We don’t: expect to be able to fully justify ourselves in writing.
We don’t: put extremely high weight on avoiding conflicts of interest, intellectual “bubbles” or “echo chambers.”
We don’t: avoid the superficial appearance — accompanied by some real risk — of being overconfident and underinformed.
Despite this, Open Phil’s communications seem seem to show great honesty and thoughtfulness in this article and others in 2016. Immense attention is given to communicate their decision and perspective and other meta issues, even on awkward, complex, or difficult to articulate topics.
For example, look at the effort given to explaining nuances in the “hits-based” decision of hiring Open Phil’s first program officer:
In these conversations, a common pattern we saw was that a candidate would have a concrete plan for funding one broad kind of work (for example, ballot initiatives, alternative metrics for prosecutors, or research on alternatives to incarceration) but would have relatively little to say about other broad kinds of work. This was where we found the work that had gone into our landscape document particularly useful. When a candidate didn’t mention a major aspect of the criminal justice reform field, we would ask about it and see whether they were omitting it because they (a) had strong knowledge of it and were making a considered decision to de-prioritize this aspect of the field; (b) didn’t have much experience or knowledge of this area of the field.
There’s a lot given to us in just this one paragraph: a peek into a failure of breadth (in probably very high quality candidates), a filter which helps explain how Open Phil finds someone “well-positioned to develop a good strategy”. It also concretely shows the value of the structure in the “landscape document”, which shows the value of process and how it is adhered to.
The article even gives us with a peek into the internal decision making process:
Early on, Alexander Berger and I expect to work closely with her, asking many questions and having many critical discussions about the funding areas and grants she proposes prioritizing. That said, we don’t expect to understand the full case for her proposals, and we will see our role more as “spot-checking reasoning” than as “verifying every aspect of the case.” Over time, we hope to build trust and reduce the intensity of (while never completely eliminating) our critical questions. Ultimately, we hope that our grants in the space of criminal justice reform will be less and less about our view of the details, and more and more about the bet we’re making on Chloe.
This clearly shows us meta-awareness of the process of 1) how decisions are made, 2) how some control and validation of the program officer occurs, and 3) acknowledgement of the limitations about the executives.
This is an impressive level of honesty and explicitness about a very sensitive process.
It’s hard to think of another organization that would write something like this.
Holden Karnofsky says that:
Despite this, Open Phil’s communications seem seem to show great honesty and thoughtfulness in this article and others in 2016. Immense attention is given to communicate their decision and perspective and other meta issues, even on awkward, complex, or difficult to articulate topics.
For example, look at the effort given to explaining nuances in the “hits-based” decision of hiring Open Phil’s first program officer:
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/process-hiring-our-first-cause-specific-program-officer
There’s a lot given to us in just this one paragraph: a peek into a failure of breadth (in probably very high quality candidates), a filter which helps explain how Open Phil finds someone “well-positioned to develop a good strategy”. It also concretely shows the value of the structure in the “landscape document”, which shows the value of process and how it is adhered to.
The article even gives us with a peek into the internal decision making process:
This clearly shows us meta-awareness of the process of 1) how decisions are made, 2) how some control and validation of the program officer occurs, and 3) acknowledgement of the limitations about the executives.
This is an impressive level of honesty and explicitness about a very sensitive process.
It’s hard to think of another organization that would write something like this.