LTFF, OP, SFF, FTXF etc. are all keen to fund bio stuff. If they don’t do so in practice, it’s because nobody pitches them with good proposals, not because they’re not interested. Also, some of the bio grants aren’t public.
If they don’t do so in practice, it’s because nobody pitches them with good proposals, not because they’re not interested
I think “good proposals” should be disambiguated a bit here. There’s a range of possible options* for what you might mean.
*eg
“good”ness from the POV of the specific funders vs an ideal rational observer vs an ominiscient entity with perfect clairvoyance,
goodness as defined by naive EV vs (e.g) including vetting costs
“proposal” defined literally vs meaning the whole package including e.g. founder quality, etc, etc.
I mention this because I personally found it hard to parse your comment, and I expect I’m more familiar with the EA funding landscape than the average reader.
Thanks! I don’t have strong evidence for this, but I definitely have a strong prior that we’ll miss good grants, evaluated from the POV of benevolent impartial agents with perfect clairvoyance. The world just doesn’t seem that fundamentally predictable to me.
I disagree with this, not because we’re particularly good at predicting which projects get successful, but because funders have been very generous with money lately (e.g., EAIF and LTFF have had pretty high acceptance rates), which makes it pretty unlikely that we’ll miss one.
What do the numbers in brackets mean? Including this information more prominently would make this post a lot more skim-able.
The categories for biorisk look very wrong to me (I don’t think there’s a funding gap).
Keen to hear about any data on this topic, James is right it is the number of ~EA funders with unique perspectives.
LTFF, OP, SFF, FTXF etc. are all keen to fund bio stuff. If they don’t do so in practice, it’s because nobody pitches them with good proposals, not because they’re not interested. Also, some of the bio grants aren’t public.
I think “good proposals” should be disambiguated a bit here. There’s a range of possible options* for what you might mean.
*eg
“good”ness from the POV of the specific funders vs an ideal rational observer vs an ominiscient entity with perfect clairvoyance,
goodness as defined by naive EV vs (e.g) including vetting costs
“proposal” defined literally vs meaning the whole package including e.g. founder quality, etc, etc.
I mention this because I personally found it hard to parse your comment, and I expect I’m more familiar with the EA funding landscape than the average reader.
I meant pretty much any of the possible interpretations of goodness, though not the literal interpretation of ‘proposal’.
Thanks! I don’t have strong evidence for this, but I definitely have a strong prior that we’ll miss good grants, evaluated from the POV of benevolent impartial agents with perfect clairvoyance. The world just doesn’t seem that fundamentally predictable to me.
I disagree with this, not because we’re particularly good at predicting which projects get successful, but because funders have been very generous with money lately (e.g., EAIF and LTFF have had pretty high acceptance rates), which makes it pretty unlikely that we’ll miss one.
Oh yeah that’s a really good point.
Maybe Joey can clear it up but I believe it’s the number of funders in that bucket, as an indication of funder diversity.