I’m very sorry that you had such a bad experience here. Whilst I would disagree with some of the details here I do think that our communication was worse than I would have liked and I am very sorry for any hardship that you experienced. It sounds like a stressful process which could have been made much better if we had communicated more often and more quickly.
In my last email (March 4th), I said that we were exploring making this grant, but it’s legally challenging. Grants for mental health support are complicated, in general, as we have to show that there is a pure public benefit. We have an open thread with our legal counsel, and I’m cautiously optimistic about getting a decision on this relatively soon.
In general, I don’t think I made promises or hard commitments to get back in a certain time frame; instead, I said that we aim to get back by a certain time. I believe I am at fault for not making this distinction appropriately clear, and I am upset that this mismatch of expectations resulted in hardship.
Edit: As I said above, from my perspective, this account doesn’t accurately depict EAIF’s interaction with Igor. We did actually reject this application, but I did say that I was interested in finding another funding arrangement. In hindsight, it would have been better to reject the application (even if that lowered the chance of the applicant receiving funding). I was also not the fund manager in charge of this application. I personally don’t want to spend a long time engaging with critiques on a public forum—I’d prefer to spend that time fixing problems. That said I think to some degree it’s helpful (and expected) for EA orgs to communicate on public forums, despite my personal feelings.
Still, I think that some of my comments on people’s negative experiences would fall into the following categories:
cases where grantees took many weeks to get back to us to answer relatively short questions, which slowed the process down on our side
cases where the grantee received funding from other organisations and didn’t tell us about this, which created confusion and made the situation seem much less urgent than they implied
in cases where people said they had already provided information in their application, it was often unclear, and we were asking for more details
One thing to note is that at the end of January, we rejected the original grant (which I believed that we wouldn’t be able to show a clear public benefit for), and then said we were interested in a different version of the grant that seemed more defensible to me (subject to legal review). Since then, we have been working out whether we can make this alternate grant.
I didn’t realise that Igor stopped taking clients completely, and I regret that I didn’t make a stronger effort to understand the consequences of the unclear situation whilst we tried to understand the legal implications of making the grant.
I agree that the second statement is a prediction, and suspect the issue may lie in the inferences one might draw from it.
As a formal matter, does “it’s likely X will happen within one week” imply “it is very likely X will happen within two weeks” and “it is extremely likely X will happen within three weeks”? Without more, I do not think the first statement logically implies any particular confidence intervals.[1]
However, I think it is readily foreseeable that a good number of readers would assign significant credence to the latter two statements based on the first, but would feel hesitant to nag the decisionmaker on their grant to be clearer on the confidence intervals. Thus, if the two week / three week statements are not valid, and that is not otherwise clear from the context,[2] I think it would be much better to include a disclaimer here. E.g.: However, there is a reasonable possibility that our decision could take 3-4 weeks, or even longer, primarily due to other things on our lawyer’s desk.
An example of “without more”: I call a company customer-service line, and am told that there are 30 callers ahead of me, that calls are answered in the order received, and that the estimated wait time is 15 minutes. Due to the law of large numbers, I think I’d be entitled to infer a wait time between ~10-20 minutes here.
I would view “nothing may get done in the 1-1.5 weeks surrounding Christmas” as obvious if the correspondents both lived in countries where Christmas leave is common.
I’m very sorry that you had such a bad experience here. Whilst I would disagree with some of the details here I do think that our communication was worse than I would have liked and I am very sorry for any hardship that you experienced. It sounds like a stressful process which could have been made much better if we had communicated more often and more quickly.
In my last email (March 4th), I said that we were exploring making this grant, but it’s legally challenging. Grants for mental health support are complicated, in general, as we have to show that there is a pure public benefit. We have an open thread with our legal counsel, and I’m cautiously optimistic about getting a decision on this relatively soon.
In general, I don’t think I made promises or hard commitments to get back in a certain time frame; instead, I said that we aim to get back by a certain time. I believe I am at fault for not making this distinction appropriately clear, and I am upset that this mismatch of expectations resulted in hardship.
Edit: As I said above, from my perspective, this account doesn’t accurately depict EAIF’s interaction with Igor. We did actually reject this application, but I did say that I was interested in finding another funding arrangement. In hindsight, it would have been better to reject the application (even if that lowered the chance of the applicant receiving funding). I was also not the fund manager in charge of this application. I personally don’t want to spend a long time engaging with critiques on a public forum—I’d prefer to spend that time fixing problems. That said I think to some degree it’s helpful (and expected) for EA orgs to communicate on public forums, despite my personal feelings.
Still, I think that some of my comments on people’s negative experiences would fall into the following categories:
cases where grantees took many weeks to get back to us to answer relatively short questions, which slowed the process down on our side
cases where the grantee received funding from other organisations and didn’t tell us about this, which created confusion and made the situation seem much less urgent than they implied
in cases where people said they had already provided information in their application, it was often unclear, and we were asking for more details
One thing to note is that at the end of January, we rejected the original grant (which I believed that we wouldn’t be able to show a clear public benefit for), and then said we were interested in a different version of the grant that seemed more defensible to me (subject to legal review). Since then, we have been working out whether we can make this alternate grant.
I didn’t realise that Igor stopped taking clients completely, and I regret that I didn’t make a stronger effort to understand the consequences of the unclear situation whilst we tried to understand the legal implications of making the grant.
Thank you for the attitude you expressed here, although I believe that you promised me to get back in a certain time.
A part from your email from December 5
We sincerely regret the delay and assure you that we will provide you with an update within the next few days.
Your email from December 18
We expect to give a decision this week.
I provide parts of your emails because you expressed that you would rather not share everything in your other comments here.
The first one is a commitment, but the second one isn’t—it’s rather a prediction. Perhaps there is a language familiarity issue?
I agree that the second statement is a prediction, and suspect the issue may lie in the inferences one might draw from it.
As a formal matter, does “it’s likely X will happen within one week” imply “it is very likely X will happen within two weeks” and “it is extremely likely X will happen within three weeks”? Without more, I do not think the first statement logically implies any particular confidence intervals.[1]
However, I think it is readily foreseeable that a good number of readers would assign significant credence to the latter two statements based on the first, but would feel hesitant to nag the decisionmaker on their grant to be clearer on the confidence intervals. Thus, if the two week / three week statements are not valid, and that is not otherwise clear from the context,[2] I think it would be much better to include a disclaimer here. E.g.: However, there is a reasonable possibility that our decision could take 3-4 weeks, or even longer, primarily due to other things on our lawyer’s desk.
An example of “without more”: I call a company customer-service line, and am told that there are 30 callers ahead of me, that calls are answered in the order received, and that the estimated wait time is 15 minutes. Due to the law of large numbers, I think I’d be entitled to infer a wait time between ~10-20 minutes here.
I would view “nothing may get done in the 1-1.5 weeks surrounding Christmas” as obvious if the correspondents both lived in countries where Christmas leave is common.