My knee-jerk reaction is: If “net negative” means “ex-post counterfactual impact anywhere below zero, but including close-to-zero cases” then it’s close to 50% of grantees. Important here is that “impact” means “total impact on the universe as evaluated by some omniscient observer”. I think it’s much less likely that funded projects are net negative by the light of their own proxy goals or by any criterion we could evaluate in 20 years (assuming no AGI-powered omniscience or similar by then).
(I still think that the total value of the grantee portfolio would be significantly positive b/c I’d expect the absolute values to be systematically higher for positive than for negative grants.)
This is just a general view I have. It’s not specific to EA Funds, or the grants this round. It applies to basically any action. That view is somewhat considered but I think also at least somewhat controversial. I have discussed it a bit but not a lot with others, so I wouldn’t be very surprised if someone replied to this comment saying “but this can’t be right because of X”, and then I’d be like “oh ok, I think you’re right, the close-to-50% figure now seems massively off to me”.
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If “net negative” means “significantly net negative” (though I’m not sure what the interesting bar for “significant” would be), then I’m not sure I have a strong prior. Glancing over the specific grants we made I feel that for very roughly 1⁄4 of them I have some vague sense that “there is a higher-than-baseline risk for this being significantly net negative”. But idk what that higher-than-baseline risk is as absolute probability, and realistically I think all that’s going on here is that for about 1⁄4 of grants I can easily generate some prototypical story for why they’d turn out to be significantly net negative. I don’t know how well this is correlated with the actual risk.
(NB I still think that the absolute values for ‘significantly net negative’ grants will be systematically smaller than for ‘significantly net positive’ ones. E.g., I’d guess that the 99th percentile ex-post impact grant much more than offsets the 1st percentile grant [which I’m fairly confident is significantly net negative].)
Thanks a lot for this answer! After asking this, I realize I’m also interested in asking the same question about what ratio of grants you almost funded would be ex post net-negative.
My knee-jerk reaction is: If “net negative” means “ex-post counterfactual impact anywhere below zero, but including close-to-zero cases” then it’s close to 50% of grantees. Important here is that “impact” means “total impact on the universe as evaluated by some omniscient observer”. I think it’s much less likely that funded projects are net negative by the light of their own proxy goals or by any criterion we could evaluate in 20 years (assuming no AGI-powered omniscience or similar by then).
(I still think that the total value of the grantee portfolio would be significantly positive b/c I’d expect the absolute values to be systematically higher for positive than for negative grants.)
This is just a general view I have. It’s not specific to EA Funds, or the grants this round. It applies to basically any action. That view is somewhat considered but I think also at least somewhat controversial. I have discussed it a bit but not a lot with others, so I wouldn’t be very surprised if someone replied to this comment saying “but this can’t be right because of X”, and then I’d be like “oh ok, I think you’re right, the close-to-50% figure now seems massively off to me”.
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If “net negative” means “significantly net negative” (though I’m not sure what the interesting bar for “significant” would be), then I’m not sure I have a strong prior. Glancing over the specific grants we made I feel that for very roughly 1⁄4 of them I have some vague sense that “there is a higher-than-baseline risk for this being significantly net negative”. But idk what that higher-than-baseline risk is as absolute probability, and realistically I think all that’s going on here is that for about 1⁄4 of grants I can easily generate some prototypical story for why they’d turn out to be significantly net negative. I don’t know how well this is correlated with the actual risk.
(NB I still think that the absolute values for ‘significantly net negative’ grants will be systematically smaller than for ‘significantly net positive’ ones. E.g., I’d guess that the 99th percentile ex-post impact grant much more than offsets the 1st percentile grant [which I’m fairly confident is significantly net negative].)
Thanks a lot for this answer! After asking this, I realize I’m also interested in asking the same question about what ratio of grants you almost funded would be ex post net-negative.