I expect to communicate extensively with CFAR over the coming weeks, talk to most of its staff members, generally get a better sense of how CFAR operates and think about the big-picture effects that CFAR has on the long-term future and global catastrophic risk. I think I am likely to then either:
-make recommendations for a set of changes with conditional funding,
-decide that CFAR does not require further funding from the LTF,
-or be convinced that CFAR’s current plans make sense and that they should have sufficient resources to execute those plans.
Of the categories listed, that seems to most accurately summarize what happened (edit: though I don’t think this should be seen as a concrete endorsement of CFAR’s long-term plans, and have more to do with the considerations about decision-making ability I outlined above). I do think that it’s still quite possible that in future rounds I will take the first option, and make recommendations conditional on some changes, though I feel comfortable with the amount of funding we recommended to CFAR this round.
CFAR also communicated to me that they plan to focus more on external transparency in the coming months, so I expect that I will continue building out my models in this space.
Thanks for this substantive post!
Re: CFAR, from the April 2019 grant decisions thread:
Sounds like the third option is what happened?
Of the categories listed, that seems to most accurately summarize what happened (edit: though I don’t think this should be seen as a concrete endorsement of CFAR’s long-term plans, and have more to do with the considerations about decision-making ability I outlined above). I do think that it’s still quite possible that in future rounds I will take the first option, and make recommendations conditional on some changes, though I feel comfortable with the amount of funding we recommended to CFAR this round.
CFAR also communicated to me that they plan to focus more on external transparency in the coming months, so I expect that I will continue building out my models in this space.