I recommended some retroactive funding for this post (via the Future Fund’s regranting program) because I think it was valuable and hadn’t been otherwise funded. (Though I believe CEA agreed to fund potential future updates.)
I think the main sources of value were:
Providing (another) proof of concept that teams of forecasters can produce decision-relevant information & high-quality reasoning in crisis situations on relatively short notice.
Saving many people considerable amounts of time. (I know of several very time-pressed people who without that post would likely have spent at least an hour looking into whether they want to leave certain cities etc.).
(And I think the case for retroactively funding valuable work roughly just is that it sets the right incentives. In an ideal case, if people are confident that they will be able to obtain retroactive funding for valuable work after the fact, they can just go and do that, and more valuable work is going to happen. This is also why I’m publicly commenting about having provided retroactive funding in this case.
Of course, there are a bunch of problems with relying on that mechanism, and I’m not suggesting that retroactive funding should replace upfront funding or anything like that.)
I recommended some retroactive funding for this post (via the Future Fund’s regranting program) because I think it was valuable and hadn’t been otherwise funded. (Though I believe CEA agreed to fund potential future updates.)
I think the main sources of value were:
Providing (another) proof of concept that teams of forecasters can produce decision-relevant information & high-quality reasoning in crisis situations on relatively short notice.
Saving many people considerable amounts of time. (I know of several very time-pressed people who without that post would likely have spent at least an hour looking into whether they want to leave certain cities etc.).
Providing a foil for expert engagement.
(And I think the case for retroactively funding valuable work roughly just is that it sets the right incentives. In an ideal case, if people are confident that they will be able to obtain retroactive funding for valuable work after the fact, they can just go and do that, and more valuable work is going to happen. This is also why I’m publicly commenting about having provided retroactive funding in this case.
Of course, there are a bunch of problems with relying on that mechanism, and I’m not suggesting that retroactive funding should replace upfront funding or anything like that.)