. It is hard to know how much they base their decisions on different factors such as the trusted-ness of the people running the project versus some bar of expected effectiveness versus something else. Ultimately this can make us more hesitant to try and start new organisations that would be aiming to get funding from OpenPhil’s longtermist teams than we are to start new organisations that would be aiming to get funding from GiveWell (or other very transparent organisations). This uncertainty about future funding is also a barrier we see in potential entrepreneurs and more clarity feels useful
On other funders could fill gaps that they believe OpenPhil has missed – I recently wrote a critique of the Lon-Term Future Fund pointing out that they have ignored policy work. This has led to some other funders looking into the space. This was only possible because their grant and grant evaluations are public. (This did require having inside knowledge of the space about who was looking for funding.) Honestly OpenPhil are already pretty good at this, you can see all their grants and identify gaps (like I believe no longtermist team at OpenPhil has ever given to any policy work outside the US) and then direct funds to fill those gaps. It is unclear to me how much more useful the tiers would be but I expect the lower tiers would highlight areas where OpenPhil is unlikely to fund in the future and other funders could look at what they think is valuable in that space and fund it.
(All views my own not speaking for any org or for Charity Entrepreneurship etc)
There’s a lot of policy work, it’s just not getting identified.
In Biorisk, Openphil funds Center for Health Security, NTI, and Council on Strategic Risks. In AI, they fund GovAI, CNAS, Carnegie, and others. Those are all very policy-heavy.
Yeah, I somewhat agree this would be a challenge, and there is a trade off between the time needed to do this well and carefully (as it would need to be done well and carefully) and other things that could be done.
I think it would surprise a lot if the various issues were insurmountable. I am not an expert in how to publish public evaluations of organisations without upsetting those organisations or misleading people but connected orgs like GiveWell do this frequently enough and must have learnt a thing or two about it in the past few years. To take one the concerns you raise: if you are worried about people reading too much into the list and judging the organisations who requested the grants rather than specific grants you could publish the list in a pseudoanonymised way where you remove names of organisations and exact amounts of funding – sure people could connect the dots but it would help prevent misunderstanding and make it clearer judgement is for grants not organisations.
Anyway to answer your questions:
On creating new projects – it is easier for the Charity Entrepreneurship research team to know how to asses funding availability and the bar to beat for global health projects than for biosecurity projects. Sure we can look at where OpenPhil have given but there is no detail there. It is hard to know how much they base their decisions on different factors such as the trusted-ness of the people running the project versus some bar of expected effectiveness versus something else. Ultimately this can make us more hesitant to try and start new organisations that would be aiming to get funding from OpenPhil’s longtermist teams than we are to start new organisations that would be aiming to get funding from GiveWell (or other very transparent organisations). This uncertainty about future funding is also a barrier we see in potential entrepreneurs and more clarity feels useful
On other funders could fill gaps that they believe OpenPhil has missed – I recently wrote a critique of the Lon-Term Future Fund pointing out that they have ignored policy work. This has led to some other funders looking into the space. This was only possible because their grant and grant evaluations are public. (This did require having inside knowledge of the space about who was looking for funding.) Honestly OpenPhil are already pretty good at this, you can see all their grants and identify gaps (like I believe no longtermist team at OpenPhil has ever given to any policy work outside the US) and then direct funds to fill those gaps. It is unclear to me how much more useful the tiers would be but I expect the lower tiers would highlight areas where OpenPhil is unlikely to fund in the future and other funders could look at what they think is valuable in that space and fund it.
(All views my own not speaking for any org or for Charity Entrepreneurship etc)
There’s a lot of policy work, it’s just not getting identified.
In Biorisk, Openphil funds Center for Health Security, NTI, and Council on Strategic Risks. In AI, they fund GovAI, CNAS, Carnegie, and others. Those are all very policy-heavy.
The OP biosecurity and PP team just gave one recently for health security policy work in Australia, albeit a smaller grant
Great! Its good to see things changing :-) Thank you for the update!