What are the reasons why this report was published over 8 months after these grant recommendations were made? Is there anything support from the rest of the EA community could ameliorate any of those bottlenecks for the LTFF, other EA Funds, fund advisors and/or the Centre for Effective Altruism?
I’m aware these may be sensitive questions, so I’m providing in this comment my rationale for asking these questions to demonstrate I mean to ask them in a respectful and constructive way.
First, I don’t mean to imply one or more individuals have been procrastinating and not fulfilling some personal obligation to ensure reports are published in a timely manner. I recognize it as a structural problem of the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) and grant advisors being extremely busy with many, more important professional responsibilities. I would agree with any advisors their other professional responsibilities are a greater priority than only publishing the grant recommendations once they’ve already been made.
I’ve interacted with dozens of people who are wary of submitting grant applications because they feel like they don’t have enough information to be confident it’s worth the effort to submit a grant application. That’s a solvable problem but it’s exacerbated by a delay in access to information that would better inform their decision.
There are various things to be done to solve the problem but for specifically hastening the rate at which grant recommendation reports are published, my opinion is that it would be worthwhile for some be hired and paid as an assistant grant advisors can delegate basic tasks to and save their own time.
I could afford to donate a sum of my own money toward that end but I doubt it’d be enough. I’m confident enough in the value of this prospect, though, that I’m willing to advocate for others to donate to such an end too, or write-up an EA Forum post making the case for it. I’m confident enough in this that I might still consider it to be a good idea even if grant advisors themselves would think it unnecessary.
Thanks for asking this, this didn’t feel rude and I think it’s a very reasonable question. I think that this report was released much later than we would have liked.
Firstly I want to clarify that EA Funds is not part of CEA, it was spun out a few years ago and I now run by me, whereas CEA is run by Max Dalton. Asya Bergal chairs the LTFF.
Asya may want to add more information below but my take is that EA Funds is bottlenecked on grant making capacity as well as good applications. Our goal is to make excellent grants and writing these reports trades off against grant making capacity. If we had more time I expect we’d put out these reports more quickly but I’m keen to try and protect the time of our part time fund managers as much as possible. I would happily hire more part time fund managers but we have found it hard to find people who are at our current bar and we have a reasonable amount of fund manager turn over (as our fund managers pursue other valuable projects).
We do have 1 assistant fund manager on EAIF and are hiring some more, but I don’t expect them to speed up this process very much (as the fund managers themselves need to write up why they decided to fund the project). We will soon have a public grants database with each project we fund, but I’m less excited about just reporting our grant making as opposed to explaining our reasoning (as most of my theory of change for why these reports are useful is more around improving EA community project taste or being transparent in a high fidelity way).
I’m a bit confused about why people aren’t sure whether it’s worth their time to apply when the form takes less than an hour and people can apply for arbitrarily large amounts of money, the EV/hour seems very high (based on previous report acceptance rates).
Another factor which I expect to get push back on is that being transparent just ends up being very operationally costly and it’s not obvious that this is the best use of our time relative to supporting grantees, approving more grants, or trying to solicit better applications. Also a large proportion of our funding comes from Open Phil, which in my view does decrease the requirement to be transparent outside of trying to encourage good community norms, and steer future EA projects.
I’m a bit confused about why people aren’t sure whether it’s worth their time to apply when the form takes less than an hour and people can apply for arbitrarily large amounts of money, the EV/hour seems very high (based on previous report acceptance rates).
I don’t know how representative it is, but I know one person that worked pretty hard on the “less than an hour” application form. Asked feedback and had calls with several people to optimize it, rewrote it from scratch at least once, probably spent >30 hours on it in total. It was probably worth it, they got a big raise and a much more exciting job. It was understandably life changing, and I think they’ll do a lot of good!
Being so life changing, I understand why applying could be a large investment, it can be large amounts of money on the line.
What are the reasons why this report was published over 8 months after these grant recommendations were made? Is there anything support from the rest of the EA community could ameliorate any of those bottlenecks for the LTFF, other EA Funds, fund advisors and/or the Centre for Effective Altruism?
I’m aware these may be sensitive questions, so I’m providing in this comment my rationale for asking these questions to demonstrate I mean to ask them in a respectful and constructive way.
First, I don’t mean to imply one or more individuals have been procrastinating and not fulfilling some personal obligation to ensure reports are published in a timely manner. I recognize it as a structural problem of the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) and grant advisors being extremely busy with many, more important professional responsibilities. I would agree with any advisors their other professional responsibilities are a greater priority than only publishing the grant recommendations once they’ve already been made.
I’ve interacted with dozens of people who are wary of submitting grant applications because they feel like they don’t have enough information to be confident it’s worth the effort to submit a grant application. That’s a solvable problem but it’s exacerbated by a delay in access to information that would better inform their decision.
There are various things to be done to solve the problem but for specifically hastening the rate at which grant recommendation reports are published, my opinion is that it would be worthwhile for some be hired and paid as an assistant grant advisors can delegate basic tasks to and save their own time.
I could afford to donate a sum of my own money toward that end but I doubt it’d be enough. I’m confident enough in the value of this prospect, though, that I’m willing to advocate for others to donate to such an end too, or write-up an EA Forum post making the case for it. I’m confident enough in this that I might still consider it to be a good idea even if grant advisors themselves would think it unnecessary.
Thanks for asking this, this didn’t feel rude and I think it’s a very reasonable question. I think that this report was released much later than we would have liked.
Firstly I want to clarify that EA Funds is not part of CEA, it was spun out a few years ago and I now run by me, whereas CEA is run by Max Dalton. Asya Bergal chairs the LTFF.
Asya may want to add more information below but my take is that EA Funds is bottlenecked on grant making capacity as well as good applications. Our goal is to make excellent grants and writing these reports trades off against grant making capacity. If we had more time I expect we’d put out these reports more quickly but I’m keen to try and protect the time of our part time fund managers as much as possible. I would happily hire more part time fund managers but we have found it hard to find people who are at our current bar and we have a reasonable amount of fund manager turn over (as our fund managers pursue other valuable projects).
We do have 1 assistant fund manager on EAIF and are hiring some more, but I don’t expect them to speed up this process very much (as the fund managers themselves need to write up why they decided to fund the project). We will soon have a public grants database with each project we fund, but I’m less excited about just reporting our grant making as opposed to explaining our reasoning (as most of my theory of change for why these reports are useful is more around improving EA community project taste or being transparent in a high fidelity way).
I’m a bit confused about why people aren’t sure whether it’s worth their time to apply when the form takes less than an hour and people can apply for arbitrarily large amounts of money, the EV/hour seems very high (based on previous report acceptance rates).
Another factor which I expect to get push back on is that being transparent just ends up being very operationally costly and it’s not obvious that this is the best use of our time relative to supporting grantees, approving more grants, or trying to solicit better applications. Also a large proportion of our funding comes from Open Phil, which in my view does decrease the requirement to be transparent outside of trying to encourage good community norms, and steer future EA projects.
I don’t know how representative it is, but I know one person that worked pretty hard on the “less than an hour” application form. Asked feedback and had calls with several people to optimize it, rewrote it from scratch at least once, probably spent >30 hours on it in total.
It was probably worth it, they got a big raise and a much more exciting job. It was understandably life changing, and I think they’ll do a lot of good!
Being so life changing, I understand why applying could be a large investment, it can be large amounts of money on the line.