1a. Our goals for 2018 are laid out in the post you linked to.
1b. The expectation is based mostly on the fact that we gave well over $100 million last year, and we’re devoting similar time and effort to grantmaking in 2018.
2a. Open Phil is still a fairly new organization, and I don’t think many know much about us yet. Probably we are best known in the effective altruism community, where we seem to have a strong reputation.
2b. Does it matter for our reputation, do you mean? I’m not sure. I’m not aware of us having received critiques about that.
The purpose of these questions was to better estimate if an RAs impact can be expected to increase, decrease, or remain the same in the coming years.
An aggressive measurable goal (ie. increase estimated QALYs gained by a factor of x) would indicate to me that an RAs expected impact would increase. (It’s possible that a measurable goal might be trivial to set because the error bars might be too large. I don’t know enough to know.)
If other funders (esp. big funders such as government) considered Open Phil research credible enough to base their decisions on, that would also indicate more expected impact. ie. already published research would be reused in the future by other large donors to effectively allocate more funds.
Either way, it seems that an RAs expected impact is higher than many other career alternatives, even if it decreases a bit in the next few years.
Quick replies to each:
1a. Our goals for 2018 are laid out in the post you linked to.
1b. The expectation is based mostly on the fact that we gave well over $100 million last year, and we’re devoting similar time and effort to grantmaking in 2018.
2a. Open Phil is still a fairly new organization, and I don’t think many know much about us yet. Probably we are best known in the effective altruism community, where we seem to have a strong reputation.
2b. Does it matter for our reputation, do you mean? I’m not sure. I’m not aware of us having received critiques about that.
The purpose of these questions was to better estimate if an RAs impact can be expected to increase, decrease, or remain the same in the coming years.
An aggressive measurable goal (ie. increase estimated QALYs gained by a factor of x) would indicate to me that an RAs expected impact would increase. (It’s possible that a measurable goal might be trivial to set because the error bars might be too large. I don’t know enough to know.)
If other funders (esp. big funders such as government) considered Open Phil research credible enough to base their decisions on, that would also indicate more expected impact. ie. already published research would be reused in the future by other large donors to effectively allocate more funds.
Either way, it seems that an RAs expected impact is higher than many other career alternatives, even if it decreases a bit in the next few years.