I’m not convinced that it was poorly executed; I’d need to hear more details first.
they didn’t disclose it publicly, so that the community mostly learned about it via Emile Torres’ Twitter account
Claire said, “(This isn’t my domain but) we typically aim to publish grants within three months of when we make our initial payment, but we’re currently working through a backlog of older grants.”
This may reflect that Open Phil made a mistake, or it may reflect that they made the right call and de-prioritized “get announcements out ASAP” in favor of more objectively important tasks. I’d want to know more about why the backlog existed before weighing in.
I don’t think Open Phil should heavily reshape their prioritization on things like this based on what they’re scared Emile Torres will tweet about; that does not sound like the sort of heuristic that I’d expect to result in a functional Open Phil that is keeping its eye on the ball.
But separate from Torres, I can see arguments for it being useful to EAs for us to get faster updates from Open Phil, given what a large funder they are in this space. They of course don’t morally owe EAs even 1% of the details they’ve provided to date, but it’s a genuinely valuable community service that they share so much. So yes, faster may be better, and maybe the slow announcement in this case reflects some upstream process error I’m not aware of.
contrary to what Edward Kmett says, there are modern conference centres in Oxford, which would probably have cost substantially less
I’d be interested to see examples, and I’d be idly curious to know why they didn’t pick one. If there’s a need for more venue space, possibly we should purchase at least one of those too.
it doesn’t sound like they did much or any external consultation, and the board have not shown any indication that they recognise the genuine risk of rationalising high-value decisions like this
I don’t know what you mean by this or why you think it. Who should Claire have talked to who you think she didn’t talk to? Why is this decision at higher risk of rationalizing than any other decision?
Or are you just saying “this decision was important, and it’s not clear to me that Claire realized how important it is, and therefore risky to get wrong”? If so, I have no idea why you think that either. Maybe if you wrote a longer-form thing detailing what you think the evaluation process should have looked like, and how you think that differed from the actual evaluation process for the abbey, it would be clearer where the disagreement is.
I’m not convinced that it was poorly executed; I’d need to hear more details first.
Claire said, “(This isn’t my domain but) we typically aim to publish grants within three months of when we make our initial payment, but we’re currently working through a backlog of older grants.”
This may reflect that Open Phil made a mistake, or it may reflect that they made the right call and de-prioritized “get announcements out ASAP” in favor of more objectively important tasks. I’d want to know more about why the backlog existed before weighing in.
I don’t think Open Phil should heavily reshape their prioritization on things like this based on what they’re scared Emile Torres will tweet about; that does not sound like the sort of heuristic that I’d expect to result in a functional Open Phil that is keeping its eye on the ball.
But separate from Torres, I can see arguments for it being useful to EAs for us to get faster updates from Open Phil, given what a large funder they are in this space. They of course don’t morally owe EAs even 1% of the details they’ve provided to date, but it’s a genuinely valuable community service that they share so much. So yes, faster may be better, and maybe the slow announcement in this case reflects some upstream process error I’m not aware of.
I’d be interested to see examples, and I’d be idly curious to know why they didn’t pick one. If there’s a need for more venue space, possibly we should purchase at least one of those too.
I don’t know what you mean by this or why you think it. Who should Claire have talked to who you think she didn’t talk to? Why is this decision at higher risk of rationalizing than any other decision?
Or are you just saying “this decision was important, and it’s not clear to me that Claire realized how important it is, and therefore risky to get wrong”? If so, I have no idea why you think that either. Maybe if you wrote a longer-form thing detailing what you think the evaluation process should have looked like, and how you think that differed from the actual evaluation process for the abbey, it would be clearer where the disagreement is.