how much should you value an OP longtermist $ vs an LTFF or EAIF $
There’s both a question of simple EV and how cooperative or epistemically deferential you should be.
If Alice values her $s at 10x Bob’s, and Bob values his dollars at 10x Alice’s, but they know each other really well and cooperate in other settings, they should probably come to a better equilibria then the first-order calculation.
whether we’re likely to get an inflow of institutional and large individual donations going forwards, now that we’re “actually trying” to fundraise.
The more optimistic you’re about our future donations, the more it makes sense to donate know.
whether we’ll get some inflow soonish, given our pretty public and unambiguous ask.
obviously there’s some weird game theory thing going on here where if (say) other people are willing to cover half of our funding gap until if/when larger donors role in, the marginal value of you covering our funds is much lower. But the more other people are waiting, the more valuable it is for you to give now.
whether it makes sense for LTFF to keep going if we don’t raise much money.
obviously most of us have fairly high-value counterfactuals, so working on LTFF when it’s not doing much is pretty costly in terms of other work we could be doing.
whether some other org will fill up the vacuum if we stop going.
If it takes X months for a different org to fill up the vacuum while we plan out a graceful exit, funding us now rather than later is pretty valuable. If otoh we neither get more funding nor anybody else wants to step in to do this work, then the marginal value of donations to us would become a lot more flat.
whether the projects we’re currently excited about will get funding elsewhere if we don’t fund them now (so us not funding them only incurs delay and switching costs from their end) vs just won’t happen, or at least won’t happen for X months.
whether money promised in the future is a very concrete and specific promise “for tax law reasons I can either give you $28k in Janurary or $20k now; I’m very willing to publicly commit in writing to doing the former if y’all think it’s a better idea” vs a pretty wishy-washy “Oh I might give $1.40x in around 3 months instead of $1x now.” vs you mentally thinking of giving us money later but telling us anything about it
If enough people are giving us very credible and concrete commitments, then it’s at least possible for us (though a bit costly in terms of work, and probably money as well) to borrow against such commitments to fund projects today, at a much-lower-than-implied interest rate.
If we can’t plan around a hypothetical future windfall, we should probably triage as if that windfall isn’t there (though with some contingency plans to absorb that if necessary).
whether the current funding landscape for smallish independent projects is a temporary lull vs “new normal”
The more it’s like a “new normal”, the less critical funds are now as opposed to later.
several cruxes:
how much should you value an OP longtermist $ vs an LTFF or EAIF $
There’s both a question of simple EV and how cooperative or epistemically deferential you should be.
If Alice values her $s at 10x Bob’s, and Bob values his dollars at 10x Alice’s, but they know each other really well and cooperate in other settings, they should probably come to a better equilibria then the first-order calculation.
whether we’re likely to get an inflow of institutional and large individual donations going forwards, now that we’re “actually trying” to fundraise.
The more optimistic you’re about our future donations, the more it makes sense to donate know.
whether we’ll get some inflow soonish, given our pretty public and unambiguous ask.
obviously there’s some weird game theory thing going on here where if (say) other people are willing to cover half of our funding gap until if/when larger donors role in, the marginal value of you covering our funds is much lower. But the more other people are waiting, the more valuable it is for you to give now.
whether it makes sense for LTFF to keep going if we don’t raise much money.
obviously most of us have fairly high-value counterfactuals, so working on LTFF when it’s not doing much is pretty costly in terms of other work we could be doing.
whether some other org will fill up the vacuum if we stop going.
If it takes X months for a different org to fill up the vacuum while we plan out a graceful exit, funding us now rather than later is pretty valuable. If otoh we neither get more funding nor anybody else wants to step in to do this work, then the marginal value of donations to us would become a lot more flat.
whether the projects we’re currently excited about will get funding elsewhere if we don’t fund them now (so us not funding them only incurs delay and switching costs from their end) vs just won’t happen, or at least won’t happen for X months.
whether money promised in the future is a very concrete and specific promise “for tax law reasons I can either give you $28k in Janurary or $20k now; I’m very willing to publicly commit in writing to doing the former if y’all think it’s a better idea” vs a pretty wishy-washy “Oh I might give $1.40x in around 3 months instead of $1x now.” vs you mentally thinking of giving us money later but telling us anything about it
If enough people are giving us very credible and concrete commitments, then it’s at least possible for us (though a bit costly in terms of work, and probably money as well) to borrow against such commitments to fund projects today, at a much-lower-than-implied interest rate.
If we can’t plan around a hypothetical future windfall, we should probably triage as if that windfall isn’t there (though with some contingency plans to absorb that if necessary).
whether the current funding landscape for smallish independent projects is a temporary lull vs “new normal”
The more it’s like a “new normal”, the less critical funds are now as opposed to later.