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?
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?