Should we fund people for more years at a time? I’ve heard that various EA organisations and individuals with substantial track records still need to apply for funding one year at a time, because they either are refused longer-term funding, or they perceive they will be.
For example, the LTFF page asks for applications to be “as few as possible”, but clarifies that this means “established organizations once a year unless there is a significant reason for submitting multiple applications”. Even the largest organisations seem to only receive OpenPhil funding every 2-4 years. For individuals, even if they are highly capable, ~12 months seems to be the norm.
Offering longer (2-5 year) grants would have some obvious benefits:
Grantees spend less time writing grant applications
Evaluators spend less time reviewing grant applications
Grantees plan their activities longer-term
The biggest benefit, though, I think, is that:
Grantees would have greater career security.
Job security is something people value immensely. This is especially true as you get older (something I’ve noticed tbh), and would be even moreso for someone trying to raise kids. In the EA economy, many people get by on short-term grants and contracts, and even if they are employed, their organisation might itself not have a very steady stream of income. Overall, I would say that although EA has made significant progress in offering good salaries and great offices, the job stability is still not great. Moreover, career security is a potential blind spot for grantmakers, who generally do have ~permanent employment from a stable employer.
What’s more, I think that offering stable income may in many cases be cheaper than improving one’s salary and office. Because some people have, for years, never been refused a grant, and would likely return any funds that turn out not to be needed. And despite the low chance of funding being “wasted”, they still have to apply annually. In such cases, it seems especially clear that the time savings and talent retention benefits would outweigh any small losses.
Lots of my favorite EA people seem to think this is a good idea, so I’ll provide a dissenting view: job security can be costly in hard-to-spot ways.
I notice that the places that provide the most job security are also the least productive per-person (think govt jobs, tenured professors, big tech companies). The typical explanation goes like “a competitive ecosystem, including the ability for upstarts to come in and senior folks to get fired, leads to better services provided by the competitors”
I think respondents on the EA Forum may think “oh of course I’d love to get money for 3 years instead of 1”. But y’all are pretty skewed in terms of response bias—if a funder has $300k and give that all to the senior EA person for 3 years, they are passing up on the chance to fund other potentially better upstarts for years 2 & 3.
Depending on which specific funder you’re talking about, they don’t actually have years of funding in the bank! Afaict, most funders (such as the LTFF and Manifund) get funds to disburse over the next year, and in fact get chastised by their donors if they seem to be holding on to funds for longer than that. Donors themselves don’t have years of foresight into how they would like to be spending their money (eg I’ve personally shifted my allocation from GHD to longtermist in-network opportunities)
One idea I’ve been toying with instead is the concept of default-recurring month-to-month grants, where a funder and grantee roughly outline what deliverables might look like, and then the grantee provides updates on what they’ve been up to. I generally like the concept of more feedback mechanisms/lower-stress touchpoints between funders and grantees than a full “grant application round”. To borrow a saying from agile software development: “if it hurts, do it more often”.
I would be surprised if people on freelancer marketplaces are exceptionally productive—I would guess they end up spending a lot more of their time trying to get jobs than actually doing the jobs.
I do think freelancers spend significant amounts of time on job searching, but I’m not sure that’s evidence for “low productivity”. Productivity isn’t a function of total hours worked but rather of output delivered. The one time I engaged a designer on a freelancer marketplace, I got decent results exceptionally quickly. Another “freelancer marketplace” I make heavy use of is uber, which provides good customer experiences.
Of course, there’s a question of whether such marketplaces are good for the freelancers themselves—I tend to think so (eg that the existence of uber is better for drivers than the previous taxi medallion system) but freelancing is not a good fit for many folks.
I notice that the places that provide the most job security are also the least productive per-person (think govt jobs, tenured professors, big tech companies). The typical explanation goes like “a competitive ecosystem, including the ability for upstarts to come in and senior folks to get fired, leads to better services provided by the competitors
Do you have evidence for this? Because there is lots of evidence to the contrary—suggesting that job insecurity negatively impacts people’s productivity as well as their physical, and mental health.[1][2][3].
I think respondents on the EA Forum may think “oh of course I’d love to get money for 3 years instead of 1”. But y’all are pretty skewed in terms of response bias—if a funder has $300k and give that all to the senior EA person for 3 years, they are passing up on the chance to fund other potentially better upstarts for years 2 & 3.
This goes both ways—yes, there is a chance to fund other potential better upstarts, but by only offering short-term grants, funders also miss out on applicants who want/need more security (eg. competitive candidates who prefer more secure options, parents, people supporting family members, people with big mortgages, etc).
Depending on which specific funder you’re talking about, they don’t actually have years of funding in the bank! Afaict, most funders (such as the LTFF and Manifund) get funds to disburse over the next year, and in fact get chastised by their donors if they seem to be holding on to funds for longer than that. Donors themselves don’t have years of foresight into how they would like to be spending their money (eg I’ve personally shifted my allocation from GHD to long-termist in-network opportunities)
I think there are options here that would help both funders and individuals. For example, longer grants could be given with a condition that either party can give a certain amount of notice to end the agreement (typical in many US jobs), and many funders could re-structure to allow for longer grants/a different structure for grants if they wanted to. As long as these changes were well-communicated with donors, I don’t see why we would be stuck to a 1-year cycle.
My experience: As someone who has been funded by grants in the past, job security was a huge reason for me transitioning away from this. It’s also a complaint I’ve heard frequently from other grantees, and something that not everyone can even afford to do in the first place. I’m not implying that donors need to hire people or keep them on indefinitely, but even providing grants for 2 or more years at a time would be a huge improvement to the 1-year status quo.
FWIW I can imagine being really happy under this system. Contingent on grantmaker/supervisor quality of course, and since those already seem to be seriously bottlenecked this doesn’t feel like an easy solution to me. But I’d love to see it work out.
I’m focused on how the best altruistic workers should be treated, and if you think that giving them job insecurity would create good incentives, I don’t agree. We need the best altruistic workers to be rewarded not just better than the less productive altruists, but also better than those pursuing non-altruistic endeavours. It would be hard to achieve this if they do not have job security.
I’m sympathetic to treating good altruistic workers well; I generally advocate for a norm of much higher salaries than is typically provided. I don’t think job insecurity per se is what I’m after per se, but rather allowing funders to fund the best altruistic workers next year, rather than being locked into their current allocations for 3 years.
The default in the for profit sector in the US is not multi-year guaranteed contracts but rather at will employment, where workers may leave a job or be fired for basically any reason. It may seem harsh in comparison to norms in other countries (eg the EU or Japan) but I also believe it leads to more productive allocation of workers to jobs.
Remember that effective altruism exists not to serve its workers, but rather to effectively help those in need (people in developing countries, suffering animals, people in the future!) There’s instrumental benefits in treating EA workers well in terms of morale, fairness, and ability to recruit, but keep in mind the tradeoffs of less effective allocation schemes.
I think there’s a big difference between “you are an at will employee, and we can fire you on two weeks notice, but the default is you will stay with us indefinitely” and “you have a one year contract and can re-apply at the end”. Legally the latter gives the worker 50 extra weeks of security, but in practice the former seems to be preferable to many people.
I agree that default employment seems preferred by most fulltime workers, and that’s why I’m interested in the concept of “default-recurring monthly grants”.
I will note that this employment structure is not the typical arrangement among founders trying to launch a startup, though. A broad class of grants in EA are “work on this thing and maybe turn it into a new research org”, and the equivalent funding norms in the tech sector at least are not “employment” but “apply for incubators, try to raise funding”.
For EAs trying to do research… academia is the typical model for research but I also think academia is extremely inefficient, so copying the payment model doesn’t seem like a recipe for success. FROs are maybe the closest thing I can think of to “multi-year stable grants”—but there’s only like 3 of those in existence and it’s very early to say if they produce good outcomes.
Yes, because when you are at at will employee, the chance that you will still have income in n years tends to be higher than if you had to apply to renew a contract, and you don’t need to think about that application. People are typically angry if asked to reapply for their own job, because it implies that their employer might want to terminate them.
Another consideration is turn around time. Grant decisions are slow, deadlines are, imperfectly timed, distribution can be slow. So you need to apply many months before you need the money, which means well before you’ve used up your current grant, which means planning your work to have something to show ~6 months into a one year grant. Which is just pretty slow.
I don’t know what the right duration is, but the process needs to be built so that continuous funding for good work is a possibility, and possible to plan around.
My hope for addressing that problem is for grantmakers (including us) to suck less in the future and have speedier turnaround times, especially reducing the long tail of very slow responses.
How feasible do you think this is? From my outsider perspective, I see grantmakers and other types of application-reviewers taking 3-6 months across the board and it’s pretty rare to see them be faster than that, which suggests it might not be realistic to consistently review grants in <3 months.
eg the only job application process I’ve ever done that took <3 months was an application to a two-person startup.
It’s a good question. I think several grantmaking groups local to us (Lightspeed grants, Manifund, the ill-fated FF regranting program) have promised and afaict delivered on a fairly fast timeline. Though all of them are/were young and I don’t have a sense of whether they can reliably be quick after being around for longer than say 6 months.
LTFF itself has a median response time of about 4 weeks or so iirc. There might be some essential difficulties with significantly speeding up (say) the 99th percentile (eg needing stakeholder buy-in, complicated legal situations, trying to pitch a new donor for a specific project, trying to screen for infohazard concerns when none of the team are equipped to do so), but if we are able to get more capacity, I’d like us to at least get (say) the 85th or 95th tail down a lot lower.
I feel like reliability is more important than speed here, and it’s ~impossible to get this level of reliability from orgs run by unpaid volunteers with day jobs. Especially when volunteer hours aren’t fungible and the day jobs are demanding.
I think Lightspeed set a fairly ambitious goal it has struggled to meet. I applied for a fast turn around and got a response within a week, but two months later I haven’t received the check. The main grants were supposed to be announced on 8⁄6 and AFAIK still haven’t been. This is fine for me, but if people didn’t have to plan around it or risk being screwed I think it would be better.
Based on some of Ozzie’s comments here, I suspect that that using a grant process made for organizations to fund individuals is kind of doomed, and you either want to fund specific projects without the expectation it’s someone’s whole income (which is what I do), or do something more employer like with regular feedback cycles and rolling payments. And if you do the former, it needs to be enough money to compensate for the risk and inconvenience of freelancing.
I kind of get the arguments against paying grantmakers, but from my perspective I’d love to see you paid more with a higher reliability level.
I think Lightspeed set a fairly ambitious goal it has struggled to meet. I applied for a fast turn around and got a response within a week, but two months later I haven’t received the check. The main grants were supposed to be announced on 8⁄6 and AFAIK still haven’t been. This is fine for me, but if people didn’t have to plan around it or risk being screwed I think it would be better.
Yeah, this is a bit sad. I am happy to offer anyone who received a venture grant to have some money advanced if they need it, and tried to offer this to people where I had a sense it might help.
I am sad that we can’t get out final grant confirmations in time, though we did get back to the vast majority of applicants with a negative response on-time. I am also personally happy to give people probability estimates of whether they will get funding, which for some applicants is very high (95%+), which hopefully helps a bit. I also expect us to hit deadlines more exactly in future rounds.
What would have had to change to make the date? My impression was the problem was sheer volume, which sounds really hard and maybe understandable to prep for. You can put a hard cap, but that loses potentially good applications. You could spend less time per application, but that biases towards legibility and familiarity. You could hire more evaluators, but my sense is good ones are hard to find and have costly counterfactuals.
The one thing I see is “don’t use a procedure that requires evaluating everyone before giving anyone an answer” (which I think you are doing?), but I assume there are reasons for that.
The central bottleneck right now is getting funders to decide how much money to distribute, and through which evaluators to distribute the funds through.
I budgeted around a week for that, but I think realistically it will take more like 3. This part was hard to forecast because I don’t have a super high-bandwidth channel to Jaan, his time is very valuable, and I think he was hit with a bunch of last-minute opportunities that made him busy in the relevant time period.
I also think even if that had happened on my original 7 day timeline, we still would have been delayed by 4 days or so, since the volume caused me to make some mistakes in the administration which then required the evaluators going back and redoing some of their numbers and doing a few more evaluations.
I wonder if some more formalized system for advances would be worth it? I think this kind of chaos is one of the biggest consequences of delays for payments, and a low-friction way to get bridge loans would remove a lot of the costs.
You could run it as pure charity or charge reasonable fees to grantmakers for the service.
Yeah, I would quite like that. In some sense the venture granting system we have is trying to be exactly that, but that itself is currently delayed on getting fully set up legally and financially. But my current model is that as soon as its properly set up, we can just send out money on like a 1-2 day turnaround time, reliably.
EA Funds offers pay to grantmakers (~$60/h which I think should be fairly competitive with people’s nonprofit counterfactuals); most people have other day jobs however.
I don’t think pay is the limiting factor for people, who usually have day jobs and also try to do what they consider to be the highest impact (plus other personal factors).
Though I can imagine there might be some sufficiently high numbers to cause part-time grantmakers to prioritize grantmaking highly, but a) this might result in a misallocation of resources, b) isn’t necessarily sustainable, and c) might have pretty bad incentives.
Great point about the reliability overall though. I do think it’d be hard to make real promises of the form “we’ll definitely get back to you by X date” for various factors, including practical/structural ones.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there was no good way to speed up grantmaking, given the existing constraints. If that’s true, I’d love to shift the system to something that recognizes that and plans around it (through bridge loans, or big enough grants that people can plan around delays, or something that looks more like employment), rather than hope that next year is the year that will be different for unspecified reasons.
I agree—I think the financial uncertainty created by having to renew funding each year is very significantly costly and stressful and makes it hard to commit to longer-term plans.
I think that the OpenPhil situation can be decent. If you have a good manager/grantmaker that you have a good relationship and a lot of trust in, then I think this could provide a lot of the benefit. You don’t have assurance, but you should have a solid understanding of what you need to accomplish in order to get funding or not—and thus, this would give you a good idea of your chances.
I think that the non-OP funders are pretty amateurish here and could improve a lot.
I think the situation now is pretty lacking. However, the most obvious/suggested fix is more like “better management and ongoing relationships”, rather than 3+ year grants. The former could basically be the latter, if desired (once you start getting funding, it’s understood to be very likely to continue, absent huge mess-ups).
Just for the record, I don’t think OP has been doing well in this respect since the collapse of FTX. My sense is few Open Phil grantees know the conditions under which they would get more funding, or when they might receive an answer. At least I don’t, and none of the Open Phil grantees I’ve talked to in the past few months about this felt like this was handled well either.
No idea if it would be better to pay in lump sums or tranches.
You could also pay in a tailing off fashion, where if you fund for $1mn next year you automatically fund for 200k the year after. That way orgs would always have money for a slow down in funding.
Paying people for what they do works great if most of their potential impact comes from activities you can verify. But if their most effective activities are things they have a hard time explaining to others (yet have intrinsic motivation to do), you could miss out on a lot of impact by requiring them instead to work on what’s verifiable.
Perhaps funders should consider granting motivated altruists multi-year basic income. Now they don’t have to compromise[1] between what’s explainable/verifiable vs what they think is most effective—they now have independence to purely pursue the latter.
Bonus point: People who are much more competent than you at X[2] will probably behave in ways you don’t recognise as more competent. If you could, they wouldn’t be much more competent. Your “deference limit” is the level of competence above which you stop being able to reliable judge the difference between experts.
If good research is heavy-tailed & in a positive selection-regime, then cautiousness actively selects against features with the highest expected value.
Consider how the cost of compromising between optimisation criteria interacts with what part of the impact distribution you’re aiming for. If you’re searching for a project with top p% impact and top p% explainability-to-funders, you can expect only p^2 of projects to fit both criteria—assuming independence.
But I think it’s an open question how & when the distributions correlate. One reason to think they could sometimes be anticorrelated is that the projects with the highest explainability-to-funders are also more likely to receive adequate attention from profit-incentives alone.
If you’re doing conjunctive search over projects/ideas for ones that score above a threshold for multiple criteria, it matters a lot which criteria you prioritise most of your parallel attention on to identify candidates for further serial examination. Try out various examples here & here.
At least for hard-to-measure activities where most of the competence derives from knowing what to do in the first place. I reckon this includes most fields of altruistic work.
In the absence of longer-term security, it would be nice to have more foresight about income.
I can tolerate quite a lot of variance on the 6+ month timescale if I know it’s coming. If I know I’m not going to get another grant in 6 months, there are things I can do to compensate.
A mistake I made recently is applying relatively late due to an incorrect understanding of the funding situation, getting rejected, and now I’m temporarily unable to continue safety research. (Don’t worry, I’m no danger of going homeless or starving, just lowered productivity.)
Applying for grants sooner would help mitigate this, but there are presumably limits. I would guess that grantmaking organizations would rather not commit funds to a project that won’t start for another 2 years, for example.
If there was a magic way to get an informed probability on future grant funding, that would help a lot. I’m not sure how realistic this is; a lot of options seem pretty high overhead for grantmakers and/or involve some sort of fancy prediction markets with tons of transparency and market subsidies. Having continuous updates about some smaller pieces of the puzzle could help.
Yeah, this would be nice to have. CEA’s Community Building Grants (CBG) programme had the possibility for 2-year renewals for a brief period, but this policy was recently scrapped due to funding uncertainty. Shardul from EA India shared with me his experience as the second hire at GFI India. If I recall correctly, they were given funding for something like 5 years to get going, and he said this transformed their ability to build and execute a vision. The value of this stability was brought into relief when he joined the CBG programme, which has similar aims but nowhere near the stability.
From a productivity point of view, I guess what we ought to aim for is flexicurity, as typified by Denmark. For those fortunate enough to live in parts of Northwestern Europe this is already the case thanks to strong social security, but I struggle to see how a movement can provide it elsewhere. Perhaps a Basefund but for employment?
I think Ryan is probably overall right that it would be better to fund people for longer at a time. One counter-consideration that hasn’t been mentioned yet: longer contracts implicitly and explicitly push people to keep doing something — that may be sub-optimal — because they drive up switching costs.
If you have to apply for funding once a year no matter what you’re working on, the “switching costs” of doing the same thing you’ve been doing are similar to the cost of switching (of course they aren’t in general, but with regard to funding they might be). I think it’s unlikely but not crazy that the effects of status quo bias might be severe enough that funders artificially imposing switching costs on “continuing/non-switching” results in net better results. I expect that in the world where grants usually last 1 year, people switch what they’re doing more than the world where grants are 3 years, and it’s plausible these changes are good for impact.
Some factors that seem cruxy here:
how much can be gained through realistic switching (how bad is current allocation of people, how much better are the things people would do if switching costs were relatively zero as they sorta are, how much worse of things would people be doing if continuing-costs were low).
it seems very likely that this consideration should affect grants to junior and early-career people that are bouncing around more but it probably doesn’t apply much to more senior folks who have been working on a project for awhile (on the other hand, maybe you want the junior people investing more in long term career plans, thus switching less, it depends on the person).
Could relatively-zero switching costs actually hurt things because people switch too much due to over-correcting (e.g., holden karnofsky gets excited about AI evaluations so a bunch of people work on it and then governance gets big so people switch to that, and then etc.)
How much does it help to have people with a lot of experience on particular things (narrow experts vs. generalists)
If grants were more flexible (or grant-makers communicated better and the social norms were clearer; in fact people sometimes do return grants or change what they’re working on mid-grant) maybe you could fund people for 3 years while giving them affordance to switch so you still capture the value from people switching to more impactful things.
Personally, I’ve found that being funded by a grant at all makes me less likely to switch what I’m doing. I expect the amount I “want” (not upon reflection/hindsight) to switch what I’m doing is too much, so for me this effect might be net positive, but there are probably also some times where this gets in the way of me making impactful switches. If grant-makers were more accessible to talk about this, i.e., not significantly time constrained, they could probably cause a better allocation of resources. Overall, I’m not sure how compelling this counter-consideration is, but it seems worth mulling over.
I agree. Early-career EAs are more likely to need to switch projects, less likely to merit multi-year funding, and have—on average—less need for job-security. Single-year funding seems OK for those cases.
For people and orgs with significant track records, however, it seems hard to justify.
Should we fund people for more years at a time? I’ve heard that various EA organisations and individuals with substantial track records still need to apply for funding one year at a time, because they either are refused longer-term funding, or they perceive they will be.
For example, the LTFF page asks for applications to be “as few as possible”, but clarifies that this means “established organizations once a year unless there is a significant reason for submitting multiple applications”. Even the largest organisations seem to only receive OpenPhil funding every 2-4 years. For individuals, even if they are highly capable, ~12 months seems to be the norm.
Offering longer (2-5 year) grants would have some obvious benefits:
Grantees spend less time writing grant applications
Evaluators spend less time reviewing grant applications
Grantees plan their activities longer-term
The biggest benefit, though, I think, is that:
Grantees would have greater career security.
Job security is something people value immensely. This is especially true as you get older (something I’ve noticed tbh), and would be even moreso for someone trying to raise kids. In the EA economy, many people get by on short-term grants and contracts, and even if they are employed, their organisation might itself not have a very steady stream of income. Overall, I would say that although EA has made significant progress in offering good salaries and great offices, the job stability is still not great. Moreover, career security is a potential blind spot for grantmakers, who generally do have ~permanent employment from a stable employer.
What’s more, I think that offering stable income may in many cases be cheaper than improving one’s salary and office. Because some people have, for years, never been refused a grant, and would likely return any funds that turn out not to be needed. And despite the low chance of funding being “wasted”, they still have to apply annually. In such cases, it seems especially clear that the time savings and talent retention benefits would outweigh any small losses.
Lots of my favorite EA people seem to think this is a good idea, so I’ll provide a dissenting view: job security can be costly in hard-to-spot ways.
I notice that the places that provide the most job security are also the least productive per-person (think govt jobs, tenured professors, big tech companies). The typical explanation goes like “a competitive ecosystem, including the ability for upstarts to come in and senior folks to get fired, leads to better services provided by the competitors”
I think respondents on the EA Forum may think “oh of course I’d love to get money for 3 years instead of 1”. But y’all are pretty skewed in terms of response bias—if a funder has $300k and give that all to the senior EA person for 3 years, they are passing up on the chance to fund other potentially better upstarts for years 2 & 3.
Depending on which specific funder you’re talking about, they don’t actually have years of funding in the bank! Afaict, most funders (such as the LTFF and Manifund) get funds to disburse over the next year, and in fact get chastised by their donors if they seem to be holding on to funds for longer than that. Donors themselves don’t have years of foresight into how they would like to be spending their money (eg I’ve personally shifted my allocation from GHD to longtermist in-network opportunities)
OpenPhil may be the exception here, but it’s also unclear to me if the commitment to stay in an area for multiple years is good—cf Nuno’s critique of OpenPhils’s criminal justice reform
One idea I’ve been toying with instead is the concept of default-recurring month-to-month grants, where a funder and grantee roughly outline what deliverables might look like, and then the grantee provides updates on what they’ve been up to. I generally like the concept of more feedback mechanisms/lower-stress touchpoints between funders and grantees than a full “grant application round”. To borrow a saying from agile software development: “if it hurts, do it more often”.
I would be surprised if people on freelancer marketplaces are exceptionally productive—I would guess they end up spending a lot more of their time trying to get jobs than actually doing the jobs.
I do think freelancers spend significant amounts of time on job searching, but I’m not sure that’s evidence for “low productivity”. Productivity isn’t a function of total hours worked but rather of output delivered. The one time I engaged a designer on a freelancer marketplace, I got decent results exceptionally quickly. Another “freelancer marketplace” I make heavy use of is uber, which provides good customer experiences.
Of course, there’s a question of whether such marketplaces are good for the freelancers themselves—I tend to think so (eg that the existence of uber is better for drivers than the previous taxi medallion system) but freelancing is not a good fit for many folks.
Do you have evidence for this? Because there is lots of evidence to the contrary—suggesting that job insecurity negatively impacts people’s productivity as well as their physical, and mental health.[1][2][3].
This goes both ways—yes, there is a chance to fund other potential better upstarts, but by only offering short-term grants, funders also miss out on applicants who want/need more security (eg. competitive candidates who prefer more secure options, parents, people supporting family members, people with big mortgages, etc).
I think there are options here that would help both funders and individuals. For example, longer grants could be given with a condition that either party can give a certain amount of notice to end the agreement (typical in many US jobs), and many funders could re-structure to allow for longer grants/a different structure for grants if they wanted to. As long as these changes were well-communicated with donors, I don’t see why we would be stuck to a 1-year cycle.
My experience: As someone who has been funded by grants in the past, job security was a huge reason for me transitioning away from this. It’s also a complaint I’ve heard frequently from other grantees, and something that not everyone can even afford to do in the first place. I’m not implying that donors need to hire people or keep them on indefinitely, but even providing grants for 2 or more years at a time would be a huge improvement to the 1-year status quo.
FWIW I can imagine being really happy under this system. Contingent on grantmaker/supervisor quality of course, and since those already seem to be seriously bottlenecked this doesn’t feel like an easy solution to me. But I’d love to see it work out.
I’m focused on how the best altruistic workers should be treated, and if you think that giving them job insecurity would create good incentives, I don’t agree. We need the best altruistic workers to be rewarded not just better than the less productive altruists, but also better than those pursuing non-altruistic endeavours. It would be hard to achieve this if they do not have job security.
I’m sympathetic to treating good altruistic workers well; I generally advocate for a norm of much higher salaries than is typically provided. I don’t think job insecurity per se is what I’m after per se, but rather allowing funders to fund the best altruistic workers next year, rather than being locked into their current allocations for 3 years.
The default in the for profit sector in the US is not multi-year guaranteed contracts but rather at will employment, where workers may leave a job or be fired for basically any reason. It may seem harsh in comparison to norms in other countries (eg the EU or Japan) but I also believe it leads to more productive allocation of workers to jobs.
Remember that effective altruism exists not to serve its workers, but rather to effectively help those in need (people in developing countries, suffering animals, people in the future!) There’s instrumental benefits in treating EA workers well in terms of morale, fairness, and ability to recruit, but keep in mind the tradeoffs of less effective allocation schemes.
I think there’s a big difference between “you are an at will employee, and we can fire you on two weeks notice, but the default is you will stay with us indefinitely” and “you have a one year contract and can re-apply at the end”. Legally the latter gives the worker 50 extra weeks of security, but in practice the former seems to be preferable to many people.
I agree that default employment seems preferred by most fulltime workers, and that’s why I’m interested in the concept of “default-recurring monthly grants”.
I will note that this employment structure is not the typical arrangement among founders trying to launch a startup, though. A broad class of grants in EA are “work on this thing and maybe turn it into a new research org”, and the equivalent funding norms in the tech sector at least are not “employment” but “apply for incubators, try to raise funding”.
For EAs trying to do research… academia is the typical model for research but I also think academia is extremely inefficient, so copying the payment model doesn’t seem like a recipe for success. FROs are maybe the closest thing I can think of to “multi-year stable grants”—but there’s only like 3 of those in existence and it’s very early to say if they produce good outcomes.
What does FRO stand for?
“Focused Research Org”
Yes, because when you are at at will employee, the chance that you will still have income in n years tends to be higher than if you had to apply to renew a contract, and you don’t need to think about that application. People are typically angry if asked to reapply for their own job, because it implies that their employer might want to terminate them.
Another consideration is turn around time. Grant decisions are slow, deadlines are, imperfectly timed, distribution can be slow. So you need to apply many months before you need the money, which means well before you’ve used up your current grant, which means planning your work to have something to show ~6 months into a one year grant. Which is just pretty slow.
I don’t know what the right duration is, but the process needs to be built so that continuous funding for good work is a possibility, and possible to plan around.
My hope for addressing that problem is for grantmakers (including us) to suck less in the future and have speedier turnaround times, especially reducing the long tail of very slow responses.
How feasible do you think this is? From my outsider perspective, I see grantmakers and other types of application-reviewers taking 3-6 months across the board and it’s pretty rare to see them be faster than that, which suggests it might not be realistic to consistently review grants in <3 months.
eg the only job application process I’ve ever done that took <3 months was an application to a two-person startup.
It’s a good question. I think several grantmaking groups local to us (Lightspeed grants, Manifund, the ill-fated FF regranting program) have promised and afaict delivered on a fairly fast timeline. Though all of them are/were young and I don’t have a sense of whether they can reliably be quick after being around for longer than say 6 months.
LTFF itself has a median response time of about 4 weeks or so iirc. There might be some essential difficulties with significantly speeding up (say) the 99th percentile (eg needing stakeholder buy-in, complicated legal situations, trying to pitch a new donor for a specific project, trying to screen for infohazard concerns when none of the team are equipped to do so), but if we are able to get more capacity, I’d like us to at least get (say) the 85th or 95th tail down a lot lower.
I feel like reliability is more important than speed here, and it’s ~impossible to get this level of reliability from orgs run by unpaid volunteers with day jobs. Especially when volunteer hours aren’t fungible and the day jobs are demanding.
I think Lightspeed set a fairly ambitious goal it has struggled to meet. I applied for a fast turn around and got a response within a week, but two months later I haven’t received the check. The main grants were supposed to be announced on 8⁄6 and AFAIK still haven’t been. This is fine for me, but if people didn’t have to plan around it or risk being screwed I think it would be better.
Based on some of Ozzie’s comments here, I suspect that that using a grant process made for organizations to fund individuals is kind of doomed, and you either want to fund specific projects without the expectation it’s someone’s whole income (which is what I do), or do something more employer like with regular feedback cycles and rolling payments. And if you do the former, it needs to be enough money to compensate for the risk and inconvenience of freelancing.
I kind of get the arguments against paying grantmakers, but from my perspective I’d love to see you paid more with a higher reliability level.
Yeah, this is a bit sad. I am happy to offer anyone who received a venture grant to have some money advanced if they need it, and tried to offer this to people where I had a sense it might help.
I am sad that we can’t get out final grant confirmations in time, though we did get back to the vast majority of applicants with a negative response on-time. I am also personally happy to give people probability estimates of whether they will get funding, which for some applicants is very high (95%+), which hopefully helps a bit. I also expect us to hit deadlines more exactly in future rounds.
What would have had to change to make the date? My impression was the problem was sheer volume, which sounds really hard and maybe understandable to prep for. You can put a hard cap, but that loses potentially good applications. You could spend less time per application, but that biases towards legibility and familiarity. You could hire more evaluators, but my sense is good ones are hard to find and have costly counterfactuals.
The one thing I see is “don’t use a procedure that requires evaluating everyone before giving anyone an answer” (which I think you are doing?), but I assume there are reasons for that.
The central bottleneck right now is getting funders to decide how much money to distribute, and through which evaluators to distribute the funds through.
I budgeted around a week for that, but I think realistically it will take more like 3. This part was hard to forecast because I don’t have a super high-bandwidth channel to Jaan, his time is very valuable, and I think he was hit with a bunch of last-minute opportunities that made him busy in the relevant time period.
I also think even if that had happened on my original 7 day timeline, we still would have been delayed by 4 days or so, since the volume caused me to make some mistakes in the administration which then required the evaluators going back and redoing some of their numbers and doing a few more evaluations.
I wonder if some more formalized system for advances would be worth it? I think this kind of chaos is one of the biggest consequences of delays for payments, and a low-friction way to get bridge loans would remove a lot of the costs.
You could run it as pure charity or charge reasonable fees to grantmakers for the service.
Yeah, I would quite like that. In some sense the venture granting system we have is trying to be exactly that, but that itself is currently delayed on getting fully set up legally and financially. But my current model is that as soon as its properly set up, we can just send out money on like a 1-2 day turnaround time, reliably.
EA Funds offers pay to grantmakers (~$60/h which I think should be fairly competitive with people’s nonprofit counterfactuals); most people have other day jobs however.
I don’t think pay is the limiting factor for people, who usually have day jobs and also try to do what they consider to be the highest impact (plus other personal factors).
Though I can imagine there might be some sufficiently high numbers to cause part-time grantmakers to prioritize grantmaking highly, but a) this might result in a misallocation of resources, b) isn’t necessarily sustainable, and c) might have pretty bad incentives.
Great point about the reliability overall though. I do think it’d be hard to make real promises of the form “we’ll definitely get back to you by X date” for various factors, including practical/structural ones.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there was no good way to speed up grantmaking, given the existing constraints. If that’s true, I’d love to shift the system to something that recognizes that and plans around it (through bridge loans, or big enough grants that people can plan around delays, or something that looks more like employment), rather than hope that next year is the year that will be different for unspecified reasons.
I agree—I think the financial uncertainty created by having to renew funding each year is very significantly costly and stressful and makes it hard to commit to longer-term plans.
Personally I would really appreciate being fully funded for years at a time.
See also: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/01/31/create-a-full-alternative-stack/
I think that the OpenPhil situation can be decent. If you have a good manager/grantmaker that you have a good relationship and a lot of trust in, then I think this could provide a lot of the benefit. You don’t have assurance, but you should have a solid understanding of what you need to accomplish in order to get funding or not—and thus, this would give you a good idea of your chances.
I think that the non-OP funders are pretty amateurish here and could improve a lot.
I think the situation now is pretty lacking. However, the most obvious/suggested fix is more like “better management and ongoing relationships”, rather than 3+ year grants. The former could basically be the latter, if desired (once you start getting funding, it’s understood to be very likely to continue, absent huge mess-ups).
Just for the record, I don’t think OP has been doing well in this respect since the collapse of FTX. My sense is few Open Phil grantees know the conditions under which they would get more funding, or when they might receive an answer. At least I don’t, and none of the Open Phil grantees I’ve talked to in the past few months about this felt like this was handled well either.
I’ve wondered about this for independent projects and there’s some previous discussion here.
See also the shadows of the future term that Michael Nielsen uses.
No idea if it would be better to pay in lump sums or tranches.
You could also pay in a tailing off fashion, where if you fund for $1mn next year you automatically fund for 200k the year after. That way orgs would always have money for a slow down in funding.
Paying people for what they do works great if most of their potential impact comes from activities you can verify. But if their most effective activities are things they have a hard time explaining to others (yet have intrinsic motivation to do), you could miss out on a lot of impact by requiring them instead to work on what’s verifiable.
Perhaps funders should consider granting motivated altruists multi-year basic income. Now they don’t have to compromise[1] between what’s explainable/verifiable vs what they think is most effective—they now have independence to purely pursue the latter.
Bonus point: People who are much more competent than you at X[2] will probably behave in ways you don’t recognise as more competent. If you could, they wouldn’t be much more competent. Your “deference limit” is the level of competence above which you stop being able to reliable judge the difference between experts.
Consider how the cost of compromising between optimisation criteria interacts with what part of the impact distribution you’re aiming for. If you’re searching for a project with top p% impact and top p% explainability-to-funders, you can expect only p^2 of projects to fit both criteria—assuming independence.
But I think it’s an open question how & when the distributions correlate. One reason to think they could sometimes be anticorrelated is that the projects with the highest explainability-to-funders are also more likely to receive adequate attention from profit-incentives alone.
If you’re doing conjunctive search over projects/ideas for ones that score above a threshold for multiple criteria, it matters a lot which criteria you prioritise most of your parallel attention on to identify candidates for further serial examination. Try out various examples here & here.
At least for hard-to-measure activities where most of the competence derives from knowing what to do in the first place. I reckon this includes most fields of altruistic work.
Some discussion of the “career security” angle, in the form of me asking how 1-year-grant recipients are conceiving of their longer-term career arcs: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KdhEAu6pFnfPwA5hf/grantees-how-do-you-structure-your-finances-and-career
In the absence of longer-term security, it would be nice to have more foresight about income.
I can tolerate quite a lot of variance on the 6+ month timescale if I know it’s coming. If I know I’m not going to get another grant in 6 months, there are things I can do to compensate.
A mistake I made recently is applying relatively late due to an incorrect understanding of the funding situation, getting rejected, and now I’m temporarily unable to continue safety research. (Don’t worry, I’m no danger of going homeless or starving, just lowered productivity.)
Applying for grants sooner would help mitigate this, but there are presumably limits. I would guess that grantmaking organizations would rather not commit funds to a project that won’t start for another 2 years, for example.
If there was a magic way to get an informed probability on future grant funding, that would help a lot. I’m not sure how realistic this is; a lot of options seem pretty high overhead for grantmakers and/or involve some sort of fancy prediction markets with tons of transparency and market subsidies. Having continuous updates about some smaller pieces of the puzzle could help.
Yeah, this would be nice to have. CEA’s Community Building Grants (CBG) programme had the possibility for 2-year renewals for a brief period, but this policy was recently scrapped due to funding uncertainty. Shardul from EA India shared with me his experience as the second hire at GFI India. If I recall correctly, they were given funding for something like 5 years to get going, and he said this transformed their ability to build and execute a vision. The value of this stability was brought into relief when he joined the CBG programme, which has similar aims but nowhere near the stability.
From a productivity point of view, I guess what we ought to aim for is flexicurity, as typified by Denmark. For those fortunate enough to live in parts of Northwestern Europe this is already the case thanks to strong social security, but I struggle to see how a movement can provide it elsewhere. Perhaps a Basefund but for employment?
I think Ryan is probably overall right that it would be better to fund people for longer at a time. One counter-consideration that hasn’t been mentioned yet: longer contracts implicitly and explicitly push people to keep doing something — that may be sub-optimal — because they drive up switching costs.
If you have to apply for funding once a year no matter what you’re working on, the “switching costs” of doing the same thing you’ve been doing are similar to the cost of switching (of course they aren’t in general, but with regard to funding they might be). I think it’s unlikely but not crazy that the effects of status quo bias might be severe enough that funders artificially imposing switching costs on “continuing/non-switching” results in net better results. I expect that in the world where grants usually last 1 year, people switch what they’re doing more than the world where grants are 3 years, and it’s plausible these changes are good for impact.
Some factors that seem cruxy here:
how much can be gained through realistic switching (how bad is current allocation of people, how much better are the things people would do if switching costs were relatively zero as they sorta are, how much worse of things would people be doing if continuing-costs were low).
it seems very likely that this consideration should affect grants to junior and early-career people that are bouncing around more but it probably doesn’t apply much to more senior folks who have been working on a project for awhile (on the other hand, maybe you want the junior people investing more in long term career plans, thus switching less, it depends on the person).
Could relatively-zero switching costs actually hurt things because people switch too much due to over-correcting (e.g., holden karnofsky gets excited about AI evaluations so a bunch of people work on it and then governance gets big so people switch to that, and then etc.)
How much does it help to have people with a lot of experience on particular things (narrow experts vs. generalists)
If grants were more flexible (or grant-makers communicated better and the social norms were clearer; in fact people sometimes do return grants or change what they’re working on mid-grant) maybe you could fund people for 3 years while giving them affordance to switch so you still capture the value from people switching to more impactful things.
Personally, I’ve found that being funded by a grant at all makes me less likely to switch what I’m doing. I expect the amount I “want” (not upon reflection/hindsight) to switch what I’m doing is too much, so for me this effect might be net positive, but there are probably also some times where this gets in the way of me making impactful switches. If grant-makers were more accessible to talk about this, i.e., not significantly time constrained, they could probably cause a better allocation of resources. Overall, I’m not sure how compelling this counter-consideration is, but it seems worth mulling over.
I agree. Early-career EAs are more likely to need to switch projects, less likely to merit multi-year funding, and have—on average—less need for job-security. Single-year funding seems OK for those cases.
For people and orgs with significant track records, however, it seems hard to justify.