The level of malfunctioning that is going on here seems severe:
The two month average presumably includes a lot of easy decisions, not just hard ones.
The website still says LTFF will respond in 8 weeks (my emphasis)
The website says they may not respond within an applicant’s preferred deadline. But what it should actually say is that LTFF also may not respond within their own self-imposed deadline.
And then the website should indicate when, statistically, it does actually tend to give a response.
Moreover, my understanding is that weeks after these self-imposed deadlines, you still may have to send multiple emails and wait weeks longer to figure out what is going on.
Given all of the above, I would hope you could aim to get more than “somewhat better”, and have a more comprehensive plan of how to get there. I get that LTFF is pretty broke rn and that we need an OpenPhil alternative, and that there’s a 3:1 match going on, so probably it makes sense for LTFF to receive some funding for the time being. Also that you guys are trying hard to do good, probably currently shopping around unfunded grants etc. but there’s a part of me that thinks if you can’t even get it together on a basic level, then to find that OpenPhil alternative, we should be looking elsewhere.
The website still says LTFF will respond in 8 weeks (my emphasis)
Oof. Apologies, I thought we’ve fixed that everywhere already. Will try to fix asap.
but there’s a part of me that thinks if you can’t even get it together on a basic level, then to find that OpenPhil alternative, we should be looking elsewhere.
Yeah I think this is very fair. I do think the funding ecosystem is pretty broken in a bunch of ways and of course we’re a part of that; I’m reminded of Luke Muelhauser’s old comment about how MIRI’s operations got a lot better after he read Nonprofit Kit for Dummies.
We are trying to hire for a new LTFF chair, so if you or anybody else you know is excited to try to right the ship, please encourage them to apply! There are a number of ways we suck and a chair can prioritize speed at getting back to grantees as the first thing to fix.
I can also appreciate wanting a new solution rather than via fixing LTFF. For what it’s worth people have been consistently talking about shutting down LTFF in favor of a different org[1] approximately since I started volunteering here in early 2022; over the last 18 months I’ve gotten more pessimistic about replacements, which is one of the reasons why I decided to join ~full-time to try to fix it.
I think Manifund is faster than us (and iiuc the slowness of LTFF was a key reason that they’ve decided to make something new), donors reading this comment may be interested in donating to them.
but there’s a part of me that thinks if you can’t even get it together on a basic level, then to find that OpenPhil alternative, we should be looking elsewhere.
Is not “very fair”. Whilst I agree that we are slower than I’d like and slower than our website indicates I think it’s pretty unclear that Open Phil is generally faster than us, I have definitely heard similar complaints about Open Phil, SFF and Longview (all the current EA funders with a track record > 1 year). My sense is that Ryan has the impression that we are slower than the average funder, but I don’t have a great sense of how he could know this. If we aren’t particularly bad relative to some average of funders that have existed for a while, I think the claim “we don’t have it together on a basic level is” pretty unfair.
(after some discussion with Linch I think we disagree on what “get it together on a basic level means”, one thing that Linch and I both agree on is that we should be setting more accurate expectations with grantees (e.g. in some of the ways Ryan has suggested) and that if we had set more accurate expectations we would not be having more than 10% more impact)
Here we say that the LTFF between Jan 22 - April 23:
had a median response time of 29 days
evaluated >1000 applications
recommended ~$13M of funding across > 300 grants
Whilst using mostly part-time people (meaning our overheads are very low), dealing with complications from the FTX crash and running always-open general applications (which aim to be more flexible than round-based funds or specialised programs), and making grants in complex areas that don’t just directly funge with Open Phil (unlike, for example, Longview’s longtermism fund). It was pretty hard to get a sense of how much grantmaking Open Phil, SFF, Founders Pledge, and Longview have done over a similar timeframe (and a decent amount of what I do know isn’t sharable), but I currently think we stack up pretty well.
I’m aware that my general tone could leave you with the impression that I am not taking the delays seriously, when I do actually directionally agree. I do think we could be much quicker, and that it’s important. Primarily we‘ll be improving some of our internal processes and increasing capacity.
Not weighing in on LTFF specifically, but from having done a lot of traditional nonprofit fundraising, I’d guess two months is a faster response time than 80% of foundations/institutional funders, and one month is probably faster than like 95%+. My best guess at the average for traditional nonprofit funders is more like 3-6 months. I guess my impression is that even in the worst cases, EA Funds has been operating pretty well above average compared to the traditional nonprofit funding world (though perhaps that isn’t the right comparison). Given that LTFF is funding a lot of research, 2 months is almost certainly better than most academic grants.
My impression from what I think is a pretty large sample of EA funders and grants is also that EA Funds is the fastest turnaround time on average compared to the list you mention (which exceptions in some cases in both directions for EA Funds and other funders)
I think the core of the issue is that there’s unfortunately somewhat of a hierarchy of needs from a grant making org. That you’re operating at size, and in diverse areas, with always-open applications, and using part-time staff is impressive, but people will still judge you harshly if you struggling to perform your basic service.
Regarding these basics, we seem to agree that an OpenPhil alternative should accurately represent their evaluation timelines on the website, and should give an updated timeline when the stated grant decision time passes (at least on request).
With regard to speed, just objectively, LTFF is falling short of the self-imposed standard—“within eight weeks, and typically in just four weeks”. And I don’t think that standard is an inappropriate one, given that LTFF is a leaner operation than OpenPhil, and afaict, past-LTFF, past SFF, and Fast Grants all managed to be pretty quick.
That you’re struggling with the basics is what leads me to say that LTFF doesn’t “have it together”.
That you’re struggling with the basics is what leads me to say that LTFF doesn’t “have it together”.
Just FWIW, this feels kind of unfair, given that like, if our grant volume didn’t increase by like 5x over the past 1-2 years (and especially the last 8 months), we would probably be totally rocking it in terms of “the basics”.
Like, yeah, the funding ecosystem is still recovering from a major shock, and it feels kind of unfair to judge the LTFF performance on the basis of such an unprecedented context. My guess is things will settle into some healthy rhythm again when there is a new fund chair, and the basics will be better covered again, when the funding ecosystem settles into more of an equilibrium again.
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).
I deeply appreciate the degree to which this comment acknowledges issues and provides alternative organizations that may be better in specific respects. It has given me substantial respect for LTFF.
- Thanks for flagging that the EA Funds form still says that the funds will definitely get back in 8 weeks; I think that’s real bad.
- I agree that it would be good to have a comprehensive plan—personally, I think that if the LTFF fails to hire additional FT staff in the next few months (in particular, a FT chair), the fund should switch back to a round-based application system. But it’s ultimately not my call.
The level of malfunctioning that is going on here seems severe:
The two month average presumably includes a lot of easy decisions, not just hard ones.
The website still says LTFF will respond in 8 weeks (my emphasis)
The website says they may not respond within an applicant’s preferred deadline. But what it should actually say is that LTFF also may not respond within their own self-imposed deadline.
And then the website should indicate when, statistically, it does actually tend to give a response.
Moreover, my understanding is that weeks after these self-imposed deadlines, you still may have to send multiple emails and wait weeks longer to figure out what is going on.
Given all of the above, I would hope you could aim to get more than “somewhat better”, and have a more comprehensive plan of how to get there. I get that LTFF is pretty broke rn and that we need an OpenPhil alternative, and that there’s a 3:1 match going on, so probably it makes sense for LTFF to receive some funding for the time being. Also that you guys are trying hard to do good, probably currently shopping around unfunded grants etc. but there’s a part of me that thinks if you can’t even get it together on a basic level, then to find that OpenPhil alternative, we should be looking elsewhere.
Oof. Apologies, I thought we’ve fixed that everywhere already. Will try to fix asap.
Yeah I think this is very fair. I do think the funding ecosystem is pretty broken in a bunch of ways and of course we’re a part of that; I’m reminded of Luke Muelhauser’s old comment about how MIRI’s operations got a lot better after he read Nonprofit Kit for Dummies.
We are trying to hire for a new LTFF chair, so if you or anybody else you know is excited to try to right the ship, please encourage them to apply! There are a number of ways we suck and a chair can prioritize speed at getting back to grantees as the first thing to fix.
I can also appreciate wanting a new solution rather than via fixing LTFF. For what it’s worth people have been consistently talking about shutting down LTFF in favor of a different org[1] approximately since I started volunteering here in early 2022; over the last 18 months I’ve gotten more pessimistic about replacements, which is one of the reasons why I decided to join ~full-time to try to fix it.
I think Manifund is faster than us (and iiuc the slowness of LTFF was a key reason that they’ve decided to make something new), donors reading this comment may be interested in donating to them.
Including a different arm at existing orgs like Open Phil for handling LTFF-like work.
Fwiw I think that this
Is not “very fair”. Whilst I agree that we are slower than I’d like and slower than our website indicates I think it’s pretty unclear that Open Phil is generally faster than us, I have definitely heard similar complaints about Open Phil, SFF and Longview (all the current EA funders with a track record > 1 year). My sense is that Ryan has the impression that we are slower than the average funder, but I don’t have a great sense of how he could know this. If we aren’t particularly bad relative to some average of funders that have existed for a while, I think the claim “we don’t have it together on a basic level is” pretty unfair.
(after some discussion with Linch I think we disagree on what “get it together on a basic level means”, one thing that Linch and I both agree on is that we should be setting more accurate expectations with grantees (e.g. in some of the ways Ryan has suggested) and that if we had set more accurate expectations we would not be having more than 10% more impact)
Here we say that the LTFF between Jan 22 - April 23:
had a median response time of 29 days
evaluated >1000 applications
recommended ~$13M of funding across > 300 grants
Whilst using mostly part-time people (meaning our overheads are very low), dealing with complications from the FTX crash and running always-open general applications (which aim to be more flexible than round-based funds or specialised programs), and making grants in complex areas that don’t just directly funge with Open Phil (unlike, for example, Longview’s longtermism fund). It was pretty hard to get a sense of how much grantmaking Open Phil, SFF, Founders Pledge, and Longview have done over a similar timeframe (and a decent amount of what I do know isn’t sharable), but I currently think we stack up pretty well.
I’m aware that my general tone could leave you with the impression that I am not taking the delays seriously, when I do actually directionally agree. I do think we could be much quicker, and that it’s important. Primarily we‘ll be improving some of our internal processes and increasing capacity.
Not weighing in on LTFF specifically, but from having done a lot of traditional nonprofit fundraising, I’d guess two months is a faster response time than 80% of foundations/institutional funders, and one month is probably faster than like 95%+. My best guess at the average for traditional nonprofit funders is more like 3-6 months. I guess my impression is that even in the worst cases, EA Funds has been operating pretty well above average compared to the traditional nonprofit funding world (though perhaps that isn’t the right comparison). Given that LTFF is funding a lot of research, 2 months is almost certainly better than most academic grants.
My impression from what I think is a pretty large sample of EA funders and grants is also that EA Funds is the fastest turnaround time on average compared to the list you mention (which exceptions in some cases in both directions for EA Funds and other funders)
I think the core of the issue is that there’s unfortunately somewhat of a hierarchy of needs from a grant making org. That you’re operating at size, and in diverse areas, with always-open applications, and using part-time staff is impressive, but people will still judge you harshly if you struggling to perform your basic service.
Regarding these basics, we seem to agree that an OpenPhil alternative should accurately represent their evaluation timelines on the website, and should give an updated timeline when the stated grant decision time passes (at least on request).
With regard to speed, just objectively, LTFF is falling short of the self-imposed standard—“within eight weeks, and typically in just four weeks”. And I don’t think that standard is an inappropriate one, given that LTFF is a leaner operation than OpenPhil, and afaict, past-LTFF, past SFF, and Fast Grants all managed to be pretty quick.
That you’re struggling with the basics is what leads me to say that LTFF doesn’t “have it together”.
Just FWIW, this feels kind of unfair, given that like, if our grant volume didn’t increase by like 5x over the past 1-2 years (and especially the last 8 months), we would probably be totally rocking it in terms of “the basics”.
Like, yeah, the funding ecosystem is still recovering from a major shock, and it feels kind of unfair to judge the LTFF performance on the basis of such an unprecedented context. My guess is things will settle into some healthy rhythm again when there is a new fund chair, and the basics will be better covered again, when the funding ecosystem settles into more of an equilibrium again.
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.
I deeply appreciate the degree to which this comment acknowledges issues and provides alternative organizations that may be better in specific respects. It has given me substantial respect for LTFF.
Hey Ryan:
- Thanks for flagging that the EA Funds form still says that the funds will definitely get back in 8 weeks; I think that’s real bad.
- I agree that it would be good to have a comprehensive plan—personally, I think that if the LTFF fails to hire additional FT staff in the next few months (in particular, a FT chair), the fund should switch back to a round-based application system. But it’s ultimately not my call.
This blogpost of mine: Quick thoughts on Manifund’s application to Open Philanthropy might be of interest here.