It looks a little suspicious and I think the optics are bad that the girlfriend of Manifold’s founder is getting $50,000 to give away. It might just be a situation in which power grants special privilidge, and being close to power also grants some special privilidge. I wouldn’t object to this to much if she had an impressive track record or if she had some special merit that made me think she had earned the privilidge, but as far as I am aware she doesn’t have a history of being a well-calibrated or successful grant giver. In fact, she is young and inexperienced, hasn’t graduated from college, and as far as a few minutes of Google searches reveals, has never had a “real” job (although has had internships and has run a student organization at her college). In fact, her only qualification seems to be that she is dating Manifold’s founder. Are you just choosing regrantors from people you know and like? Giving sinecures and special privilidge to friends seems… kind of corrupt.
I think this comment might be interpreted as harsh and mean, and that isn’t my intention. I have actually met her in real life and she seems like a nice person. I’m really worried that posting this comment will make the founder and her upset, and I’m purposely excluding the names to make it ever-so-slightly less transparent, and ever-so-slightly harder for other people to Google around and figure out details. The main problem I perceive is simply that she is young and hasn’t had much experience yet; the ability and status she is given here seems out of proportion to her level of skill/experience. I don’t have any inside information to suspect that there is anything malicious going on here. It is also possible that she is a brilliant thinker with excellent judgement, and that I just haven’t seen any evidence of it. But the situation just seems… is “corrupt” too strong of a word?
Haha, thanks for bringing this up. One correction, Rachel and I are married (as of last month).
A quick background on this is that around February, Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten asked Manifold to set up an impact market to be able to run the ACX Forecasting Minigrants round (which is the site you see now at https://manifund.org). At the time, our existing team on Manifold were already occupied, and I had seen Rachel’s work on various programming projects such as openbook.fyi. After careful consideration, and checking in with both Scott and Manifold for Charity’s board of advisors, I decided to bring her on for a 6-week consulting engagement, which we’ve since renewed and turned into a fulltime offer.
Obviously, we recognize the potential conflicts of interest and didn’t make this decision lightly. My best judgement is that Rachel has done fantastically in this position so far, comparable to eg what I would expect a new grad at Google. (If you’re technical, I invite you to judge her commits on our open source repository).
The $50k regrantor budget that both her and I have are primarily to allow us to dogfood our own site. For the two of us to build a useful product for regrantors to use, it’s important that we have on-the-ground experience of making regrants ourselves. You’re also welcome to evaluate specifically the two grants she’s recommended so far (to Rachel Freedman and the Donations List Website)!
Thanks for explaining this context. I still think it is a little weird, but considering the framing that you are dogfooding your system makes it a bit more palatable. I also appreciate that your board of advisors approved and it seems like you have generally been cognizant of the conflict of interest.
I don’t think someone being young should be weighted highly in the assessment of their capacity to give good grants. I also think it’s important to remember that the majority of philanthropists come to have the power to give out grants due to success in the for-profit world and/or through good fortune, neither of which are necessarily correlated with being well positioned to give good grants. As a result, I don’t think the bar that Rachel needs to meet is so high that we should think that it’s unlikely that her being chosen as a regranter is based on merit.
That being said, the optics aren’t great so I understand where the original commenter is coming from.
People are not going to get the experience of making consequential decisions with $50, particularly if they’re funding individuals and small projects (as opposed to established charities with fairly smooth marginal utility curves like AMF).
That said, I’m sympathetic to the same argument for $5k or 10k.
Yeah, I think Rachel also herself feels a bit imposter-syndrome-y about her budget allocation and might end up delegating part of her remainder to another regrantor.
I just disagree with everyone here (Anon/Tyler/Linch/Rachel). $10k pays for like 1-2 months of salary post-tax, which is like… a single regrant. I’d claim “feedback loops from intense dogfooding is why the Manifold Markets user experience is notably better than similar EA efforts” coupled with “the user experience of EA grantmaking has been awful to date, and we think we can do better” (excepting the parts that involved Linch funding us, we love you Linch). Not just software UX but the end-to-end feeling of what being a grantee is like, speed of response, quantity of feedback, etc.
I’m also pretty inclined to dismiss “optics are bad” arguments. I again invite anyone to judge, on the object level, 1) how do Rachel’s grants look? 2) how does the Manifund site UX feel? 3) how does her code look?. And as always, if you think you can make better regrants than us, audition for the role!
I just disagree with everyone here (Anon/Tyler/Linch/Rachel). $10k pays for like 1-2 months of salary post-tax, which is like… a single regrant.
Fair. I don’t have a good sense of what grant size your applicants ask for, particularly on the lower end. In my own experience as a grantmaker, my own grants have had maybe 2.5 orders of magnitude of variation.
I’d claim “feedback loops from intense dogfooding is why the Manifold Markets user experience is notably better than similar EA efforts” coupled with “the user experience of EA grantmaking has been awful to date, and we think we can do better”
I definitely agree with the second part. I feel like many grantmakers in EA seem to treat grantmaking as roughly their third or fourth most important priority, which I think does not compromise judgement quality too much but does not bode well for other important desiderata like “are grantees happy with the process” and “are donors happy with the level of communication.”
Too soon to tell with the first part; I feel like there are many projects both in and out of EA that seemed to do really well in the initial rush of hype and manic energy, and then kind of splutter out afterwards. Hopefully you guys will improve upon future iterations however!
(excepting the parts that involved Linch funding us, we love you Linch)
It would seem almost if not equally effective to dogfood the UX as well with a $10K allotment, making each grant 20 percent of the amount one would have allocated at 50K. (Incidentally, I like this idea as a sort of work trial for candidate grantmakers more generally.)
If a 20⁄80 real vs play money split wouldn’t elicit realistic user behavior, what are the implications of that for your other project (Manifold)?
I don’t have an opinion on anyone’s suitability as a grantmaker; I’m just not convinced dogfooding is a rationale for handing out 50K (or that code/UX quality are relevant to assessing handing out that sum).
IMHO seems possible to be rigorous with imaginary money, as some are with prediction markets or fantasy football. Particularly so if the exercise feels critical to the success of the platform.
I think the site looks great btw, just pushing back on this :)
I agree in the context of what I call deciding between different “established charities with fairly smooth marginal utility curves,” which I think is more analogous to prediction markets or fantasy football or (for that matter) picking fake stocks.
But as someone who in the past has applied for funding for projects (though not on Manifund), if someone said, “hey we have 50k (or 500k) to allocate and we want to ask the following questions about your project,” I’d be pretty willing to either reply to their emails or go on a call.
If on the other hand they said “we have $50 (or $50k virtual dollars) to allocate between 5 projects and I want you to ask the following questions about your project as a way to test our product” maybe I’d still be willing to talk to them. However, in this scenario, a) it’s pretty unambiguous that I’m doing them a favor[1] and b) while I’ll try to keep my presentation the same, in practice this is likely to bias my decisions somewhat.[2]
Now I know some startup advisors recommend doing mockup testing without telling users that your product is incomplete, but a) I think this is kind of scummy in the context of applying for funding, and b) would-be EA grantmakers in the past have justifiably gotten flak for this exact behavior.
In some cases for the better! Eg one advantage I’ve found as a “researcher” role at Rethink Priorities is that people seem more likely to give me honest assessments and criticisms than when I put on my “funder” hat. But regardless of whether being a mock grantmaker is better epistemically than being a real grantmaker, you are still not going through a real use case if you’re planning to build out your product for real grantmakers.
FWIW: I want to offer a strong dissenting voice that I do not like how this has been handled in this comment section. Saying something isn’t intended to be harsh and mean doesn’t make it not harsh and mean. You can point out things that concern you without singling out individual people and I think the average person would have found this incredibly hurtful and off-putting.
Apologies, I usually try to respond to claims on the object level or occasionally try to enforce epistemic norms, and don’t usually bother enforcing politeness/niceness norms (in part because I think this is not my comparative advantage). I do frequently try to reach out privately if I notice people say hurtful things or people might be hurt due to the relevant situation. I agree that Anonymous EA Forum user’s comment may come across as unnecessarily aggressive to many readers[1] and perhaps it was wrong for me to reply without noting that. I thought Elizabeth’s comment was quite good in that context.
Oh uh I assume KMF intended to address Anonymous EA Forum user, but clicked “reply” in the wrong place; “harsh and mean” are quotes from Anon’s post. (I have a hard time seeing how her comment applies to anything you said).
Oh I don’t interpret her as saying that my comments are mean by themselves, but that maybe the whole discussion was mean or at least insensitive. Eg my comments helped “platform” AEAFu.
First want to say that I was also pretty uncomfortable about this, and initially told Austin I didn’t want to do it—you’re right that I am not qualified to be a grant maker, at least in the sense that I would not be hired as one in another context. I don’t deserve whatever status that role happens to bestow upon me, and I don’t particularly want the power.
That said, me being a regrantor has made the UX much better, since I’m basically the sole person pushing code and dogfooding is so powerful: it’s changed the prompting questions on write-ups, the way projects in need of more funding are displayed, the way funding targets are specified, and lots of other tiny things that were a bit uglier or higher friction or simply broken before. Less concretely, my model of what it feels like to write a publicly visible grant writeup, to search for giving opportunities, to select grant amounts, etc. has become more vivid, which I expect to be strategically useful going forward. And it’s only been a few weeks so far.
So, I agree it’s bad optically (I agree-voted your comment), but ultimately think this was a good call. Especially because the counterfactual of having not given me the $50k is not that it would be going to some better-evaluated grants than the ones I’ve made, but that it would be sitting in a bank account, and (obviously) I think the grants I’ve made are better than that.
I think this is an important point and it’s good you brought it up. But I think you were unnecessarily harsh, and you could have done the same good with less harshness.
A version I would have preferred:
How were grantors chosen, and in particular why was Rachel—included? She seems young, without relevant accomplishments, and has no experience grant making. I believe she’s dating the Manifold founder, which makes this a question of conflict of interest.
This leaves open the option you’re missing something, and that this could be remedied. You can always become harsh later if you’re not given a satisfactory answer (it looks like you feel you were).
FWIW I don’t feel fully satisfied by Austin’s answer but I also think the person with standing to object is the anonymous donor. One reason I’m excited about this infrastructure is that it allows people to accumulate track records and for funders to choose who to delegate to.
Thanks, Elizabeth, I appreciate the reworded message!
no experience grant making
In particular, one of the goals of our regranting program is to let people without grantmaking experience build that experience/track record in a small-stakes context. We don’t require that regrantors have experience, and may actually favor regrantors who do not already have significant grantmaking expertise (on the theory that senior grantmakers are likely to be able to locate money for those opportunities)
Depends who chose the regrantors? If the two humans most behind Manifund chose them, I agree it’s odd/bad that they chose themselves (independent of their relationship). If donors chose them that seems surprising but fine.
Edit: oh they say “We chose regrantors.” Hmm. I think choosing themselves is a mistake.
The $400k regrantors were nominated by our anonymous donor; the $50k ones were chosen by the Manifund team. We chose ourselves mainly to be able to dogfood the regranting process. (I would also note that the default at every EA grantmaking org is for the team themselves to make the grants)
Cool, thanks. It wasn’t obvious to me that you saw yourselves as grantmakers in addition to people who build infrastructure/tools for grantmakers. If your donors also saw you as grantmakers then there’s no issue I think; if they would be surprised that you chose yourselves that seems bad.
Tbh I see myself as a person who build infrastructure, but also as said in my other comment, being a regrantor helps me do that much better. And yes we told our primary donor we were doing this in advance.
It looks a little suspicious and I think the optics are bad that the girlfriend of Manifold’s founder is getting $50,000 to give away. It might just be a situation in which power grants special privilidge, and being close to power also grants some special privilidge. I wouldn’t object to this to much if she had an impressive track record or if she had some special merit that made me think she had earned the privilidge, but as far as I am aware she doesn’t have a history of being a well-calibrated or successful grant giver. In fact, she is young and inexperienced, hasn’t graduated from college, and as far as a few minutes of Google searches reveals, has never had a “real” job (although has had internships and has run a student organization at her college). In fact, her only qualification seems to be that she is dating Manifold’s founder. Are you just choosing regrantors from people you know and like? Giving sinecures and special privilidge to friends seems… kind of corrupt.
I think this comment might be interpreted as harsh and mean, and that isn’t my intention. I have actually met her in real life and she seems like a nice person. I’m really worried that posting this comment will make the founder and her upset, and I’m purposely excluding the names to make it ever-so-slightly less transparent, and ever-so-slightly harder for other people to Google around and figure out details. The main problem I perceive is simply that she is young and hasn’t had much experience yet; the ability and status she is given here seems out of proportion to her level of skill/experience. I don’t have any inside information to suspect that there is anything malicious going on here. It is also possible that she is a brilliant thinker with excellent judgement, and that I just haven’t seen any evidence of it. But the situation just seems… is “corrupt” too strong of a word?
Haha, thanks for bringing this up. One correction, Rachel and I are married (as of last month).
A quick background on this is that around February, Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten asked Manifold to set up an impact market to be able to run the ACX Forecasting Minigrants round (which is the site you see now at https://manifund.org). At the time, our existing team on Manifold were already occupied, and I had seen Rachel’s work on various programming projects such as openbook.fyi. After careful consideration, and checking in with both Scott and Manifold for Charity’s board of advisors, I decided to bring her on for a 6-week consulting engagement, which we’ve since renewed and turned into a fulltime offer.
Obviously, we recognize the potential conflicts of interest and didn’t make this decision lightly. My best judgement is that Rachel has done fantastically in this position so far, comparable to eg what I would expect a new grad at Google. (If you’re technical, I invite you to judge her commits on our open source repository).
The $50k regrantor budget that both her and I have are primarily to allow us to dogfood our own site. For the two of us to build a useful product for regrantors to use, it’s important that we have on-the-ground experience of making regrants ourselves. You’re also welcome to evaluate specifically the two grants she’s recommended so far (to Rachel Freedman and the Donations List Website)!
Congrats on your marriage!
Thanks for explaining this context. I still think it is a little weird, but considering the framing that you are dogfooding your system makes it a bit more palatable. I also appreciate that your board of advisors approved and it seems like you have generally been cognizant of the conflict of interest.
I don’t think someone being young should be weighted highly in the assessment of their capacity to give good grants. I also think it’s important to remember that the majority of philanthropists come to have the power to give out grants due to success in the for-profit world and/or through good fortune, neither of which are necessarily correlated with being well positioned to give good grants. As a result, I don’t think the bar that Rachel needs to meet is so high that we should think that it’s unlikely that her being chosen as a regranter is based on merit.
That being said, the optics aren’t great so I understand where the original commenter is coming from.
Could you not dogfood just as easily with $50 (or fake money in a dev account)?
People are not going to get the experience of making consequential decisions with $50, particularly if they’re funding individuals and small projects (as opposed to established charities with fairly smooth marginal utility curves like AMF).
That said, I’m sympathetic to the same argument for $5k or 10k.
Yeah, I think Rachel also herself feels a bit imposter-syndrome-y about her budget allocation and might end up delegating part of her remainder to another regrantor.
I just disagree with everyone here (Anon/Tyler/Linch/Rachel). $10k pays for like 1-2 months of salary post-tax, which is like… a single regrant. I’d claim “feedback loops from intense dogfooding is why the Manifold Markets user experience is notably better than similar EA efforts” coupled with “the user experience of EA grantmaking has been awful to date, and we think we can do better” (excepting the parts that involved Linch funding us, we love you Linch). Not just software UX but the end-to-end feeling of what being a grantee is like, speed of response, quantity of feedback, etc.
I’m also pretty inclined to dismiss “optics are bad” arguments. I again invite anyone to judge, on the object level, 1) how do Rachel’s grants look? 2) how does the Manifund site UX feel? 3) how does her code look?. And as always, if you think you can make better regrants than us, audition for the role!
Fair. I don’t have a good sense of what grant size your applicants ask for, particularly on the lower end. In my own experience as a grantmaker, my own grants have had maybe 2.5 orders of magnitude of variation.
I definitely agree with the second part. I feel like many grantmakers in EA seem to treat grantmaking as roughly their third or fourth most important priority, which I think does not compromise judgement quality too much but does not bode well for other important desiderata like “are grantees happy with the process” and “are donors happy with the level of communication.”
Too soon to tell with the first part; I feel like there are many projects both in and out of EA that seemed to do really well in the initial rush of hype and manic energy, and then kind of splutter out afterwards. Hopefully you guys will improve upon future iterations however!
Oh don’t worry, I suck too. :)
It would seem almost if not equally effective to dogfood the UX as well with a $10K allotment, making each grant 20 percent of the amount one would have allocated at 50K. (Incidentally, I like this idea as a sort of work trial for candidate grantmakers more generally.)
If a 20⁄80 real vs play money split wouldn’t elicit realistic user behavior, what are the implications of that for your other project (Manifold)?
I don’t have an opinion on anyone’s suitability as a grantmaker; I’m just not convinced dogfooding is a rationale for handing out 50K (or that code/UX quality are relevant to assessing handing out that sum).
IMHO seems possible to be rigorous with imaginary money, as some are with prediction markets or fantasy football. Particularly so if the exercise feels critical to the success of the platform.
I think the site looks great btw, just pushing back on this :)
I agree in the context of what I call deciding between different “established charities with fairly smooth marginal utility curves,” which I think is more analogous to prediction markets or fantasy football or (for that matter) picking fake stocks.
But as someone who in the past has applied for funding for projects (though not on Manifund), if someone said, “hey we have 50k (or 500k) to allocate and we want to ask the following questions about your project,” I’d be pretty willing to either reply to their emails or go on a call.
If on the other hand they said “we have $50 (or $50k virtual dollars) to allocate between 5 projects and I want you to ask the following questions about your project as a way to test our product” maybe I’d still be willing to talk to them. However, in this scenario, a) it’s pretty unambiguous that I’m doing them a favor[1] and b) while I’ll try to keep my presentation the same, in practice this is likely to bias my decisions somewhat.[2]
Now I know some startup advisors recommend doing mockup testing without telling users that your product is incomplete, but a) I think this is kind of scummy in the context of applying for funding, and b) would-be EA grantmakers in the past have justifiably gotten flak for this exact behavior.
Or eg, making a calculated impact-maximizing decision for the greater good, if consequentialist ethics are a better model than contractual ethics.
In some cases for the better! Eg one advantage I’ve found as a “researcher” role at Rethink Priorities is that people seem more likely to give me honest assessments and criticisms than when I put on my “funder” hat. But regardless of whether being a mock grantmaker is better epistemically than being a real grantmaker, you are still not going through a real use case if you’re planning to build out your product for real grantmakers.
FWIW: I want to offer a strong dissenting voice that I do not like how this has been handled in this comment section. Saying something isn’t intended to be harsh and mean doesn’t make it not harsh and mean. You can point out things that concern you without singling out individual people and I think the average person would have found this incredibly hurtful and off-putting.
Apologies, I usually try to respond to claims on the object level or occasionally try to enforce epistemic norms, and don’t usually bother enforcing politeness/niceness norms (in part because I think this is not my comparative advantage). I do frequently try to reach out privately if I notice people say hurtful things or people might be hurt due to the relevant situation. I agree that Anonymous EA Forum user’s comment may come across as unnecessarily aggressive to many readers[1] and perhaps it was wrong for me to reply without noting that. I thought Elizabeth’s comment was quite good in that context.
If I were in Rachel’s situation, these comments might easily have led me to be quite insecure.
Oh uh I assume KMF intended to address Anonymous EA Forum user, but clicked “reply” in the wrong place; “harsh and mean” are quotes from Anon’s post. (I have a hard time seeing how her comment applies to anything you said).
Oh I don’t interpret her as saying that my comments are mean by themselves, but that maybe the whole discussion was mean or at least insensitive. Eg my comments helped “platform” AEAFu.
Sorry, Linch- Austin is totally right. I am just useless at the Forum :)
First want to say that I was also pretty uncomfortable about this, and initially told Austin I didn’t want to do it—you’re right that I am not qualified to be a grant maker, at least in the sense that I would not be hired as one in another context. I don’t deserve whatever status that role happens to bestow upon me, and I don’t particularly want the power.
That said, me being a regrantor has made the UX much better, since I’m basically the sole person pushing code and dogfooding is so powerful: it’s changed the prompting questions on write-ups, the way projects in need of more funding are displayed, the way funding targets are specified, and lots of other tiny things that were a bit uglier or higher friction or simply broken before. Less concretely, my model of what it feels like to write a publicly visible grant writeup, to search for giving opportunities, to select grant amounts, etc. has become more vivid, which I expect to be strategically useful going forward. And it’s only been a few weeks so far.
So, I agree it’s bad optically (I agree-voted your comment), but ultimately think this was a good call. Especially because the counterfactual of having not given me the $50k is not that it would be going to some better-evaluated grants than the ones I’ve made, but that it would be sitting in a bank account, and (obviously) I think the grants I’ve made are better than that.
I think this is an important point and it’s good you brought it up. But I think you were unnecessarily harsh, and you could have done the same good with less harshness.
A version I would have preferred:
This leaves open the option you’re missing something, and that this could be remedied. You can always become harsh later if you’re not given a satisfactory answer (it looks like you feel you were).
FWIW I don’t feel fully satisfied by Austin’s answer but I also think the person with standing to object is the anonymous donor. One reason I’m excited about this infrastructure is that it allows people to accumulate track records and for funders to choose who to delegate to.
Thanks, Elizabeth, I appreciate the reworded message!
In particular, one of the goals of our regranting program is to let people without grantmaking experience build that experience/track record in a small-stakes context. We don’t require that regrantors have experience, and may actually favor regrantors who do not already have significant grantmaking expertise (on the theory that senior grantmakers are likely to be able to locate money for those opportunities)
Depends who chose the regrantors? If the two humans most behind Manifund chose them, I agree it’s odd/bad that they chose themselves (independent of their relationship). If donors chose them that seems surprising but fine.
Edit: oh they say “We chose regrantors.” Hmm. I think choosing themselves is a mistake.
The $400k regrantors were nominated by our anonymous donor; the $50k ones were chosen by the Manifund team. We chose ourselves mainly to be able to dogfood the regranting process. (I would also note that the default at every EA grantmaking org is for the team themselves to make the grants)
Cool, thanks. It wasn’t obvious to me that you saw yourselves as grantmakers in addition to people who build infrastructure/tools for grantmakers. If your donors also saw you as grantmakers then there’s no issue I think; if they would be surprised that you chose yourselves that seems bad.
Tbh I see myself as a person who build infrastructure, but also as said in my other comment, being a regrantor helps me do that much better. And yes we told our primary donor we were doing this in advance.