I feel very unsure about this. I don’t think my position on this question is very well thought through.
Most of the time, the reason I don’t want to make a grant doesn’t feel like “this isn’t worth the money”, it feels like “making this grant would be costly for some other reason”. For example, when someone applies for a salary to spend some time researching some question which I don’t think they’d be very good at researching, I usually don’t want to fund them, but this is mostly because I think it’s unhealthy in various ways for EA to fund people to flail around unsuccessfully rather than because I think that if you multiply the probability of the research panning out by the value of the research, you get an expected amount of good that is worse than longtermism’s last dollar.
I think this question feels less important to me because of the fact that the grants it affects are marginal anyway. I think that more than half of the impact I have via my EAIF grantmaking is through the top 25% of the grants I make. And I am able to spend more time on making those best grants go better, by working on active grantmaking or by advising grantees in various ways. And coming up with a more consistent answer to “where should the bar be” seems like a worse use of my time than those other activities.
I think I would rather make 30% fewer grants and keep the saved money in a personal account where I could disburse it later.
(To be clear, I am grateful to the people who apply for EAIF funding to do things, including the ones who I don’t think we should fund, or only marginally think we should fund; good on all of you for trying to think through how to do lots of good.)
I think that more than half of the impact I have via my EAIF grantmaking is through the top 25% of the grants I make
Am I correct in understanding that this is true for your beliefs about ex ante rather than ex post impact? (in other words, that 1⁄4 of grants you pre-identified as top-25% will end up accounting for more than 50% of your positive impact)
If so, is this a claim about only the positive impact of the grants you make, or also about the absolute value of all grants you make? See related question.
I feel very unsure about this. I don’t think my position on this question is very well thought through.
Most of the time, the reason I don’t want to make a grant doesn’t feel like “this isn’t worth the money”, it feels like “making this grant would be costly for some other reason”. For example, when someone applies for a salary to spend some time researching some question which I don’t think they’d be very good at researching, I usually don’t want to fund them, but this is mostly because I think it’s unhealthy in various ways for EA to fund people to flail around unsuccessfully rather than because I think that if you multiply the probability of the research panning out by the value of the research, you get an expected amount of good that is worse than longtermism’s last dollar.
I think this question feels less important to me because of the fact that the grants it affects are marginal anyway. I think that more than half of the impact I have via my EAIF grantmaking is through the top 25% of the grants I make. And I am able to spend more time on making those best grants go better, by working on active grantmaking or by advising grantees in various ways. And coming up with a more consistent answer to “where should the bar be” seems like a worse use of my time than those other activities.
I think I would rather make 30% fewer grants and keep the saved money in a personal account where I could disburse it later.
(To be clear, I am grateful to the people who apply for EAIF funding to do things, including the ones who I don’t think we should fund, or only marginally think we should fund; good on all of you for trying to think through how to do lots of good.)
Am I correct in understanding that this is true for your beliefs about ex ante rather than ex post impact? (in other words, that 1⁄4 of grants you pre-identified as top-25% will end up accounting for more than 50% of your positive impact)
If so, is this a claim about only the positive impact of the grants you make, or also about the absolute value of all grants you make? See related question.
This is indeed my belief about ex ante impact. Thanks for the clarification.