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.
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