How funding-constrained is your longtermist work, i.e., how much funding have you raised for your 2021 longtermist budget so far, and how much do you expect to be able to deploy usefully, and how much are you short?
Since we last posted our longtermism budget, we’ve raised ~$89,500 restricted to longtermism for 2021 (with the largest being the grant recommendation from the Survival and Flourishing Fund). This means we will enter 2021 with ~$121K restricted to longtermism not yet spent. Overall, we’d like to raise an additional $403K-$414K for longtermist work by early 2021.
For full transparency—note that, if necessary, we may also choose to use unrestricted funds on longtermism and that this is not factored into these numbers. We currently have ~$273K in unrestricted funds, though we will likely have non-longtermism things we will need to spend this money on.
Given that we are currently just raising money to cover the salaries of our existing longtermist staff (including operations support) as well as start an longtermism intern program, we expect we will be able to deploy longtermist money quickly. We also have a large talent pool of longtermist researchers we likely could hire this year if we ended up with even more longtermism money.
I did internal modeling/forecasting for our fundraising figures, and at least on the first pass it looked like our longtermist work was more likely to be funding constrained than our other priority cause areas, at least if “funding constrained” is narrowly defined as “what’s the probability that we do not raise all the money that we’d like for all planned operations to run smoothly.”
My main reasoning was somewhat outside-viewy and focused on general uncertainty: our longtermist team is new, and relative to other of Rethink’s cause areas, less well-established with less of a track record of either a) prior funding, b) public work other than Luisa’s nuclear risk work, or c) a well-vetted research plan. So I’m just generally unsure of these things.
Three major caveats:
1. I did those forecasts in late October and now I think my original figures were too pessimistic.
2. Another caveat is that my predictions were more a reflection of my own uncertainty than a lack of inside view confidence in the team. For context, my 5th-95th percentile credible interval spanned ~an order of magnitude across all cause areas.
3. When making the original numbers, I incorporated but plausibly substantially underrated the degree that the forecasts will change and not just reflect reality. For example, Peter and Marcus may have prioritized different decisions accordingly due to my numbers, or this comment may affect other people’s decisions.
How funding-constrained is your longtermist work, i.e., how much funding have you raised for your 2021 longtermist budget so far, and how much do you expect to be able to deploy usefully, and how much are you short?
Hi Jonas,
Since we last posted our longtermism budget, we’ve raised ~$89,500 restricted to longtermism for 2021 (with the largest being the grant recommendation from the Survival and Flourishing Fund). This means we will enter 2021 with ~$121K restricted to longtermism not yet spent. Overall, we’d like to raise an additional $403K-$414K for longtermist work by early 2021.
For full transparency—note that, if necessary, we may also choose to use unrestricted funds on longtermism and that this is not factored into these numbers. We currently have ~$273K in unrestricted funds, though we will likely have non-longtermism things we will need to spend this money on.
Given that we are currently just raising money to cover the salaries of our existing longtermist staff (including operations support) as well as start an longtermism intern program, we expect we will be able to deploy longtermist money quickly. We also have a large talent pool of longtermist researchers we likely could hire this year if we ended up with even more longtermism money.
I did internal modeling/forecasting for our fundraising figures, and at least on the first pass it looked like our longtermist work was more likely to be funding constrained than our other priority cause areas, at least if “funding constrained” is narrowly defined as “what’s the probability that we do not raise all the money that we’d like for all planned operations to run smoothly.”
My main reasoning was somewhat outside-viewy and focused on general uncertainty: our longtermist team is new, and relative to other of Rethink’s cause areas, less well-established with less of a track record of either a) prior funding, b) public work other than Luisa’s nuclear risk work, or c) a well-vetted research plan. So I’m just generally unsure of these things.
Three major caveats:
1. I did those forecasts in late October and now I think my original figures were too pessimistic.
2. Another caveat is that my predictions were more a reflection of my own uncertainty than a lack of inside view confidence in the team. For context, my 5th-95th percentile credible interval spanned ~an order of magnitude across all cause areas.
3. When making the original numbers, I incorporated but plausibly substantially underrated the degree that the forecasts will change and not just reflect reality. For example, Peter and Marcus may have prioritized different decisions accordingly due to my numbers, or this comment may affect other people’s decisions.