Thanks for posting! Your discussion of mistakes and rationality-and-epistemics-focused community-building reminded of this post, particularly Will’s comment about funding/supporting a red team to criticize EA/longtermism. Is Open Phil open to doing something like this?
Thoughtful and well-informed criticism is really useful, and I’d be delighted for us to support it; criticism that successfully changes minds and points to important errors is IMO among the most impactful kinds of writing.
In general, I think we’d evaluate it similarly to other kinds of grant proposals, trying to gauge how relevant the proposal is to the cause area and how good a fit the team is to doing useful work. In this case, I think part of being a good fit for the work is having a deep understanding of EA/longtermism, having really strong epistemics, and buying into the high-level goal of doing as much good as possible.
Thanks for posting! Your discussion of mistakes and rationality-and-epistemics-focused community-building reminded of this post, particularly Will’s comment about funding/supporting a red team to criticize EA/longtermism. Is Open Phil open to doing something like this?
Thoughtful and well-informed criticism is really useful, and I’d be delighted for us to support it; criticism that successfully changes minds and points to important errors is IMO among the most impactful kinds of writing.
In general, I think we’d evaluate it similarly to other kinds of grant proposals, trying to gauge how relevant the proposal is to the cause area and how good a fit the team is to doing useful work. In this case, I think part of being a good fit for the work is having a deep understanding of EA/longtermism, having really strong epistemics, and buying into the high-level goal of doing as much good as possible.