Roughly how much time per month/year does each of the fund managers currently expect to spend on investigating, discussing, and deciding on grant opportunities?
Rough fermi on how much time I expect to spend on this:
I spent about 12 hours on the investigations of the last round, and about 2 hours a week since then on various smaller tasks and discussions about potential grantees. I spent less time than I wanted to since we made the first round of grants, so I expect to settle in at something closer to 3-4 hours per week. I expect this will be higher than the other fund members.
In the long-run I expect that the majority of time I spend on this will be in conversations with potential grantees and the other members of the fund, about models of impact of various types of projects, and long-term future strategy in general. I think I would find those conversations useful independently of my work for the fund, so if you are interested in net-costs you might want to weigh that only at 50% or so. Though I am not even sure whether the net-cost for me is negative since I expect the fund will be a good vehicle for me for me to have more focused conversations and modeling about the long-term future and I can’t come up with an obviously better vehicle to do so.
So, in terms of time I will spend doing work that is related to this fund, I expect to settle in around 3-4 hours per week, with peak periods of about 15 hours per week about 4 times a year. Though how much of that is counterfactual and whether I experience any net cost is unclear, probably at least 20% of that time is dead-loss in terms of boring logistical tasks and other things that I don’t expect to gain from much long term, but I also expect to gain at least some benefit from being on the fund and the opportunities for learning it will open up for me.
Is there anything the EA community can do to make it easier for yourself and other fund managers to spend more time as you’d like to on grantmaking decisions, especially executive time spent on the decision-making?
I’m thinking of stuff like the CEA allocating more staff or volunteer time to helping the EA Funds managers take care of lower-level, ‘boring logistical tasks’ that are part of their responsibilities, outsourcing some of the questions you might have to EA Facebook groups so you don’t have to waste time doing internet searches anyone could do, etc. Stuff like that.
This is the sort of question I could easily spend a lot of time trying to forge a perfect answer to, so I’m going to instead provide a faster and probably less satisfying first try, and time permitting come back and clarify.
I see significant justification for the existence of the fund being pooling funds from several sources to justify more research than individual donors would justify given the size of their donations (there are other good reasons for the fund to exist; this is one of them). I’d like to have the expert team spend as much time as the size of each grant justifies. Given the background knowledge that the LTF Fund expert team has, the amount of time justified is going to vary by size of grant, how much we already know about the people involved, the project, the field they’re working in and many other factors.
So, (my faster and less satisfying answer:) I don’t know how much time we’re going to spend. More if we find granting opportunities from people we know less about, in fields we know less about; less if we find fewer of those opportunities and decide that more funds should go to more established groups.
I can say that while we were happy with the decisions we made, the team keenly felt the time pressure of our last (first) granting round, and would have liked more time than we had available (due to what seemed to me to be teething problems that should not apply to future rounds) to look into several of the grant applications we considered.
What do you mean by ‘expert team’ in this regard? In particular, if you consider yourself or the other fund managers to be experts, would you being willing to qualify or operationalize that expertise?
I ask because when the EA Fund management teams were first announced, there was a question about why there weren’t ‘experts’ in the traditional sense on the team, i.e., what makes you think you’d be as good as managing the Long-Term Future Fund as a Ph.D. in AI, biosecurity, or nuclear security (assuming when we talk about ‘long-term future’ we mostly in practice mean ‘existential risk reduction’)?
I ask because when the new EA Funds management teams were announced, someone asked the same question, and I couldn’t think of a very good answer. So I figure it’d be best to get the answer from you, in case it gets asked of any us again, which seems likely?
Roughly how much time per month/year does each of the fund managers currently expect to spend on investigating, discussing, and deciding on grant opportunities?
Rough fermi on how much time I expect to spend on this:
I spent about 12 hours on the investigations of the last round, and about 2 hours a week since then on various smaller tasks and discussions about potential grantees. I spent less time than I wanted to since we made the first round of grants, so I expect to settle in at something closer to 3-4 hours per week. I expect this will be higher than the other fund members.
In the long-run I expect that the majority of time I spend on this will be in conversations with potential grantees and the other members of the fund, about models of impact of various types of projects, and long-term future strategy in general. I think I would find those conversations useful independently of my work for the fund, so if you are interested in net-costs you might want to weigh that only at 50% or so. Though I am not even sure whether the net-cost for me is negative since I expect the fund will be a good vehicle for me for me to have more focused conversations and modeling about the long-term future and I can’t come up with an obviously better vehicle to do so.
So, in terms of time I will spend doing work that is related to this fund, I expect to settle in around 3-4 hours per week, with peak periods of about 15 hours per week about 4 times a year. Though how much of that is counterfactual and whether I experience any net cost is unclear, probably at least 20% of that time is dead-loss in terms of boring logistical tasks and other things that I don’t expect to gain from much long term, but I also expect to gain at least some benefit from being on the fund and the opportunities for learning it will open up for me.
Is there anything the EA community can do to make it easier for yourself and other fund managers to spend more time as you’d like to on grantmaking decisions, especially executive time spent on the decision-making?
I’m thinking of stuff like the CEA allocating more staff or volunteer time to helping the EA Funds managers take care of lower-level, ‘boring logistical tasks’ that are part of their responsibilities, outsourcing some of the questions you might have to EA Facebook groups so you don’t have to waste time doing internet searches anyone could do, etc. Stuff like that.
This is the sort of question I could easily spend a lot of time trying to forge a perfect answer to, so I’m going to instead provide a faster and probably less satisfying first try, and time permitting come back and clarify.
I see significant justification for the existence of the fund being pooling funds from several sources to justify more research than individual donors would justify given the size of their donations (there are other good reasons for the fund to exist; this is one of them). I’d like to have the expert team spend as much time as the size of each grant justifies. Given the background knowledge that the LTF Fund expert team has, the amount of time justified is going to vary by size of grant, how much we already know about the people involved, the project, the field they’re working in and many other factors.
So, (my faster and less satisfying answer:) I don’t know how much time we’re going to spend. More if we find granting opportunities from people we know less about, in fields we know less about; less if we find fewer of those opportunities and decide that more funds should go to more established groups.
I can say that while we were happy with the decisions we made, the team keenly felt the time pressure of our last (first) granting round, and would have liked more time than we had available (due to what seemed to me to be teething problems that should not apply to future rounds) to look into several of the grant applications we considered.
What do you mean by ‘expert team’ in this regard? In particular, if you consider yourself or the other fund managers to be experts, would you being willing to qualify or operationalize that expertise?
I ask because when the EA Fund management teams were first announced, there was a question about why there weren’t ‘experts’ in the traditional sense on the team, i.e., what makes you think you’d be as good as managing the Long-Term Future Fund as a Ph.D. in AI, biosecurity, or nuclear security (assuming when we talk about ‘long-term future’ we mostly in practice mean ‘existential risk reduction’)?
I ask because when the new EA Funds management teams were announced, someone asked the same question, and I couldn’t think of a very good answer. So I figure it’d be best to get the answer from you, in case it gets asked of any us again, which seems likely?