This is not surprising to me given the different historical funding situations in the relevant cause areas, the sense that animal-welfare and global-health are not talent-constrained as much as funding-constrained, and the clearer presence of strong orgs in those areas with funding gaps.
For instance:
there are 15 references to “upskill” (or variants) in the list of microgrants, and it’s often hard to justify an upskilling grant in animal welfare given the funding gaps in good, shovel-ready animal-welfare projects.
Likewise, 10 references to “study,” 12 to “development,′ 87 to “research” (although this can have many meanings), 17 for variants of “fellow,” etc.
There are 21 references to “part-time,” and relatively small, short blocks of time may align better with community building, small research projects than (e.g.) running a corporate campaign
Seems pretty unsurprising—the animal welfare fund is mostly giving to orgs, while the others give to small groups or individuals for upskilling/outreach frequently.
I think the differences between the LTFF and AWF are largely explained by differences in salary expectations/standards between the cause areas. There are small groups and individuals getting money from the AWF, and they tend to get much less for similar duration projects. Salaries in effective animal advocacy are pretty consistently substantially lower than in AI safety (and software/ML, which AI safety employers and grantmakers might try to compete with somewhat), with some exceptions. This is true even for work in high-income countries like the US and the UK. And, of course, salary expectations are even lower in low- and middle-income countries, which are an area of focus of the AWF (within neglected regions). Plus, many AI safety folks are in the Bay Area specifically, which is pretty expensive (although animal advocates in London also aren’t paid as much).
Yeah but my (implicit, should have made explicit lol) question is “why this is the case?”
Like at a high level it’s not obvious that animal welfare as a cause/field should make less use of smaller projects than the others. I can imagine structural explanations (eg older field → organizations are better developed) but they’d all be post hoc.
I think getting enough people interested in working on animal welfare has not usually been the bottleneck, relative to money to directly deploy on projects, which tend to be larger.
This doesn’t obviously point in the direction of relatively and absolutely fewer small grants, though. Like naively it would shrink and/or shift the distribution to the left—not reshape it.
I don’t understand why you think this is the case. If you think of the “distribution of grants given” as a sum of multiple different distributions (e.g. upskilling, events, and funding programmes) of significantly varying importance across cause areas, then more or less dropping the first two would give your overall distribution a very different shape.
Interesting that the Animal Welfare Fund gives out so few small grants relative to the Infrastructure and Long Term Future funds (Global Health and Development has only given out 20 grants, all very large, so seems to be a more fundamentally different type of thing(?)). Data here.
A few stats:
The 25th percentile AWF grant was $24,250, compared to $5,802 for Infrastructure and $7,700 for LTFF (and median looks basically the same).
AWF has only made just nine grants of less than $10k, compared to 163 (Infrastructure) and 132 (LTFF).
Proportions under $threshold
Grants under $threshold
Summary stats (rounded)
This is not surprising to me given the different historical funding situations in the relevant cause areas, the sense that animal-welfare and global-health are not talent-constrained as much as funding-constrained, and the clearer presence of strong orgs in those areas with funding gaps.
For instance:
there are 15 references to “upskill” (or variants) in the list of microgrants, and it’s often hard to justify an upskilling grant in animal welfare given the funding gaps in good, shovel-ready animal-welfare projects.
Likewise, 10 references to “study,” 12 to “development,′ 87 to “research” (although this can have many meanings), 17 for variants of “fellow,” etc.
There are 21 references to “part-time,” and relatively small, short blocks of time may align better with community building, small research projects than (e.g.) running a corporate campaign
Seems pretty unsurprising—the animal welfare fund is mostly giving to orgs, while the others give to small groups or individuals for upskilling/outreach frequently.
I think the differences between the LTFF and AWF are largely explained by differences in salary expectations/standards between the cause areas. There are small groups and individuals getting money from the AWF, and they tend to get much less for similar duration projects. Salaries in effective animal advocacy are pretty consistently substantially lower than in AI safety (and software/ML, which AI safety employers and grantmakers might try to compete with somewhat), with some exceptions. This is true even for work in high-income countries like the US and the UK. And, of course, salary expectations are even lower in low- and middle-income countries, which are an area of focus of the AWF (within neglected regions). Plus, many AI safety folks are in the Bay Area specifically, which is pretty expensive (although animal advocates in London also aren’t paid as much).
Yeah but my (implicit, should have made explicit lol) question is “why this is the case?”
Like at a high level it’s not obvious that animal welfare as a cause/field should make less use of smaller projects than the others. I can imagine structural explanations (eg older field → organizations are better developed) but they’d all be post hoc.
I think getting enough people interested in working on animal welfare has not usually been the bottleneck, relative to money to directly deploy on projects, which tend to be larger.
This doesn’t obviously point in the direction of relatively and absolutely fewer small grants, though. Like naively it would shrink and/or shift the distribution to the left—not reshape it.
I don’t understand why you think this is the case. If you think of the “distribution of grants given” as a sum of multiple different distributions (e.g. upskilling, events, and funding programmes) of significantly varying importance across cause areas, then more or less dropping the first two would give your overall distribution a very different shape.
Yeah you’re right, not sure what I missed on the first read
Very interesting, thanks for pulling this data!