Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!): In November 2022, Open Philanthropy (OP) announced a soft pause on new longtermist funding commitments, while they re-evaluated their bar for funding. This is now lifted and a new bar set.
The process for setting the new bar was:
Rank past grants by both OP and now-defunct FTX-associated funders, and divide these into tiers.
Under the assumption of 30-50% of OP’s funding going to longtermist causes, estimate the annual spending needed to exhaust these funds in 20-50 years.
Play around with what grants would have made the cut at different budget levels, and using a heavy dose of intuition come to an all-things-considered new bar.
They landed on funding everything that was ‘tier 4’ or above, and some ‘tier 5’ under certain conditions (eg. low time cost to evaluate, potentially stopping funding in future). In practice this means ~55% of OP longtermist grants over the past 18 months would have been funded under the new bar.
(This will appear in this week’s forum summary. If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)
Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
In November 2022, Open Philanthropy (OP) announced a soft pause on new longtermist funding commitments, while they re-evaluated their bar for funding. This is now lifted and a new bar set.
The process for setting the new bar was:
Rank past grants by both OP and now-defunct FTX-associated funders, and divide these into tiers.
Under the assumption of 30-50% of OP’s funding going to longtermist causes, estimate the annual spending needed to exhaust these funds in 20-50 years.
Play around with what grants would have made the cut at different budget levels, and using a heavy dose of intuition come to an all-things-considered new bar.
They landed on funding everything that was ‘tier 4’ or above, and some ‘tier 5’ under certain conditions (eg. low time cost to evaluate, potentially stopping funding in future). In practice this means ~55% of OP longtermist grants over the past 18 months would have been funded under the new bar.
(This will appear in this week’s forum summary. If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)