Have you considered sometimes producing longer write-ups that somewhat extensively detail the arguments you saw for and against giving to a particular funding opportunity? (Perhaps just for larger grants.)
This could provide an additional dose of the kind of benefits already provided by the current payout reports, as well as some of the benefits that having an additional animal welfare charity evaluator would provide. (Obviously thereās already ACE in this space, but these write-ups could focus on funding opportunities they havenāt got a write-up on, or this could simply provide an additional perspective.)
A similar idea would be to sometimes investigate a smaller funding opportunity or set of opportunities in detail as a sort of exemplar of a certain type of funding opportunity, and produce a write-up on that. Or to do things more explicitly like intervention reports or cause area reports.
Some of this probably isnāt the Animal Welfare Fundās comparative advantage, but perhaps itād be interesting to experiment with the first option, as that could mostly just use the reasoning and discussions you already have internally when making decisions?
But I think the recent EAIF report already had longer write-ups than the Animal Welfare Fund reports tend to, and in particular Maxās write-ups seemed to provide a fair amount of detail on his thinking on various issues related to the grants that were made. So the question is less applicable here.
But Iām still interested in your thoughts on this kind of thing, such as:
Do you think in future youāll continue to provide write-ups as detailed as those in the recent report?
What about increasing the average level of detail, e.g. making the average write-up similarly detailed to Maxās write-ups?
What are your thoughts on the pros and cons of that?
Do you think you might in future consciously aim to produce write-ups that serve more of the role that would be served by a write-up about a certain type of funding opportunity, or an intervention report, or a cause area report?
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 theyāre not read by that many people. Also, a main benefit is people improving their thinking based on reading them (it seems helpful for improving oneās 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 doesnāt help that much ā 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 ā 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.
re 1: I expect to write similarly detailed writeups in future.
re 2: I think that would take a bunch more of my time and not clearly be worth it, so it seems unlikely that Iāll do it by default. (Someone could try to pay me at a high rate to write longer grant reports, if they thought that this was much more valuable than I did.)
re 3: I agree with everyone that there are many pros of writing more detailed grant reports (and these pros are a lot of why I am fine with writing grant reports as long as the ones I wrote). By far the biggest con is that it takes more time. The secondary con is that if I wrote more detailed grant reports, Iād have to be a bit clearer about the advantages and disadvantages of the grants we made, and this would involve me having to be clearer about kind of awkward things (like my detailed thoughts on how promising person X is vs person Y); this would be a pain, because Iād have to try hard to write these sentences in inoffensive ways, which is a lot more time consuming and less fun.
re 4: Yes I think this is a good idea, and I tried to do that a little bit in my writeup about Youtubers; I think I might do it more in future.
Speaking for myself, Iām interested in increasing the detail in my write-ups a little over the medium term (perhaps making them typically more the length of the write up for Stefan Schubert). I doubt Iāll go all the way to making them as comprehensive as Maxās. Pros:
Particularly useful for donors to the fund and potential applicants to get to know the reasoning processes grant makers when weāve just joined and havenāt yet made many grants
Getting feedback from others on what parts of my reasoning process in making grants seem better and worse seems more likely to be useful than simply feedback on āthis grant was one I would /ā wouldnāt have madeā
Cons:
Time writing reports trades against time evaluating grants. The latter seems more important to me at the current margin. Thatās partly because Iād have liked to have decidedly more time than I had for evaluating grants and perhaps for seeking out people I think would make good grantees.
I find it hard to write up grants in great detail in a way thatās fully accurate and balanced without giving grantees public negative feedback. Iām hesitant to do much of that, and when I do it, want to do it very sensitively.
I expect to try to include considerations in my write ups which might be found in write ups of types of opportunity. I donāt expect to produce the kind of lengthy write ups that come to mind when you mention reports.
I would guess that the length of my write ups going forward will depend on various things, including how much impact they seem to be having (eg how much useful feedback I get from them that informs my thinking, and how useful people seem to be finding them in deciding what projects to do /ā whether to apply to the fund etc).
While Iām not sure Iāll produce similarly long write-ups in the future, FWIW for me some of the pros of long writeups are:
It helps me think and clarify my own views.
I would often find it more time-consuming to produce a brief writeup, except perhaps for writeups that have a radically more limited scopeāe.g., just describing what the grant ābuysā, but not saying anything about my reasoning for why I thought the grant is worth making.
In the Animal Welfare Fund AMA, I asked:
But I think the recent EAIF report already had longer write-ups than the Animal Welfare Fund reports tend to, and in particular Maxās write-ups seemed to provide a fair amount of detail on his thinking on various issues related to the grants that were made. So the question is less applicable here.
But Iām still interested in your thoughts on this kind of thing, such as:
Do you think in future youāll continue to provide write-ups as detailed as those in the recent report?
What about increasing the average level of detail, e.g. making the average write-up similarly detailed to Maxās write-ups?
What are your thoughts on the pros and cons of that?
Do you think you might in future consciously aim to produce write-ups that serve more of the role that would be served by a write-up about a certain type of funding opportunity, or an intervention report, or a cause area report?
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 theyāre not read by that many people. Also, a main benefit is people improving their thinking based on reading them (it seems helpful for improving oneās 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 doesnāt help that much ā 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 ā 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.
re 1: I expect to write similarly detailed writeups in future.
re 2: I think that would take a bunch more of my time and not clearly be worth it, so it seems unlikely that Iāll do it by default. (Someone could try to pay me at a high rate to write longer grant reports, if they thought that this was much more valuable than I did.)
re 3: I agree with everyone that there are many pros of writing more detailed grant reports (and these pros are a lot of why I am fine with writing grant reports as long as the ones I wrote). By far the biggest con is that it takes more time. The secondary con is that if I wrote more detailed grant reports, Iād have to be a bit clearer about the advantages and disadvantages of the grants we made, and this would involve me having to be clearer about kind of awkward things (like my detailed thoughts on how promising person X is vs person Y); this would be a pain, because Iād have to try hard to write these sentences in inoffensive ways, which is a lot more time consuming and less fun.
re 4: Yes I think this is a good idea, and I tried to do that a little bit in my writeup about Youtubers; I think I might do it more in future.
Speaking for myself, Iām interested in increasing the detail in my write-ups a little over the medium term (perhaps making them typically more the length of the write up for Stefan Schubert). I doubt Iāll go all the way to making them as comprehensive as Maxās.
Pros:
Particularly useful for donors to the fund and potential applicants to get to know the reasoning processes grant makers when weāve just joined and havenāt yet made many grants
Getting feedback from others on what parts of my reasoning process in making grants seem better and worse seems more likely to be useful than simply feedback on āthis grant was one I would /ā wouldnāt have madeā
Cons:
Time writing reports trades against time evaluating grants. The latter seems more important to me at the current margin. Thatās partly because Iād have liked to have decidedly more time than I had for evaluating grants and perhaps for seeking out people I think would make good grantees.
I find it hard to write up grants in great detail in a way thatās fully accurate and balanced without giving grantees public negative feedback. Iām hesitant to do much of that, and when I do it, want to do it very sensitively.
I expect to try to include considerations in my write ups which might be found in write ups of types of opportunity. I donāt expect to produce the kind of lengthy write ups that come to mind when you mention reports.
I would guess that the length of my write ups going forward will depend on various things, including how much impact they seem to be having (eg how much useful feedback I get from them that informs my thinking, and how useful people seem to be finding them in deciding what projects to do /ā whether to apply to the fund etc).
While Iām not sure Iāll produce similarly long write-ups in the future, FWIW for me some of the pros of long writeups are:
It helps me think and clarify my own views.
I would often find it more time-consuming to produce a brief writeup, except perhaps for writeups that have a radically more limited scopeāe.g., just describing what the grant ābuysā, but not saying anything about my reasoning for why I thought the grant is worth making.