By “useful to us” I meant useful to the EAIF or LTFF (as opposed to make a comment on what the best thing to do is). I don’t have a great sense of what the counterfactuals for the funding at Open Phil are. Some evidence that open Phil thinks that they are worse than donations to us is that Open Phil has historically given us large grants and has decided to offer donation matching to help incentivise donations from the public.
But also Open Phil wants to fund you less going forward and the matching is for this transition, right? Or was it primarily EA Funds pushing for that?
Of course, the reason seems to be to reduce your reliance on Open Phil, but that should be weighed against the difference in value of grants you’d make with more of their funding instead of them. And they might want to reduce your reliance on them because they think they can do better themselves and/or because the need for extra grant advisor capacity in the space has been reduced with the reduction in funding after the collapse of FTX.
One possible interpretation is that this matching and decreased future support is like them spinning off their criminal justice reform work with one last large exit grant, because they concluded it didn’t meet the bar anymore. Furthermore, Open Phil has recently raised its bar for longtermist work, with about half of previous longtermist grants no longer meeting the bar.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FHJMKSwrwdTogYLGF/we-re-no-longer-pausing-most-new-longtermist-funding
It’s pretty plausible to me (with what limited knowledge I have of the specifics, and I would hope they’d let you know) that you no longer meet their new bar. And even if you would going forward, Open Phil might just prefer to make grants themselves, because they have the capacity and decide themselves what meets their own bar ex ante, whereas they’d have to trust you. Furthermore, by having the EA Fund managers who also work at Open Phil resign from EA Funds, they have more time to focus on Open Phil grantmaking, so they’ve effectively increased their capacity (maybe only marginally, I suppose, if EA Funds was only a small time commitment).
Some evidence that open Phil thinks that they are worse than donations to us is that Open Phil has historically given us large grants and has decided to offer donation matching to help incentivise donations from the public.
Sure but the difference in value is key here right? If you value marginal OP longtermist $s at 90% those of LTFF $s, then 2:1 counteractual matching “only” 1.2x’s your donations, whereas if you value OP longtermist $s at 10% those of LTFF $s, then the matching is equivalent to a 1.8x:1 match from an unaligned donor, or like a 2.8x donation to us overall.
By “useful to us” I meant useful to the EAIF or LTFF (as opposed to make a comment on what the best thing to do is). I don’t have a great sense of what the counterfactuals for the funding at Open Phil are. Some evidence that open Phil thinks that they are worse than donations to us is that Open Phil has historically given us large grants and has decided to offer donation matching to help incentivise donations from the public.
But also Open Phil wants to fund you less going forward and the matching is for this transition, right? Or was it primarily EA Funds pushing for that?
Of course, the reason seems to be to reduce your reliance on Open Phil, but that should be weighed against the difference in value of grants you’d make with more of their funding instead of them. And they might want to reduce your reliance on them because they think they can do better themselves and/or because the need for extra grant advisor capacity in the space has been reduced with the reduction in funding after the collapse of FTX.
One possible interpretation is that this matching and decreased future support is like them spinning off their criminal justice reform work with one last large exit grant, because they concluded it didn’t meet the bar anymore. Furthermore, Open Phil has recently raised its bar for longtermist work, with about half of previous longtermist grants no longer meeting the bar. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FHJMKSwrwdTogYLGF/we-re-no-longer-pausing-most-new-longtermist-funding
It’s pretty plausible to me (with what limited knowledge I have of the specifics, and I would hope they’d let you know) that you no longer meet their new bar. And even if you would going forward, Open Phil might just prefer to make grants themselves, because they have the capacity and decide themselves what meets their own bar ex ante, whereas they’d have to trust you. Furthermore, by having the EA Fund managers who also work at Open Phil resign from EA Funds, they have more time to focus on Open Phil grantmaking, so they’ve effectively increased their capacity (maybe only marginally, I suppose, if EA Funds was only a small time commitment).
Sure but the difference in value is key here right? If you value marginal OP longtermist $s at 90% those of LTFF $s, then 2:1 counteractual matching “only” 1.2x’s your donations, whereas if you value OP longtermist $s at 10% those of LTFF $s, then the matching is equivalent to a 1.8x:1 match from an unaligned donor, or like a 2.8x donation to us overall.