I appreciate that you’re going meta and considering such a full mix of re-granting options, rather than just giving to charities themselves as past lottery winners have. Your point about not having as much local knowledge as the big granting organizations makes a lot of sense. Longview, the LTFF, and the EA Infrastructure fund all seem like worthy targets, although I don’t know much about them in particular. Here are a few thoughts on the other approaches:
Paying someone to help decide:
This idea doesn’t make much sense to me. After all, figuring out the most effective ways to donate to charity is already the core research project of effective altruism! It seems to me that paying someone to research what to do with the money would just be a strange, roundabout way to support cause prioritization research. Better to just explicitly donate to a cause prioritization research initiative. That way, a team of researchers could work on whatever cause prioritization problems seem most important for the overall EA movement, rather than employing one person to deliberate on this specific pot of $500K.
Patient philanthropy fund:
This is an intriguing idea, but I wonder if patient philanthropy is well-developed enough that money would be best used to actually fill up the fund, versus studying the idea and working out various details in the plan. As Founder’s Fund says, there are significant risks of expropriation and value drift, and there is probably more research and planning that can be done to investigate how to mitigate these risks. To their list of dangers, I would add:
The risk of some kind of financial collapse or transition, such that the contents of the fund are no longer valuable and/or no longer honored. (For instance, as a result of nations defaulting on their debt, or a sudden switch away from today’s currencies.) This seems similar to, but distinct from, expropriation.
Somewhat related to value drift, the risk that a fund designed to last for millennia and to be highly resistant against expropriation and value drift, would fail to also be nimble enough to recognize changing opportunities and actually deploy its assets at a crucial time when they could do the most good. Figuring out how best to mitigate this seems like a very tricky institution-design problem. But making even a small amount of progress on it could be really valuable, especially since the problem of staying on-mission while also being nimble and maintaining organizational skill/capacity is a fundamental paradox that bedevils all kinds of institutions.
…Anyways, I’m sure that people more involved in patient philanthropy have thought about this stuff in more depth than I. But my point is that right now, it’s possible that funding should mostly go towards designing and testing and implementing patient-philanthropy funds, rather than just putting large amounts of cash in the fund itself.
Invest & wait a few years:
Although similar in some ways to the patient-philanthropy plan, I think the motivations for choosing this option are actually quite different:
Giving to a patient-philanthropy fund is somewhat incompatible with “urgent longtermism” focused on AI and other X-risks, while a plan to wait 5 years and then give is perfectly compatible with urgent longtermism.
Two benefits of waiting are the growth in capital, and the ability to learn more as the EA movement makes intellectual progress. Presumably, over a timespan of centuries, the EA movement will start running into diminishing intellectual returns, so the economic-growth benefit (if we assume steady returns of a few percent per year) would be proportionately larger. By waiting just five years, I’d guess that the larger benefit would come from the development of the EA movement.
Personally, I’m more sympathetic to the idea of waiting just a few years to take advantage of the rapidly increasing sophistication of EA thought, rather than waiting centuries. But you’d have to balance this consideration against how much funding you expect EA to receive in the future. If you think EA is currently in a boom and will decline later, you should save your money and give later (when ideas are well-developed but money is scarce). If you think EA will be pulling in much bigger numbers in the future, it’s best to give now (so future funding can benefit from a more well-developed EA movement).
Re patient philanthropy funds: Spending money on research rather than giving money to a fund does seem more focused and efficient. I think there are limits to how much progress you can make with research (assuming that research hasn’t ruled the idea out), so it does make sense to try creating such a fund at some point. Some issues would become apparent with even a toy fund (one with a minimal amount of capital produced as an exercise). A real fund that has millions of dollars would be a better test of the idea, but whether contributing to such a fund is a good use of money is less clear to me now.
Yes, I was definitely thinking of stuff along the lines of “help fund the creation of a toy fund and work out the legal kinks, portfolio design, governance mechanisms, etc”, in addition to pure blog-post-style research into the idea of investing-to-give.
Admittedly it’s an odd position for me to be pessimistic about patient philanthropy itself but still pretty psyched about setting up the experiment. I guess for the argument to go through that funding the creation of the PPF is a great idea, it relies on one or more of the following being true:
Actually doing patient philanthropy turns out to be, in fact, extremely effective. However, we won’t definitively know this for decades! A leading indicator might be if the perceived problems/drawbacks of PPF turn out to be more easily solved than we thought. (Perhaps everyone looks at the legal mechanisms of the newly-launched toy fund and thinks, “Wow, this is actually a really innovative and promising structure!”)
If the PPF draws in lots more EA donations that wouldn’t have otherwise happened, it could be a great idea even if it’s not as competitive on effectiveness.
Designing the PPF might somehow have positive spillover effects. (Are there other areas in EA calling for weird long-term institution design or complex financial products? Surely a few...)
I appreciate that you’re going meta and considering such a full mix of re-granting options, rather than just giving to charities themselves as past lottery winners have. Your point about not having as much local knowledge as the big granting organizations makes a lot of sense. Longview, the LTFF, and the EA Infrastructure fund all seem like worthy targets, although I don’t know much about them in particular. Here are a few thoughts on the other approaches:
Paying someone to help decide: This idea doesn’t make much sense to me. After all, figuring out the most effective ways to donate to charity is already the core research project of effective altruism! It seems to me that paying someone to research what to do with the money would just be a strange, roundabout way to support cause prioritization research. Better to just explicitly donate to a cause prioritization research initiative. That way, a team of researchers could work on whatever cause prioritization problems seem most important for the overall EA movement, rather than employing one person to deliberate on this specific pot of $500K.
Patient philanthropy fund: This is an intriguing idea, but I wonder if patient philanthropy is well-developed enough that money would be best used to actually fill up the fund, versus studying the idea and working out various details in the plan. As Founder’s Fund says, there are significant risks of expropriation and value drift, and there is probably more research and planning that can be done to investigate how to mitigate these risks. To their list of dangers, I would add:
The risk of some kind of financial collapse or transition, such that the contents of the fund are no longer valuable and/or no longer honored. (For instance, as a result of nations defaulting on their debt, or a sudden switch away from today’s currencies.) This seems similar to, but distinct from, expropriation.
Somewhat related to value drift, the risk that a fund designed to last for millennia and to be highly resistant against expropriation and value drift, would fail to also be nimble enough to recognize changing opportunities and actually deploy its assets at a crucial time when they could do the most good. Figuring out how best to mitigate this seems like a very tricky institution-design problem. But making even a small amount of progress on it could be really valuable, especially since the problem of staying on-mission while also being nimble and maintaining organizational skill/capacity is a fundamental paradox that bedevils all kinds of institutions.
…Anyways, I’m sure that people more involved in patient philanthropy have thought about this stuff in more depth than I. But my point is that right now, it’s possible that funding should mostly go towards designing and testing and implementing patient-philanthropy funds, rather than just putting large amounts of cash in the fund itself.
Invest & wait a few years: Although similar in some ways to the patient-philanthropy plan, I think the motivations for choosing this option are actually quite different:
Giving to a patient-philanthropy fund is somewhat incompatible with “urgent longtermism” focused on AI and other X-risks, while a plan to wait 5 years and then give is perfectly compatible with urgent longtermism.
Two benefits of waiting are the growth in capital, and the ability to learn more as the EA movement makes intellectual progress. Presumably, over a timespan of centuries, the EA movement will start running into diminishing intellectual returns, so the economic-growth benefit (if we assume steady returns of a few percent per year) would be proportionately larger. By waiting just five years, I’d guess that the larger benefit would come from the development of the EA movement.
Personally, I’m more sympathetic to the idea of waiting just a few years to take advantage of the rapidly increasing sophistication of EA thought, rather than waiting centuries. But you’d have to balance this consideration against how much funding you expect EA to receive in the future. If you think EA is currently in a boom and will decline later, you should save your money and give later (when ideas are well-developed but money is scarce). If you think EA will be pulling in much bigger numbers in the future, it’s best to give now (so future funding can benefit from a more well-developed EA movement).
Re patient philanthropy funds: Spending money on research rather than giving money to a fund does seem more focused and efficient. I think there are limits to how much progress you can make with research (assuming that research hasn’t ruled the idea out), so it does make sense to try creating such a fund at some point. Some issues would become apparent with even a toy fund (one with a minimal amount of capital produced as an exercise). A real fund that has millions of dollars would be a better test of the idea, but whether contributing to such a fund is a good use of money is less clear to me now.
Yes, I was definitely thinking of stuff along the lines of “help fund the creation of a toy fund and work out the legal kinks, portfolio design, governance mechanisms, etc”, in addition to pure blog-post-style research into the idea of investing-to-give.
Admittedly it’s an odd position for me to be pessimistic about patient philanthropy itself but still pretty psyched about setting up the experiment. I guess for the argument to go through that funding the creation of the PPF is a great idea, it relies on one or more of the following being true:
Actually doing patient philanthropy turns out to be, in fact, extremely effective. However, we won’t definitively know this for decades! A leading indicator might be if the perceived problems/drawbacks of PPF turn out to be more easily solved than we thought. (Perhaps everyone looks at the legal mechanisms of the newly-launched toy fund and thinks, “Wow, this is actually a really innovative and promising structure!”)
If the PPF draws in lots more EA donations that wouldn’t have otherwise happened, it could be a great idea even if it’s not as competitive on effectiveness.
Designing the PPF might somehow have positive spillover effects. (Are there other areas in EA calling for weird long-term institution design or complex financial products? Surely a few...)