Somewhat embarrassingly we’ve been overwhelmed enough with grant requests in the past few months that we haven’t had much time to discuss grants, so there hasn’t been much opportunity for things to be controversial among the fund managers.
But guessing about what kinds of things I disagree most with other people on, my sense is that grants that are very PR-risky, and grants that are more oriented around a theory of change that involves people getting better at thinking and reasoning (e.g. “rationality development”), instead of directly being helpful with solving technical problems or acquiring resources that could be used by the broader longtermist community, tend to be the two most controversial categories. But again, I want to emphasize that I don’t have a ton of data here, since the vast majority of grants are currently just evaluated by one fund manager and then sanity-checked by the fund chair, so there aren’t a lot of contexts in which disagreements like this could surface.
I am not sure these are the most controversial, but I have had several conversations when evaluating AIS grants where I disagreed substantively with other fund managers. I think there are some object-level disagreements (what kinds of research do we expect to be productive) as well as meta-level disagreements (like “what should the epistemic process look like that decides what types of research get funded” or “how do our actions change the incentives landscape within EA/rationality/AIS”).
What kinds of grants tend to be most controversial among fund managers?
Somewhat embarrassingly we’ve been overwhelmed enough with grant requests in the past few months that we haven’t had much time to discuss grants, so there hasn’t been much opportunity for things to be controversial among the fund managers.
But guessing about what kinds of things I disagree most with other people on, my sense is that grants that are very PR-risky, and grants that are more oriented around a theory of change that involves people getting better at thinking and reasoning (e.g. “rationality development”), instead of directly being helpful with solving technical problems or acquiring resources that could be used by the broader longtermist community, tend to be the two most controversial categories. But again, I want to emphasize that I don’t have a ton of data here, since the vast majority of grants are currently just evaluated by one fund manager and then sanity-checked by the fund chair, so there aren’t a lot of contexts in which disagreements like this could surface.
I am not sure these are the most controversial, but I have had several conversations when evaluating AIS grants where I disagreed substantively with other fund managers. I think there are some object-level disagreements (what kinds of research do we expect to be productive) as well as meta-level disagreements (like “what should the epistemic process look like that decides what types of research get funded” or “how do our actions change the incentives landscape within EA/rationality/AIS”).
I’ve answered both you and Quadratic Reciprocity here.