If someone told me about a temporary 5x increase in volume that understandably messed things up, I would think they were talking about a couple month timeframe, not 8 months to 2 years. Surely there’s some point at which you step back and realise you need to adapt your systems to scale with demand? E.g. automating deadline notifications.
It’s also not clear to me that either supply or demand for funding will go back to pre-LTFF levels, given the increased interest in AI safety from both potential donors and potential recipients.
We already have automated deadline notifications; I’m not sure why you think it’s especially helpful.
It’s also not clear to me that either supply or demand for funding will go back to pre-LTFF levels, given the increased interest in AI safety from both potential donors and potential recipients.
One potential hope is that other funders will step up in the longer term so it can reduce LTFF’S load; as an empirical matter I’ve gotten more skeptical about the short-term viability of such hopes in the last 18 months. [1]
Not long after I started, there were talks about sunsetting LTFF “soon” in favor of a dedicated program to do LTFF’s work hosted in a larger longtermist org. Empirically this still hasn’t happened and LTFF’s workload has very much increased rather than decreased.
Partially based on Asya’s comment in her reflections post that there was difficulty keeping track of deadlines, and partially an assumption that the reason for in some cases not having any communication with an applicant by their stated time-sensitive deadline was because that was not kept track of. It’s good to hear you were keeping track of this, although confusing to me that it didn’t help with this.
There are probably process fixes in addition to personnel constraints; like once you ignore the first deadline it becomes a lot easier to ignore future deadlines, both individually and as a cultural matter.
This is why I agreed with Ryan on “can’t even get it together on a basic level,” certainly as a fund manager I often felt like I didn’t have it together on a basic level , and I doubt that this opinion is unique. I think Caleb disagreed because from his vantage point other funders weren’t clearly doing better given the higher load across the board (and there’s some evidence they do worse); we ended up not settling the question on whether “basic level” should be defined in relation to peer organizations or in relation to how we internally feel about whether and how much things have gone wrong.
Probably the thing we want to do (in addition to having more capacity) is clearing out a backlog first and then assigning people to be responsible for other people’s deadlines. Figuring this out is currently one of our four highest priorities (but not the highest).
Ok, it makes sense that a temporary 5x in volume can really mess you up.
If someone told me about a temporary 5x increase in volume that understandably messed things up, I would think they were talking about a couple month timeframe, not 8 months to 2 years. Surely there’s some point at which you step back and realise you need to adapt your systems to scale with demand? E.g. automating deadline notifications.
It’s also not clear to me that either supply or demand for funding will go back to pre-LTFF levels, given the increased interest in AI safety from both potential donors and potential recipients.
We already have automated deadline notifications; I’m not sure why you think it’s especially helpful.
One potential hope is that other funders will step up in the longer term so it can reduce LTFF’S load; as an empirical matter I’ve gotten more skeptical about the short-term viability of such hopes in the last 18 months. [1]
Not long after I started, there were talks about sunsetting LTFF “soon” in favor of a dedicated program to do LTFF’s work hosted in a larger longtermist org. Empirically this still hasn’t happened and LTFF’s workload has very much increased rather than decreased.
Partially based on Asya’s comment in her reflections post that there was difficulty keeping track of deadlines, and partially an assumption that the reason for in some cases not having any communication with an applicant by their stated time-sensitive deadline was because that was not kept track of. It’s good to hear you were keeping track of this, although confusing to me that it didn’t help with this.
There are probably process fixes in addition to personnel constraints; like once you ignore the first deadline it becomes a lot easier to ignore future deadlines, both individually and as a cultural matter.
This is why I agreed with Ryan on “can’t even get it together on a basic level,” certainly as a fund manager I often felt like I didn’t have it together on a basic level , and I doubt that this opinion is unique. I think Caleb disagreed because from his vantage point other funders weren’t clearly doing better given the higher load across the board (and there’s some evidence they do worse); we ended up not settling the question on whether “basic level” should be defined in relation to peer organizations or in relation to how we internally feel about whether and how much things have gone wrong.
Probably the thing we want to do (in addition to having more capacity) is clearing out a backlog first and then assigning people to be responsible for other people’s deadlines. Figuring this out is currently one of our four highest priorities (but not the highest).
By ‘the above’ I meant my comment rather than your previous one. Have edited to make this clearer.