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.
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.