How many people work full-time and part-time on GPP? What are sustainable growth predictions?
Do you model yourself as a think-tank?
What think-tanks have you looked at, spoken to, or modelled yourself upon?
Have you reached out to e.g. RUSI, BASIC, etc? Do you plan to?
What are your plans for the next a) 6 months b) year c) 5 years?
In what ways are you experimenting and iterating?
How many people have read your most popular content?
What are your next few marginal hires?
If a reader wants to work for GPP, what should they do/study/write/etc?
If a reader wants to help GPP, what should they do?
What would you do with a) £2,000 b) £10,000 c) £20,000?
What do you think your room-for-more-funding is?
You’re based in the UK—there’s about to be an election, then five years of a new government. How does that affect your plans?
When do you aim to influence debate, and policy—i.e. over what timescale? Are you trying to influence policy in 10 years, 20?
Who are the key decision-makers/stakeholders in your area? Have you mapped them out—how they relate, what their responsibilities are?
What Government Departments are you mainly interested in? Which are you monitoring? Are there any consultations open at the moment that you are submitting to? Same question for Parliamentary Committees.
If a reader wants to help GPP, what should they do?
At the moment GPP is funding constrained. We have an enormous pipeline of work—at one end we have literally hundreds of ideas we would love to pursue, but we also have several person-years of work on the table which is simply adapting our existing research to a particular audience to have impact. Anyone who is either able to donate or knows someone who might be able to would be enormously helpful. Based on the experience of other EA organisations, it is possible that we will become talent-constrained within the next year or two.
Beyond that, we continue to value introductions to individuals in governments or foundations. We also have more of these introductions available than we can currently pursue all of, but this is something where variety and quality of the lead is important. Knowing we could access a particular type of individual is useful, even when we do not pursue the lead immediately. We have a good system for tracking these opportunities to pursue later. We would also love to be able to help academics focus their research directions with an eye to impact. Introductions to academics who may be receptive and are in a position to choose their research direction would therefore be great.
Lastly, we really value challenge to our ideas. This AMA has already thrown up some questions that will change how we plan and think about our work. Anyone is welcome to send me critiques either as a PM or emailing seb[at]prioritisation-dot-org. I have had some extremely productive follow-on conversations with EAs who sent me feedback like that.
What would you do with a) £2,000 b) £10,000 c) £20,000?
At the moment, additional funding goes towards making sure we have a sustainable foundation for the organisation. Best-practice is to have 12 months of reserves, which at this point means raising an additional £20-25k (this is a rough number and does not include some pledged donations not yet received). Once we have raised that level, we would like to hire an additional member of staff. We expect, counting overhead costs like office space, HR, finance etc. that an additional staff member would cost us £35-40k. In order to offer credible job-security to a new hire, we would like to have at least a full year of reserves set aside to fund that hire.
All this means that, in order to comfortably hire a new staff member in the next CEA recruitment cycle we are raising towards a target of £100,000.
A picture of the historical unit costs of some of our outputs (to be distinguished from outcomes) is available in our strategy document, although these are very rough estimates. You can also find more details of our funding needs.
What do you think your room-for-more-funding is?
I think we could comfortably absorb £150,000 (which would build 12 months of reserves and allow us to hire two researchers, and possibly an intern). Funds beyond that could be put to creative use (for example, hiring researchers qua the University is more expensive, but might let us get better talent) but might be better directed at other organisations.
You’re based in the UK—there’s about to be an election, then five years of a new government. How does that affect your plans?
At the moment, individuals in government are largely distracted by the upcoming elections, so we have deprioritised outreach to UK policy-makers. We plan to spend the time until the election (May 7th) preparing policy briefs and fundraising so that we can focus on policy outreach in the months following the election. Conventional wisdom is that this is the best time to pursue policy objectives.
We have probably not devoted enough resources to developing contacts in the Opposition. The election is too close to call, so this may not end up being a problem, but we are open to pursuing strong leads in this period despite the attention of politicians being elsewhere.
Who are the key decision-makers/stakeholders in your area? Have you mapped them out—how they relate, what their responsibilities are?
What Government Departments are you mainly interested in? Which are you monitoring? Are there any consultations open at the moment that you are submitting to? Same question for Parliamentary Committees.
Because we are trying to appeal to such a broad range of communities and enable comparison between them, there are a very large number of stakeholders. Within the UK government, we have the most to say to similarly broad organisations (Cabinet Office and Treasury) as well as departments like DFID or DoH (similarly PHE) where we have specific interests that overlap. Similarly, within foundations, we see many existing metacharity organisations as stakeholders to engage with (including GiveWell, Copenhagen Consensus, DCP, WHO and others).
Consultations and parliamentary committees are an excellent point—this is something that I’ve been monitoring since I joined the team. In that period (just under two months) we have not seen any for which we felt we had sufficiently valuable things to contribute (which were also a priority for us). It is too early to say, though, whether that avenue will prove effective in the long run.
How many people work full-time and part-time on GPP? What are sustainable growth predictions?
I and Owen effectively work full-time on GPP (Owen has some teaching commitments as well). Toby Ord, Rob Wiblin, and Niel Bowerman all contribute irregularly to GPP projects, averaging a couple hours a week each. We aim to hire 1-2 new staff this year depending on fundraising.
Do you model yourself as a think-tank?
Somewhat, although think tanks have a wide variety of models and the type is not that well-defined (some have barely any staff while others have hundreds; some mostly lobby while others mostly do research). We are similar to many think tanks in that our goal is to influence policy and academic work without being a formal part of either system. Some of the future models of GPP look less like a think-tank.
What think-tanks have you looked at, spoken to, or modelled yourself upon?
We’ve spoken to people at a few think tanks, about specific issues like fundraising rather than their general approach, but have not modelled ourselves on any particular one. I think this is a good point though, and we may have underinvested in this area. Would be great to have a conversation with you about this some time.
Have you reached out to e.g. RUSI, BASIC, etc? Do you plan to?
We have not and do not currently have plans to, although it might make sense in the future. Our current focus has been less on topics related to defense (our current work in existential risk, for example, is focused on civilian biosafety risks).
What are your plans for the next a) 6 months b) year c) 5 years?
For the next 6 months we plan to test out models for impact. At around that point we aim to use what we’ve learned to focus our work onto the model which appears most effective, while continuing to evaluate and explore options. We plan to review that decision periodically with the possibility of future ‘pivots’ (drawing on the best-practice start-up literature). Some of our work has natural timescales which are shorter than other parts, so we will be able to reach conclusions earlier.
Models we are considering have strong commonalities and build off of our skills and current work, but might look different operationally. They include, for example, a focused policy think-tank, a policy evaluation think-tank, a policy evaluation consultancy, an academic organisation trying to seed ‘prioritisation’ as an academic discipline, or a cause comparison meta-charity organisation.
In what ways are you experimenting and iterating?
In our work-plan we divide activities around impact strategies. For example, one work-stream is to produce a really focused policy proposal worked through at a very detailed level and to get lobby groups in that field to push it forward. Another is to engage with an existing policy evaluation framework and suggest specific improvements. Once we do one, for example by producing a ‘topic primer’ on Unprecedented Technological Risks, we deprioritise similar activities to try to get more information about other routes to impact. By doing this, and evaluating the impact of each approach, we plan to focus down to a small number of effective and synergistic mechanisms for impact.
We are very aware that some of our approaches will have a high intrinsic variance, and are trying to correct for that in how we assess progress. Clearly, however, this will not be easy since we can never get a satisfactory sample size.
We are also ramping up the work we do to measure impact, both by getting better at tracking our inputs and by asking for more feedback on our outputs. Our recent push to increase engagement with our work is also partly in order to increase the quality of the feedback we get from producing it.
How many people have read your most popular content?
One of the many reasons we moved to our new website is that our analytics set up when we were using part of the FHI page was not everything we could have wanted. This makes it hard to give a confident answer to your question. Our top post got around 1000 page views over the last year, but some of our high-quality material such as the report on Unprecedented Technological Risks, was released as pdf and we do not have tracking numbers.
However, it is worth noting that monthly traffic to our website is up 5x between the month to today and the previous month, which makes the historic numbers less relevant. This is mostly because we now have a dedicated website, a mailing list, a facebook page, and a twitter account. As we continue to build up the base of subscribers, we expect this to grow.
When do you aim to influence debate, and policy—i.e. over what timescale? Are you trying to influence policy in 10 years, 20?
A lot of uncertainty comes into projections of future impact, and timescale is a major part of that. So work which aims for policy impact in 10 years doesn’t look very different from work which aims at impact in 20 years—in both cases your error bars are easily wide enough to include the other date.
I can say that 5 − 15 years is probably a more appropriate timescale than 1 − 3. While we will be engaging with policy makers on what seem like important questions in the shorter term, a large part of the value of this is in learning.
If a reader wants to work for GPP, what should they do/study/write/etc?
There is a wide range of topics that may be useful to learn about for prioritisation work. Knowledge of economics and policy are high on the list; for some projects statistics, philosophy, history, mathematical modelling, and science may also be relevant. Reading the material produced by us and other actors in the prioritisation community is also a great idea. The Copenhagen Consensus and the Open Philanthropy Project both have some excellent work. Some individual bloggers in the EA community (such as Carl Shulman, Katja Grace, and Paul Christiano) are well worth checking out. Additionally, work outside the EA community in topics like welfare or development economics, campaigning, or politics may be very relevant. Reading this could let the reader work out which parts of the space she finds most compelling, and which bits of research she could respond to.
If she can write pieces which engage with our research topics, that could definitely help. It’s neither necessary nor sufficient for working for GPP, of course, but it could help us learn about her skills and how she might fit into our team, and could help her learn about which parts of the field she is a good fit for. We may also have a few opportunities for volunteers to help us.
It is unlikely that changing what you are working on in order just to be more likely to be hired by GPP makes sense. This is partly because far more people have expressed interest in working for us and are strong candidates than we can hire. However it’s a valuable area and there are several other roles and organisations where similar knowledge and experience would help.
How many people work full-time and part-time on GPP? What are sustainable growth predictions?
Do you model yourself as a think-tank?
What think-tanks have you looked at, spoken to, or modelled yourself upon?
Have you reached out to e.g. RUSI, BASIC, etc? Do you plan to?
What are your plans for the next a) 6 months b) year c) 5 years?
In what ways are you experimenting and iterating?
How many people have read your most popular content?
What are your next few marginal hires?
If a reader wants to work for GPP, what should they do/study/write/etc?
If a reader wants to help GPP, what should they do?
What would you do with a) £2,000 b) £10,000 c) £20,000?
What do you think your room-for-more-funding is?
You’re based in the UK—there’s about to be an election, then five years of a new government. How does that affect your plans?
When do you aim to influence debate, and policy—i.e. over what timescale? Are you trying to influence policy in 10 years, 20?
Who are the key decision-makers/stakeholders in your area? Have you mapped them out—how they relate, what their responsibilities are?
What Government Departments are you mainly interested in? Which are you monitoring? Are there any consultations open at the moment that you are submitting to? Same question for Parliamentary Committees.
At the moment GPP is funding constrained. We have an enormous pipeline of work—at one end we have literally hundreds of ideas we would love to pursue, but we also have several person-years of work on the table which is simply adapting our existing research to a particular audience to have impact. Anyone who is either able to donate or knows someone who might be able to would be enormously helpful. Based on the experience of other EA organisations, it is possible that we will become talent-constrained within the next year or two.
Beyond that, we continue to value introductions to individuals in governments or foundations. We also have more of these introductions available than we can currently pursue all of, but this is something where variety and quality of the lead is important. Knowing we could access a particular type of individual is useful, even when we do not pursue the lead immediately. We have a good system for tracking these opportunities to pursue later. We would also love to be able to help academics focus their research directions with an eye to impact. Introductions to academics who may be receptive and are in a position to choose their research direction would therefore be great.
Lastly, we really value challenge to our ideas. This AMA has already thrown up some questions that will change how we plan and think about our work. Anyone is welcome to send me critiques either as a PM or emailing seb[at]prioritisation-dot-org. I have had some extremely productive follow-on conversations with EAs who sent me feedback like that.
At the moment, additional funding goes towards making sure we have a sustainable foundation for the organisation. Best-practice is to have 12 months of reserves, which at this point means raising an additional £20-25k (this is a rough number and does not include some pledged donations not yet received). Once we have raised that level, we would like to hire an additional member of staff. We expect, counting overhead costs like office space, HR, finance etc. that an additional staff member would cost us £35-40k. In order to offer credible job-security to a new hire, we would like to have at least a full year of reserves set aside to fund that hire.
All this means that, in order to comfortably hire a new staff member in the next CEA recruitment cycle we are raising towards a target of £100,000.
A picture of the historical unit costs of some of our outputs (to be distinguished from outcomes) is available in our strategy document, although these are very rough estimates. You can also find more details of our funding needs.
I think we could comfortably absorb £150,000 (which would build 12 months of reserves and allow us to hire two researchers, and possibly an intern). Funds beyond that could be put to creative use (for example, hiring researchers qua the University is more expensive, but might let us get better talent) but might be better directed at other organisations.
At the moment, individuals in government are largely distracted by the upcoming elections, so we have deprioritised outreach to UK policy-makers. We plan to spend the time until the election (May 7th) preparing policy briefs and fundraising so that we can focus on policy outreach in the months following the election. Conventional wisdom is that this is the best time to pursue policy objectives.
We have probably not devoted enough resources to developing contacts in the Opposition. The election is too close to call, so this may not end up being a problem, but we are open to pursuing strong leads in this period despite the attention of politicians being elsewhere.
Because we are trying to appeal to such a broad range of communities and enable comparison between them, there are a very large number of stakeholders. Within the UK government, we have the most to say to similarly broad organisations (Cabinet Office and Treasury) as well as departments like DFID or DoH (similarly PHE) where we have specific interests that overlap. Similarly, within foundations, we see many existing metacharity organisations as stakeholders to engage with (including GiveWell, Copenhagen Consensus, DCP, WHO and others).
Consultations and parliamentary committees are an excellent point—this is something that I’ve been monitoring since I joined the team. In that period (just under two months) we have not seen any for which we felt we had sufficiently valuable things to contribute (which were also a priority for us). It is too early to say, though, whether that avenue will prove effective in the long run.
Do you receive any funding from CEA or do you have a separate budget?
I and Owen effectively work full-time on GPP (Owen has some teaching commitments as well). Toby Ord, Rob Wiblin, and Niel Bowerman all contribute irregularly to GPP projects, averaging a couple hours a week each. We aim to hire 1-2 new staff this year depending on fundraising.
Somewhat, although think tanks have a wide variety of models and the type is not that well-defined (some have barely any staff while others have hundreds; some mostly lobby while others mostly do research). We are similar to many think tanks in that our goal is to influence policy and academic work without being a formal part of either system. Some of the future models of GPP look less like a think-tank.
We’ve spoken to people at a few think tanks, about specific issues like fundraising rather than their general approach, but have not modelled ourselves on any particular one. I think this is a good point though, and we may have underinvested in this area. Would be great to have a conversation with you about this some time.
We have not and do not currently have plans to, although it might make sense in the future. Our current focus has been less on topics related to defense (our current work in existential risk, for example, is focused on civilian biosafety risks).
For the next 6 months we plan to test out models for impact. At around that point we aim to use what we’ve learned to focus our work onto the model which appears most effective, while continuing to evaluate and explore options. We plan to review that decision periodically with the possibility of future ‘pivots’ (drawing on the best-practice start-up literature). Some of our work has natural timescales which are shorter than other parts, so we will be able to reach conclusions earlier.
Models we are considering have strong commonalities and build off of our skills and current work, but might look different operationally. They include, for example, a focused policy think-tank, a policy evaluation think-tank, a policy evaluation consultancy, an academic organisation trying to seed ‘prioritisation’ as an academic discipline, or a cause comparison meta-charity organisation.
In our work-plan we divide activities around impact strategies. For example, one work-stream is to produce a really focused policy proposal worked through at a very detailed level and to get lobby groups in that field to push it forward. Another is to engage with an existing policy evaluation framework and suggest specific improvements. Once we do one, for example by producing a ‘topic primer’ on Unprecedented Technological Risks, we deprioritise similar activities to try to get more information about other routes to impact. By doing this, and evaluating the impact of each approach, we plan to focus down to a small number of effective and synergistic mechanisms for impact.
We are very aware that some of our approaches will have a high intrinsic variance, and are trying to correct for that in how we assess progress. Clearly, however, this will not be easy since we can never get a satisfactory sample size.
We are also ramping up the work we do to measure impact, both by getting better at tracking our inputs and by asking for more feedback on our outputs. Our recent push to increase engagement with our work is also partly in order to increase the quality of the feedback we get from producing it.
One of the many reasons we moved to our new website is that our analytics set up when we were using part of the FHI page was not everything we could have wanted. This makes it hard to give a confident answer to your question. Our top post got around 1000 page views over the last year, but some of our high-quality material such as the report on Unprecedented Technological Risks, was released as pdf and we do not have tracking numbers.
However, it is worth noting that monthly traffic to our website is up 5x between the month to today and the previous month, which makes the historic numbers less relevant. This is mostly because we now have a dedicated website, a mailing list, a facebook page, and a twitter account. As we continue to build up the base of subscribers, we expect this to grow.
Answered above
New website is looking slick.
A lot of uncertainty comes into projections of future impact, and timescale is a major part of that. So work which aims for policy impact in 10 years doesn’t look very different from work which aims at impact in 20 years—in both cases your error bars are easily wide enough to include the other date.
I can say that 5 − 15 years is probably a more appropriate timescale than 1 − 3. While we will be engaging with policy makers on what seem like important questions in the shorter term, a large part of the value of this is in learning.
There is a wide range of topics that may be useful to learn about for prioritisation work. Knowledge of economics and policy are high on the list; for some projects statistics, philosophy, history, mathematical modelling, and science may also be relevant. Reading the material produced by us and other actors in the prioritisation community is also a great idea. The Copenhagen Consensus and the Open Philanthropy Project both have some excellent work. Some individual bloggers in the EA community (such as Carl Shulman, Katja Grace, and Paul Christiano) are well worth checking out. Additionally, work outside the EA community in topics like welfare or development economics, campaigning, or politics may be very relevant. Reading this could let the reader work out which parts of the space she finds most compelling, and which bits of research she could respond to.
If she can write pieces which engage with our research topics, that could definitely help. It’s neither necessary nor sufficient for working for GPP, of course, but it could help us learn about her skills and how she might fit into our team, and could help her learn about which parts of the field she is a good fit for. We may also have a few opportunities for volunteers to help us.
It is unlikely that changing what you are working on in order just to be more likely to be hired by GPP makes sense. This is partly because far more people have expressed interest in working for us and are strong candidates than we can hire. However it’s a valuable area and there are several other roles and organisations where similar knowledge and experience would help.