[Speaking just for myself here, not for my employer, the Open Philanthropy Project, which is housed at GiveWell]
UPDATED 8/27/16. I added the name of my employer to the top of the post because Vipul told me offline that he thinks “my financial and institutional ties . . . could be construed as creating a conflict of interest” in this post.
One of the things that makes this decision so hard for anybody considering ETG to fund relatively small projects that staffed foundations might miss is that projects that receive funding get way more visibility than projects that do not.
This makes it incredibly hard to figure out what the right margin is and how many projects are at that margin (particularly important when you know lots of others are making the same decision at the same time). Unless they do an incredible amount of research, a potential ETGer can mostly see examples of projects they support that that WERE funded and then speculate on whether they were close to not being funded. You can also look at projects that are currently fundraising but, again, it’s hard to tell in advance how many of them will actually struggle to get support
If I were CEA/80k and wanted to make progress on this question, I think the first project I’d try would be to create a list of people willing to disclose projects that they tried and failed to fundraise for over the last year or two. Ideally, they’d also give some sense of their own opportunity cost—what they ended up doing instead (this is especially important if it included projects pitched by medium/large EA orgs where staff that didn’t get funding for one thing may have ended up just working on a different priority which is pretty different from somebody who wanted to quit their job to start something and couldn’t).
There are all kinds of reasons this would be imperfect. It wouldn’t be a complete survey. It wouldn’t account for the potential growth of the community. It wouldn’t capture all of the effects of a bigger funding pool—e.g. projects happening faster, less time wasted fundraising, people feeling more confident pitching projects in the first place because their odds are higher. But I think it’d be a lower bound with fairly high information content. If I were 80k and advising lots of people on whether to ETG at the same time, I’d like to see something like this.
A survey of EAs would probably identify a bunch of projects and CEA could also ask ETGers and people who see lots of pitches (e.g. EAV, Carl, Nick) if they can ask rejected people whether they’d be willing to disclose. Presumably 80k also knows of advisees who considered starting an organization but couldn’t get funded. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit failure but it’d be worth it for some people as it might also give them another shot at funding. Although whoever carried this out would have to make sure it stayed a list of projects that failed to fundraise or else it’ll just become a big pitch bank.
This post initially didn’t disclose the name of my employer (Open Phil, which is housed at GiveWell) at the top of this post. I’d be interested in feedback on whether that was a mistake and whether anybody feels like there’s a conflict they wish I’d disclosed. Context is that Vipul told me he thinks there could be one offline.
My main reason for not disclosing is that I didn’t consciously think much about it and was being kind of lazy bc I wrote the comment on my phone on BART. “Speaking just for myself here, not for my employer” is shorter.
I always explicitly disclose who I work for when something that closely touches on our work is being discussed. In this particular case I don’t actually see the conflict and I’m actually not even sure what direction my financial/institutional interests point. But here are some other factors:
1) Even if I say I’m not speaking for GiveWell/Open Phil, I think prominently mentioning their name in all of my comments creates a stronger association between my views and Open Phil’s and makes it more likely that people will confuse my own views with my employers. I think this is a pretty big risk because some people could make big decisions based on their predictions of Open Phil’s actions. This concern (and the general friction caused by needing to think about it) has frequently stopped me from publicly commenting on things.
2) I worry that flagging all my posts with the name of my employer, which is high status in this community, uses their credibility to artificially inflate my own. In general, I think it would be bad for EA if it feels like Open Phil/GW is throwing their weight around.
3) I mostly thought about this as a suggestion to Will/80k/CEA all of whom know me well and know where I work. I email them with suggestions fairly frequently and am used to giving them thoughts w/o needing to disclose.
Although whoever carried this out would have to make sure it stayed a list of projects that failed to fundraise or else it’ll just become a big pitch bank.
Why is this a failure mode? What if someone deliberately created a big pitch bank for the purpose of collecting these kind of statistics? (“Kickstarter/AngelList for effective nonprofits.” Edit: It seems that AngelList does allow nonprofits to list, but the EA community might also have unique funding needs, as described in this post.) This could solve some of the data collection issues, since you’re giving people an incentive to put their info in your database. And potentially work to address issues related to time spent fundraising/ease of pitching new projects without requiring any new charitable funds (beyond those required to create the pitch bank itself). Heck, it even might eliminate the need for people to have their failure to fundraise analyzed publicly, if a more liquid market solves the original problem of matching supply and demand better.
I know this is kind of what Effective Altruism Ventures was. I’m not entirely clear on why it’s no longer in operation. Kerry mentioned difficulty finding both quality projects and generous donors—apparently resources for EAV were allocated towards other projects that were doing better. So maybe this is something that only starts to be worth the overhead once the community reaches a certain size.
Oh—in the long run a pitch bank could definitely be good. It might be more valuable than the project I was suggesting. Although it would also, I think, take substantially more work to do well. You’d need to keep it updated, create a way to get in touch with potential grantees, etc.
The reason I think it would corrupt the data is because if the list included lots of projects that are still fundraising (and perhaps only recently started fundraising) then it would no longer help someone figure out today which projects are actually on the margin. It would make for interesting data in a year or so once we could see which projects from the list were still fundraising.
[Speaking just for myself here, not for my employer, the Open Philanthropy Project, which is housed at GiveWell]
UPDATED 8/27/16. I added the name of my employer to the top of the post because Vipul told me offline that he thinks “my financial and institutional ties . . . could be construed as creating a conflict of interest” in this post.
One of the things that makes this decision so hard for anybody considering ETG to fund relatively small projects that staffed foundations might miss is that projects that receive funding get way more visibility than projects that do not.
This makes it incredibly hard to figure out what the right margin is and how many projects are at that margin (particularly important when you know lots of others are making the same decision at the same time). Unless they do an incredible amount of research, a potential ETGer can mostly see examples of projects they support that that WERE funded and then speculate on whether they were close to not being funded. You can also look at projects that are currently fundraising but, again, it’s hard to tell in advance how many of them will actually struggle to get support
If I were CEA/80k and wanted to make progress on this question, I think the first project I’d try would be to create a list of people willing to disclose projects that they tried and failed to fundraise for over the last year or two. Ideally, they’d also give some sense of their own opportunity cost—what they ended up doing instead (this is especially important if it included projects pitched by medium/large EA orgs where staff that didn’t get funding for one thing may have ended up just working on a different priority which is pretty different from somebody who wanted to quit their job to start something and couldn’t).
There are all kinds of reasons this would be imperfect. It wouldn’t be a complete survey. It wouldn’t account for the potential growth of the community. It wouldn’t capture all of the effects of a bigger funding pool—e.g. projects happening faster, less time wasted fundraising, people feeling more confident pitching projects in the first place because their odds are higher. But I think it’d be a lower bound with fairly high information content. If I were 80k and advising lots of people on whether to ETG at the same time, I’d like to see something like this.
A survey of EAs would probably identify a bunch of projects and CEA could also ask ETGers and people who see lots of pitches (e.g. EAV, Carl, Nick) if they can ask rejected people whether they’d be willing to disclose. Presumably 80k also knows of advisees who considered starting an organization but couldn’t get funded. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit failure but it’d be worth it for some people as it might also give them another shot at funding. Although whoever carried this out would have to make sure it stayed a list of projects that failed to fundraise or else it’ll just become a big pitch bank.
This post initially didn’t disclose the name of my employer (Open Phil, which is housed at GiveWell) at the top of this post. I’d be interested in feedback on whether that was a mistake and whether anybody feels like there’s a conflict they wish I’d disclosed. Context is that Vipul told me he thinks there could be one offline.
My main reason for not disclosing is that I didn’t consciously think much about it and was being kind of lazy bc I wrote the comment on my phone on BART. “Speaking just for myself here, not for my employer” is shorter.
I always explicitly disclose who I work for when something that closely touches on our work is being discussed. In this particular case I don’t actually see the conflict and I’m actually not even sure what direction my financial/institutional interests point. But here are some other factors:
1) Even if I say I’m not speaking for GiveWell/Open Phil, I think prominently mentioning their name in all of my comments creates a stronger association between my views and Open Phil’s and makes it more likely that people will confuse my own views with my employers. I think this is a pretty big risk because some people could make big decisions based on their predictions of Open Phil’s actions. This concern (and the general friction caused by needing to think about it) has frequently stopped me from publicly commenting on things.
2) I worry that flagging all my posts with the name of my employer, which is high status in this community, uses their credibility to artificially inflate my own. In general, I think it would be bad for EA if it feels like Open Phil/GW is throwing their weight around.
3) I mostly thought about this as a suggestion to Will/80k/CEA all of whom know me well and know where I work. I email them with suggestions fairly frequently and am used to giving them thoughts w/o needing to disclose.
Curious about what others think.
I think that this isn’t a mistake and I think Vipul’s being ridiculous, FWIW.
Why is this a failure mode? What if someone deliberately created a big pitch bank for the purpose of collecting these kind of statistics? (“Kickstarter/AngelList for effective nonprofits.” Edit: It seems that AngelList does allow nonprofits to list, but the EA community might also have unique funding needs, as described in this post.) This could solve some of the data collection issues, since you’re giving people an incentive to put their info in your database. And potentially work to address issues related to time spent fundraising/ease of pitching new projects without requiring any new charitable funds (beyond those required to create the pitch bank itself). Heck, it even might eliminate the need for people to have their failure to fundraise analyzed publicly, if a more liquid market solves the original problem of matching supply and demand better.
I know this is kind of what Effective Altruism Ventures was. I’m not entirely clear on why it’s no longer in operation. Kerry mentioned difficulty finding both quality projects and generous donors—apparently resources for EAV were allocated towards other projects that were doing better. So maybe this is something that only starts to be worth the overhead once the community reaches a certain size.
Oh—in the long run a pitch bank could definitely be good. It might be more valuable than the project I was suggesting. Although it would also, I think, take substantially more work to do well. You’d need to keep it updated, create a way to get in touch with potential grantees, etc.
The reason I think it would corrupt the data is because if the list included lots of projects that are still fundraising (and perhaps only recently started fundraising) then it would no longer help someone figure out today which projects are actually on the margin. It would make for interesting data in a year or so once we could see which projects from the list were still fundraising.
This is a nice idea!