My take on this (others at the EAIF may disagree and may convince me otherwise):
I think EA Funds should be spending less time on detailed reports, as they’re not read by that many people. Also, a main benefit is people improving their thinking based on reading them (it seems helpful for improving one’s judgment ability to be able to read very concrete practical decisions and how they were reached), but there are a many such reports already at this point, such that writing further ones doesn’t help that much – readers can simply go back to past reports and read those instead. I think EA Funds should produce such detailed reports every 1-2 years (especially when new fund managers come on board, so interested donors can get a sense of their thinking), and otherwise focus more on active grantmaking.
In addition, I think it would make sense for us to publish reports on whichever topic seems most important to us to communicate about – perhaps an intervention report, perhaps an important but underappreciated consideration, or a cause area. I think this should probably happen on an ad-hoc basis.
My take on this (others at the EAIF may disagree and may convince me otherwise):
I think EA Funds should be spending less time on detailed reports, as they’re not read by that many people. Also, a main benefit is people improving their thinking based on reading them (it seems helpful for improving one’s judgment ability to be able to read very concrete practical decisions and how they were reached), but there are a many such reports already at this point, such that writing further ones doesn’t help that much – readers can simply go back to past reports and read those instead. I think EA Funds should produce such detailed reports every 1-2 years (especially when new fund managers come on board, so interested donors can get a sense of their thinking), and otherwise focus more on active grantmaking.
In addition, I think it would make sense for us to publish reports on whichever topic seems most important to us to communicate about – perhaps an intervention report, perhaps an important but underappreciated consideration, or a cause area. I think this should probably happen on an ad-hoc basis.
While I produced a number of detailed reports for this round, I agree with this.