Thank you for an interesting and useful post, the style of narration made it an enjoyable read.
I wanted to briefly address the below statement:
Rethink’s requesting funding for specific projects says to me ’we basically think these are the least important things we’d spend money on, otherwise we’d spend it on them out of our primary budget
As I was part of the group at Rethink Priorities that chose what project to front on Manifund, I can honestly share that this is not how our thought process went. Rather, we focused mostly on … I) relatively small asks, that would be a better fit for the crowdfunding format of people giving hundreds of dollars II) projects we thought were best suited for the “EA Community” framing of the funding round, i.e. meta efforts rather than broader .
Relative to our scale, we also don’t have a large “primary budget” that we can use to fund projects we think are impactful. Some of our departments do not have grants for general team work, and have to fundraise for any specific next research project. Even the ones that do have department-level earmarking, are often somewhat restricted by funder(s) in what types of projects they can choose to work on by default. My experience is that it’s more likely that a particular project that doesn’t get funded gets put on hold in hope of another funder, than that we’re able to use general unrestricted funds for it.
With more unrestricted funds available to RP, I think our reality would look at least a bit more like what you described in your comment. I think we have some very astute thinkers internally when it comes to cause prio, so I think that would be a good thing.
Thanks Henri, that’s useful context. Obviously we had to make pretty quick decisions on low info, and I guess the same was true for many other participants. If anything like this happens in future it might be worth including something like this about the broad counterfactuality of the decision in (or at least linked from) the proposal.
That makes sense, and thank you for the suggestion :)
For what it’s worth, I was also on a personal level quite excited about the smaller type of projects that could get funding through something like this and otherwise might not make the effort of going through a long application process.
Thank you for an interesting and useful post, the style of narration made it an enjoyable read.
I wanted to briefly address the below statement:
As I was part of the group at Rethink Priorities that chose what project to front on Manifund, I can honestly share that this is not how our thought process went. Rather, we focused mostly on …
I) relatively small asks, that would be a better fit for the crowdfunding format of people giving hundreds of dollars
II) projects we thought were best suited for the “EA Community” framing of the funding round, i.e. meta efforts rather than broader .
Relative to our scale, we also don’t have a large “primary budget” that we can use to fund projects we think are impactful. Some of our departments do not have grants for general team work, and have to fundraise for any specific next research project. Even the ones that do have department-level earmarking, are often somewhat restricted by funder(s) in what types of projects they can choose to work on by default. My experience is that it’s more likely that a particular project that doesn’t get funded gets put on hold in hope of another funder, than that we’re able to use general unrestricted funds for it.
With more unrestricted funds available to RP, I think our reality would look at least a bit more like what you described in your comment. I think we have some very astute thinkers internally when it comes to cause prio, so I think that would be a good thing.
Thanks Henri, that’s useful context. Obviously we had to make pretty quick decisions on low info, and I guess the same was true for many other participants. If anything like this happens in future it might be worth including something like this about the broad counterfactuality of the decision in (or at least linked from) the proposal.
That makes sense, and thank you for the suggestion :)
For what it’s worth, I was also on a personal level quite excited about the smaller type of projects that could get funding through something like this and otherwise might not make the effort of going through a long application process.