Most these ideas sound interesting to me. However —
- OpenPhil making a statement to fund high quality work they disagree with
I’m not quite sure what this means? I’m reading it as “funding work which looks set to make good progress on a goal OP don’t believe is especially important, or even net bad”. And that doesn’t seem right to me.
Similar ideas that could be good —
OP/other grantmakers clarifying that they will consider funding you on equal terms even if you’ve publicly criticised OP/that grantmaker
More funding for thoughtful criticisms of effective altruism and longtermism (theory and practice)
Perhaps a general “willingness to commit” X % funding to criticism of areas which are heavily funded by the EA-aligned funding organization could work as a general heuristic for enabling the second idea.
(e.g. if “pro current X-risk” research in general gets N funding then some % of N would be made available for “critical work” in the same area. But in science it can be sometimes hard to even say which is a critical work and which is a work that builds on top of existing work.)
Most these ideas sound interesting to me. However —
I’m not quite sure what this means? I’m reading it as “funding work which looks set to make good progress on a goal OP don’t believe is especially important, or even net bad”. And that doesn’t seem right to me.
Similar ideas that could be good —
OP/other grantmakers clarifying that they will consider funding you on equal terms even if you’ve publicly criticised OP/that grantmaker
More funding for thoughtful criticisms of effective altruism and longtermism (theory and practice)
I’m especially keen on the latter!
Perhaps a general “willingness to commit” X % funding to criticism of areas which are heavily funded by the EA-aligned funding organization could work as a general heuristic for enabling the second idea.
(e.g. if “pro current X-risk” research in general gets N funding then some % of N would be made available for “critical work” in the same area. But in science it can be sometimes hard to even say which is a critical work and which is a work that builds on top of existing work.)
Sounds good. At the more granular and practical end, this sounds like red-teaming, which is often just good practice.