I was going to mention this post as well, to summarize it: Open Phil has deliberately lowered their transparency levels on the grants they make because unlike GiveWell they aren’t making direct recommendations to the public and because the projects are too complex/would take too many resources to justify/sharing information would have ‘programmatic risks’, and they wouldn’t be able to be completely transparent.
So Open Phil has actively moved away from public discussion. Given the feedback process for the Long Term Funds recently, I can understand this decision, although if it wasn’t so research intensive I’d like to see more write-ups, especially for US policy grants. I think international opportunities (not just global health but on a whole plethora of issues) are very neglected and tractable, but currently there is an overwhelming focus on NTD’s (mainly GiveWell’s research). I’m assuming Open Phil doesn’t want to crowd out/double up on GiveWell’s research, or because of Good Ventures’ interests. I predict these international opportunities will become less neglected as EA reaches developing countries and is able to incubate local EA’s who have comparative advantage in those areas.
The flipside of less transparency is that Open Phil has been doing the most active recruiting over the last two years within EA, and so it’s position as such is relatively strong in the community, not just in terms of money but also from a careers perspective.
Tangentially relevant: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/update-how-were-thinking-about-openness-and-information-sharing
I was going to mention this post as well, to summarize it: Open Phil has deliberately lowered their transparency levels on the grants they make because unlike GiveWell they aren’t making direct recommendations to the public and because the projects are too complex/would take too many resources to justify/sharing information would have ‘programmatic risks’, and they wouldn’t be able to be completely transparent.
So Open Phil has actively moved away from public discussion. Given the feedback process for the Long Term Funds recently, I can understand this decision, although if it wasn’t so research intensive I’d like to see more write-ups, especially for US policy grants. I think international opportunities (not just global health but on a whole plethora of issues) are very neglected and tractable, but currently there is an overwhelming focus on NTD’s (mainly GiveWell’s research). I’m assuming Open Phil doesn’t want to crowd out/double up on GiveWell’s research, or because of Good Ventures’ interests. I predict these international opportunities will become less neglected as EA reaches developing countries and is able to incubate local EA’s who have comparative advantage in those areas.
The flipside of less transparency is that Open Phil has been doing the most active recruiting over the last two years within EA, and so it’s position as such is relatively strong in the community, not just in terms of money but also from a careers perspective.