In 2023, 80% of CEA’s budget came from OP’s GCRCB team. This creates an obvious incentive for CEA to prioritize the stuff the GCRCB team prioritizes.
As its name suggests, the GCRCB team has an overt focus on Global Catastrophic Risks. Here’s how OP’s website describes this team:
We want to increase the number of people who aim to prevent catastrophic events, and help them to achieve their goals.
We believe that scope-sensitive giving often means focusing on the reduction of global catastrophic risks — those which could endanger billions of people. We support organizations and projects that connect and support people who want to work on these issues, with a special focus on biosecurity and risks from advanced AI. In doing so, we hope to grow and empower the community of people focused on addressing threats to humanity and protecting the future of human civilization.
The work we fund in this area is primarily focused on identifying and supporting people who are or could eventually become helpful partners, critics, and grantees.
This team was formerly known as “Effective Altruism Community Growth (Longtermism).”
CEA has also received a much smaller amount of funding from OP’s “Effective Altruism (Global Health and Wellbeing)” team. From what I can tell, the GHW team basically focuses on meta charities doing global poverty type and animal welfare work (often via fundraising for effective charities in those fields). The OP website notes:
“This focus area uses the lens of our global health and wellbeing portfolio, just as our global catastrophic risks capacity building area uses the lens of our GCR portfolio… Our funding so far has focused on [grantees that] Raise funds for highly effective charities, Enable people to have a greater impact with their careers, and found and incubate new charities working on important and neglected interventions.”
There is an enormous difference between these teams in terms of their historical and ongoing impact on EA funding and incentives. The GCRCB team has granted over $400 million since 2016, including over $70 million to CEA and over $25 million to 80k. Compare that to the GHW which launched “in July 2022. In its first 12 months, the program had a budget of $10 million.”
So basically there’s been a ton of funding for a long time for EA community building that prioritizes AI/Bio/other GCR work, and a vastly smaller amount of funding that only became available recently for EA community building that uses a global poverty/animal welfare lens. And, as your question suggests, this dynamic is not at all well understood.
I think the correct interpretation of this is that OP GHW doesn’t think general community building for its cause areas is cost effective, which seems quite plausible to me. [Edit: note I’m saying community-building in general, not just the EA community specifically—so under this view, the skewing of the EA community is less relevant. My baseline assumption is that any sort of community-building in developed countries isn’t an efficient use of money, so you need quite a strong case for increased impact for it to be worthwhile.].
I agree it’s likely they have a smaller budget, but equating budget with total spend per year (rather than saying that one is an indication of the other) is slightly begging the question—any gap between the two may reflect relevant CEAs.
I don’t think they had dramatically more money in 2023, and (without checking the numbers again to save time) I am pretty sure they mostly maxed out their budget both years.
That may well have been OP’s thinking and they may have been correct about the relative cost effectiveness of community building in GCR vs. GHW. But that doesn’t change the fact that this funding strategy had massive (and IMO problematic) implications for the incentive structure of the entire EA community.
I think it should be fairly uncontroversial that the best way to align the incentives of organizations like CEA with the views and values of the broader community would be if they were funded by organizations/program areas that made decisions using the lens of EA, not subsets of EA like GCR or GHW. OP is free to prioritize whatever it wants, including prioritizing things ahead of aligning CEA’s incentives with those of the EA community. But as things stand significant misalignment of incentives exists, and I think it’s important to acknowledge and spread awareness of that situation.
By analogy, suppose there were a Center for Medical Studies that was funded ~80% by a group interested in just cardiology. Influenced by the resultant incentives, the CMS hires a bunch of cardiologists, pushes medical students toward cardiology residencies, and devotes an entire instance of its flagship Medical Research Global conference to the exclusive study of topics in cardiology. All those things are fine, but this org shouldn’t use a name that implies that it takes a more general and balanced perspective on the field of medical studies, and should make very very clear that it doesn’t speak for the medical community as a whole.
> funded by organizations/program areas that made decisions using the lens of EA
I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar thing occured—those orgs/programs decide that it isn’t that cost-effective to do GHW community-building. I could see it going another way, but my baseline assumption is that any sort of community-building in developed countries isn’t an efficient use of money, so you need quite a strong case for increased impact for it to be worthwhile.
I dunno, I think a funder that had a goal and mindset of funding EA community building could just do stuff like fund cause-agnostic EAGs and a maintenance of a cause-agnostic effectivealtruism.org, and nor really worry about things like the relative cost-effectiveness of GCR community building vs. GHW community building.
In 2023, 80% of CEA’s budget came from OP’s GCRCB team. This creates an obvious incentive for CEA to prioritize the stuff the GCRCB team prioritizes.
As its name suggests, the GCRCB team has an overt focus on Global Catastrophic Risks. Here’s how OP’s website describes this team:
CEA has also received a much smaller amount of funding from OP’s “Effective Altruism (Global Health and Wellbeing)” team. From what I can tell, the GHW team basically focuses on meta charities doing global poverty type and animal welfare work (often via fundraising for effective charities in those fields). The OP website notes:
There is an enormous difference between these teams in terms of their historical and ongoing impact on EA funding and incentives. The GCRCB team has granted over $400 million since 2016, including over $70 million to CEA and over $25 million to 80k. Compare that to the GHW which launched “in July 2022. In its first 12 months, the program had a budget of $10 million.”
So basically there’s been a ton of funding for a long time for EA community building that prioritizes AI/Bio/other GCR work, and a vastly smaller amount of funding that only became available recently for EA community building that uses a global poverty/animal welfare lens. And, as your question suggests, this dynamic is not at all well understood.
I think the correct interpretation of this is that OP GHW doesn’t think general community building for its cause areas is cost effective, which seems quite plausible to me. [Edit: note I’m saying community-building in general, not just the EA community specifically—so under this view, the skewing of the EA community is less relevant. My baseline assumption is that any sort of community-building in developed countries isn’t an efficient use of money, so you need quite a strong case for increased impact for it to be worthwhile.].
The risk, I think, is that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where:
Prominent EA institutions get funded mostly from OP-GCRCB money
Those institutions then prioritise GCRs[1] more
The EA community gets more focused on GCRs by either deferring to these institutions or evaporative cooling by less GCR/longtermist EAs
Due to the increased GCR focus of EA, GHW/AW funders think that funding prominent EA institutions is not cost-effective for their goals
Go-to step 1
Using this as a general term for AI x-risk, longtermism, etc/
They also have a much smaller budget (as indicated by total spend per year).
You can see a direct comparison of total funding in this post I wrote: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nnTQaLpBfy2znG5vm/the-flow-of-funding-in-ea-movement-building#Overall_picture
I agree it’s likely they have a smaller budget, but equating budget with total spend per year (rather than saying that one is an indication of the other) is slightly begging the question—any gap between the two may reflect relevant CEAs.
Fair point, I couldn’t find a link to point to the budget, but:
“We launched this program in July 2022. In its first 12 months, the program had a budget of $10 million.”
From their website—https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/ea-global-health-and-wellbeing/
I don’t think they had dramatically more money in 2023, and (without checking the numbers again to save time) I am pretty sure they mostly maxed out their budget both years.
That may well have been OP’s thinking and they may have been correct about the relative cost effectiveness of community building in GCR vs. GHW. But that doesn’t change the fact that this funding strategy had massive (and IMO problematic) implications for the incentive structure of the entire EA community.
I think it should be fairly uncontroversial that the best way to align the incentives of organizations like CEA with the views and values of the broader community would be if they were funded by organizations/program areas that made decisions using the lens of EA, not subsets of EA like GCR or GHW. OP is free to prioritize whatever it wants, including prioritizing things ahead of aligning CEA’s incentives with those of the EA community. But as things stand significant misalignment of incentives exists, and I think it’s important to acknowledge and spread awareness of that situation.
A name change would be a good start.
By analogy, suppose there were a Center for Medical Studies that was funded ~80% by a group interested in just cardiology. Influenced by the resultant incentives, the CMS hires a bunch of cardiologists, pushes medical students toward cardiology residencies, and devotes an entire instance of its flagship Medical Research Global conference to the exclusive study of topics in cardiology. All those things are fine, but this org shouldn’t use a name that implies that it takes a more general and balanced perspective on the field of medical studies, and should make very very clear that it doesn’t speak for the medical community as a whole.
> funded by organizations/program areas that made decisions using the lens of EA
I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar thing occured—those orgs/programs decide that it isn’t that cost-effective to do GHW community-building. I could see it going another way, but my baseline assumption is that any sort of community-building in developed countries isn’t an efficient use of money, so you need quite a strong case for increased impact for it to be worthwhile.
I dunno, I think a funder that had a goal and mindset of funding EA community building could just do stuff like fund cause-agnostic EAGs and a maintenance of a cause-agnostic effectivealtruism.org, and nor really worry about things like the relative cost-effectiveness of GCR community building vs. GHW community building.