While we think this is extremely impactful, we expect many donors (especially those who are newer to the longtermist community) will prefer to support larger organisations whose work requires less context to understand. The Longtermism Fund aims to support those donors. We think there’s room for a new fund which takes into account the legibility of its grants, and puts greater emphasis on ensuring the reasoning behind each grant is explained in a way that will make sense to people with varying levels of context.
Not sure how I feel about this. Seems like this might make longtermism more scalable, and the cost of screening-off some opportunities. Do you expect the best opportunities to be above or below your bar for legibility? Do other people (e.g., from the LTFF or OpenPhil) agree with your view here? Personally I have some intuitions that it might be below.
Seems like this might make longtermism more scalable, and the cost of screening-off some opportunities.
The cost is lower than it naively looks because if the grantmakers are skilled, they should be able to understand what makes for a great-but-potentially-illegible grant, and forward it to other grantmakers.
I do agree with GWWC here and have been involved in some of the strategic decision-making that lead to launching this new fund. I’m excited to have a donation option that is less weird than LTFF for longtermists but still (like GWWC) see a lot of value in both donation opportunities existing.
I think that excellent but illegible projects already have (in my probably biased opinion) good funding options through both the LTFF and the FTX regranting program.
As Linch suggests, opportunities that seem promising but aren’t sufficiently legible can be referred to other funders to investigate.
We reached out to staff at Open Philanthropy about setting up this fund, and received positive feedback. The EA Funds team (with input from LTFF grant managers at the time) had also previously considered setting up a “Legible Longtermism Fund” — my understanding is the reason they didn’t was due to lack of capacity, but they were in favour of the idea.
Whether the best opportunities are sufficiently legible is an interesting question:
It may depend on whether you look at it in terms of cost-effectiveness, or total benefit:
In pure cost-effectiveness terms:
I think I may share your intuitions that some of the smaller grants the Long-Term Future Fund makes might be more cost-effective than the typical grant I expect the Longtermism Fund to make (though, it’s difficult to evaluate this in advance of the Longtermism Fund making grants!).
Though, we anticipate the Longtermism Fund’s requirement for legibility might, in some cases, be beneficial to cost-effectiveness. For example, we anticipate some organisations to prefer receiving grants from the Longtermism Fund (as it’s democratically funded and highly legible) than other funders. Per his comment, Caleb (from EA Funds) and a reviewer from OP share this view.
In total benefit terms:
My intuition, informed by just double-checking Open Phil’s and FTX FF’s respective grants databases, is that a significant amount of longtermist grantmaking goes to work that would be sufficiently legible for this fund to support.
There therefore seems to me to be plenty of sufficiently legible work to support.
My bottomline view is the effect of the fund will be to:
Increase the total amount of funding going to longtermist work. This may be especially important if longtermism manages to scale up significantly and funding requirements increase (e.g., successful megaprojects).
Changing the proportion of funding to legible/illegible opportunities provided by individual donors/large funders (i.e., the proportion of funding going to legible work provided by individual donors will increase).
Provide a funder that may be favourable to grantees who want to be funded by something democratically supported/highly legible.
I don’t think it’s ‘screening off’ opportunities that don’t fit meet its legibility requirement will make it more difficult for those organisations to receive funding.
Worth noting that I’m speaking as a Researcher at GWWC, whereas Longview is primarily responsible for grantmaking.
Provide a funder that may be favourable to grantees who want to be funded by something democratically supported/highly legible.
FWIW this is the most exciting ToC to me. In general (and speaking very coarsely) I think grantmakers should be optimizing to identify new vehicles to allow more great grants to be given, rather than e.g. better evaluations or improvements of existing opportunities, or fundraising.
Not sure how I feel about this. Seems like this might make longtermism more scalable, and the cost of screening-off some opportunities. Do you expect the best opportunities to be above or below your bar for legibility? Do other people (e.g., from the LTFF or OpenPhil) agree with your view here? Personally I have some intuitions that it might be below.
The cost is lower than it naively looks because if the grantmakers are skilled, they should be able to understand what makes for a great-but-potentially-illegible grant, and forward it to other grantmakers.
Good point!
I do agree with GWWC here and have been involved in some of the strategic decision-making that lead to launching this new fund. I’m excited to have a donation option that is less weird than LTFF for longtermists but still (like GWWC) see a lot of value in both donation opportunities existing.
I think that excellent but illegible projects already have (in my probably biased opinion) good funding options through both the LTFF and the FTX regranting program.
Thanks for your questions!
As Linch suggests, opportunities that seem promising but aren’t sufficiently legible can be referred to other funders to investigate.
We reached out to staff at Open Philanthropy about setting up this fund, and received positive feedback. The EA Funds team (with input from LTFF grant managers at the time) had also previously considered setting up a “Legible Longtermism Fund” — my understanding is the reason they didn’t was due to lack of capacity, but they were in favour of the idea.
Whether the best opportunities are sufficiently legible is an interesting question:
It may depend on whether you look at it in terms of cost-effectiveness, or total benefit:
In pure cost-effectiveness terms:
I think I may share your intuitions that some of the smaller grants the Long-Term Future Fund makes might be more cost-effective than the typical grant I expect the Longtermism Fund to make (though, it’s difficult to evaluate this in advance of the Longtermism Fund making grants!).
Though, we anticipate the Longtermism Fund’s requirement for legibility might, in some cases, be beneficial to cost-effectiveness. For example, we anticipate some organisations to prefer receiving grants from the Longtermism Fund (as it’s democratically funded and highly legible) than other funders. Per his comment, Caleb (from EA Funds) and a reviewer from OP share this view.
In total benefit terms:
My intuition, informed by just double-checking Open Phil’s and FTX FF’s respective grants databases, is that a significant amount of longtermist grantmaking goes to work that would be sufficiently legible for this fund to support.
There therefore seems to me to be plenty of sufficiently legible work to support.
My bottomline view is the effect of the fund will be to:
Increase the total amount of funding going to longtermist work. This may be especially important if longtermism manages to scale up significantly and funding requirements increase (e.g., successful megaprojects).
Changing the proportion of funding to legible/illegible opportunities provided by individual donors/large funders (i.e., the proportion of funding going to legible work provided by individual donors will increase).
Provide a funder that may be favourable to grantees who want to be funded by something democratically supported/highly legible.
I don’t think it’s ‘screening off’ opportunities that don’t fit meet its legibility requirement will make it more difficult for those organisations to receive funding.
Worth noting that I’m speaking as a Researcher at GWWC, whereas Longview is primarily responsible for grantmaking.
FWIW this is the most exciting ToC to me. In general (and speaking very coarsely) I think grantmakers should be optimizing to identify new vehicles to allow more great grants to be given, rather than e.g. better evaluations or improvements of existing opportunities, or fundraising.
Thanks Michael!