‘Determining where to set the bar is another challenge. If they set it too low, they’ll throw away money. If they set it too high, they’ll have money sitting around with nothing to do. This isn’t necessarily bad, though. They can save it for the future, in hopes that more high-quality projects will appear later.’
It’s worth noticing that these aren’t symmetrical cases. Assuming a vaguely normal diminishing returns curve, money ‘thrown away’ would still have positive EV, just less of it.
On the other hand, money not spent has whatever your best guess at its future value is, which will depend eg on a) how likely discoveries for opportunities whose EV eclipses the current set, given that you sit on the money, b) the same, given that you spend the money, c) how likely other philanthropists will be to fill future high EV funding gaps if you don’t, d) how much the value gained by donating it now would have compounded in the meantime.
Given that Givewell have included the same charity in their top tier (AMF) almost every year since their inception, the upper bound for both a) and b) seems not that high (though intuitively higher for b), and given the increasing numbers of very wealthy EA aligned people, c) also seems to have diminished a lot. So most of the case for conservative funding seems to rest on d.
This seems insufficient to me to justify the low rate of risky—aka exploratory—funding.
I think it’s common for funding opportunities “just below the bar” to have capped upside potential, in the sense of the funders thinking that the grants are highly unlikely to generate very high impact. At least, that’s my experience with grantmaking. The things I felt unsure about tended to always be of the sort “maybe this is somewhat impactful, but I can’t imagine it being a giant mistake not to fund it.” By contrast, saving money gives you some chance of having an outsized impact later on, in case you end up desperately needing it for a new, large opportunity.
Good thoughts. I think this problem decomposes into three factors:
Should there be a bar, or should all EA projects get funded in order of priority until the money runs out?
If there’s a bar, where should it be set, and why?
After the bar is set, when should grantmakers re-examine its underlying reasoning to see if it still makes sense under present circumstances?
My argument actively argues that we should have a bar, is agnostic on how high the bar should be, and assumes that the bar is immobile for the purposes of the reader.
At some point, I may give consideration to where and how we set the bar. I think that’s an interesting question both for grant makers and people launching projects. A healthy movement would strive for some clarity and consensus. If neophytes could more rapidly gain skill in self-evaluation relative to the standards of the “EA grantmaker’s bar,” without killing the buzz, it could help them make more confident choices about “looping out and back” or persevering within the movement.
For the purposes of this comment section, though, I’m not ready to develop my stance on it. Hope you’ll consider expanding your thoughts in a larger post!
‘Determining where to set the bar is another challenge. If they set it too low, they’ll throw away money. If they set it too high, they’ll have money sitting around with nothing to do. This isn’t necessarily bad, though. They can save it for the future, in hopes that more high-quality projects will appear later.’
It’s worth noticing that these aren’t symmetrical cases. Assuming a vaguely normal diminishing returns curve, money ‘thrown away’ would still have positive EV, just less of it.
On the other hand, money not spent has whatever your best guess at its future value is, which will depend eg on a) how likely discoveries for opportunities whose EV eclipses the current set, given that you sit on the money, b) the same, given that you spend the money, c) how likely other philanthropists will be to fill future high EV funding gaps if you don’t, d) how much the value gained by donating it now would have compounded in the meantime.
Given that Givewell have included the same charity in their top tier (AMF) almost every year since their inception, the upper bound for both a) and b) seems not that high (though intuitively higher for b), and given the increasing numbers of very wealthy EA aligned people, c) also seems to have diminished a lot. So most of the case for conservative funding seems to rest on d.
This seems insufficient to me to justify the low rate of risky—aka exploratory—funding.
I think it’s common for funding opportunities “just below the bar” to have capped upside potential, in the sense of the funders thinking that the grants are highly unlikely to generate very high impact. At least, that’s my experience with grantmaking. The things I felt unsure about tended to always be of the sort “maybe this is somewhat impactful, but I can’t imagine it being a giant mistake not to fund it.” By contrast, saving money gives you some chance of having an outsized impact later on, in case you end up desperately needing it for a new, large opportunity.
Good thoughts. I think this problem decomposes into three factors:
Should there be a bar, or should all EA projects get funded in order of priority until the money runs out?
If there’s a bar, where should it be set, and why?
After the bar is set, when should grantmakers re-examine its underlying reasoning to see if it still makes sense under present circumstances?
My argument actively argues that we should have a bar, is agnostic on how high the bar should be, and assumes that the bar is immobile for the purposes of the reader.
At some point, I may give consideration to where and how we set the bar. I think that’s an interesting question both for grant makers and people launching projects. A healthy movement would strive for some clarity and consensus. If neophytes could more rapidly gain skill in self-evaluation relative to the standards of the “EA grantmaker’s bar,” without killing the buzz, it could help them make more confident choices about “looping out and back” or persevering within the movement.
For the purposes of this comment section, though, I’m not ready to develop my stance on it. Hope you’ll consider expanding your thoughts in a larger post!