I agree about tabooing “OP is funding…”; my team is undergoing that transition now, leading to some inconsistencies in our own usage, let alone that of others.
Re: “large negative incentive for founders and organizations who are considering working more with the political right.” I’ll note that we’ve consistently been able to help such work find funding, because (as noted here), the bottleneck is available right-of-center opportunities rather than available funding. Plus, GV can and does directly fund lots of work that “engages with the right” (your phrasing), e.g. Horizon fellows and many other GV grantees regularly engage with Republicans, and seem likely to do even more of that on the margin given the incoming GOP trifecta.
Re: “nothing has changed in the last year.” No, a lot has changed, but my quick-take post wasn’t about “what has changed,” it was about “correcting some misconceptions I’m encountering.”
Re: “De-facto GV was and is likely to continue to be 95%+ of the giving that OP is influencing.” This isn’t true, including specifically for my team (“AI governance and policy”).
I also don’t think this was ever true: “One was also able to roughly assume that if OP decides to not recommend a grant to GV, that most OP staff do not think that grant would be more cost-effective than other grants referred to GV.” There’s plenty of internal disagreement even among the AI-focused staff about which grants are above our bar for recommending, and funding recommendation decisions have never been made by majority vote.
Re: “nothing has changed in the last year.” No, a lot has changed, but my quick-take post wasn’t about “what has changed,” it was about “correcting some misconceptions I’m encountering.”
Makes sense. I think it’s easy to point out ways things are off, but in this case, IMO the most important thing that needs to happen in the funding ecosystem is people grappling with the huge changes that have occurred, and I think a lot of OP communication has been actively pushing back on that (not necessarily intentionally, I just think it’s a tempting and recurring error mode for established institutions to react to people freaking out with a “calm down” attitude, even when that’s inappropriate, cf. CDC and pandemics and many past instances of similar dynamics)
In particular, I am confident the majority of readers of your original comment interpreted what you said as meaning that GV has no substantial dispreference for right-of-center grants, which I think was substantially harmful to the epistemic landscape (though I am glad that further prodding by me and Jason cleared that up).
Re: “De-facto GV was and is likely to continue to be 95%+ of the giving that OP is influencing.” This isn’t true, including specifically for my team (“AI governance and policy”).
I would take bets on this! It is of course important to assess counterfactualness of recommendations from OP. If you recommend a grant a funder would have made anyways, it doesn’t make any sense to count that as something OP “influenced”.
With that adjustment, I would take bets that more than 90% of influence-adjusted grants from OP in 2024 will have been made by GV (I don’t think it’s true in “AI governance and policy” where I can imagine it being substantially lower, I have much less visibility into that domain. My median for all of OP is 95%, but that doesn’t imply my betting odds, since I want at least a bit of profit margin).
Happy to refer to some trusted third-party arbiter for adjudicating.
Sure, my guess is OP gets around 50%[1] of the credit for that and GV is about 20% of the funding in the pool, making the remaining portion a ~$10M/yr grant ($20M/yr for 4 years of non-GV funding[2]). GV gives out ~$600M[3] grants per year recommended by OP, so to get to >5% you would need the equivalent of 3 projects of this size per year, which I haven’t seen (and don’t currently think exist).
Even at 100% credit, which seems like a big stretch, my guess is you don’t get over 5%.
To substantially change the implications of my sentence I think you need to get closer to 10%, which I think seems implausible from my viewpoint. It seems pretty clear the right number is around 95% (and IMO it’s bad form given that to just respond with a “this was never true” when it’s clearly and obviously been true in some past years, and it’s at the very least very close to true this year).
Mostly chosen for schelling-ness. I can imagine it being higher or lower. It seems like lots of other people outside of OP have been involved, and the choice of area seems heavily determined by what OP could get buy-in for from other funders, seeming somewhat more constrained than other grants, so I think a lower number seems more reasonable.
I have also learned to really not count your chickens before they are hatched with projects like this, so I think one should discount this funding by an expected 20-30% for a 4-year project like this, since funders frequently drop out and leadership changes, but we can ignore that for now
I also don’t think this was ever true: “One was also able to roughly assume that if OP decides to not recommend a grant to GV, that most OP staff do not think that grant would be more cost-effective than other grants referred to GV.” There’s plenty of internal disagreement even among the AI-focused staff about which grants are above our bar for recommending, and funding recommendation decisions have never been made by majority vote.
I used the double negative here very intentionally. Funding recommendations don’t get made by majority vote, and there isn’t such a thing as “the Open Phil view” on a grant, but up until 2023 I had long and intense conversations with staff at OP who said that it would be very weird and extraordinary if OP rejected a grant that most of its staff considered substantially more cost-effective than your average grant.
That of course stopped being true recently (and I also think past OP staff overstated a bit the degree to which it was true previously, but it sure was something that OP staff actively reached out to me about and claimed was true when I disputed it). You saying “this was never true” is in direct contradiction to statements made by OP staff to me up until late 2023 (bar what people claimed were very rare exceptions).
I’ll note that we’ve consistently been able to help such work find funding, because (as noted here), the bottleneck is available right-of-center opportunities rather than available funding.
I don’t currently believe this, and think you are mostly not exposed to most people who could be doing good work in the space (which is downstream of a bunch of other choices OP and GV made), and also overestimate the degree to which OP is helpful in getting the relevant projects funding (I know of 1-2 projects in this space which did ultimately get funding, where OP was a bit involved, but my sense is was overall slightly anti-helpful).
If you know people who could do good work in the space, please point them to our RFP! As for being anti-helpful in some cases, I’m guessing that was cases where we thought the opportunity wasn’t a great opportunity despite it being right-of-center (which is a point in favor, in my opinion), but I’m not sure.
Replying to just a few points…
I agree about tabooing “OP is funding…”; my team is undergoing that transition now, leading to some inconsistencies in our own usage, let alone that of others.
Re: “large negative incentive for founders and organizations who are considering working more with the political right.” I’ll note that we’ve consistently been able to help such work find funding, because (as noted here), the bottleneck is available right-of-center opportunities rather than available funding. Plus, GV can and does directly fund lots of work that “engages with the right” (your phrasing), e.g. Horizon fellows and many other GV grantees regularly engage with Republicans, and seem likely to do even more of that on the margin given the incoming GOP trifecta.
Re: “nothing has changed in the last year.” No, a lot has changed, but my quick-take post wasn’t about “what has changed,” it was about “correcting some misconceptions I’m encountering.”
Re: “De-facto GV was and is likely to continue to be 95%+ of the giving that OP is influencing.” This isn’t true, including specifically for my team (“AI governance and policy”).
I also don’t think this was ever true: “One was also able to roughly assume that if OP decides to not recommend a grant to GV, that most OP staff do not think that grant would be more cost-effective than other grants referred to GV.” There’s plenty of internal disagreement even among the AI-focused staff about which grants are above our bar for recommending, and funding recommendation decisions have never been made by majority vote.
Makes sense. I think it’s easy to point out ways things are off, but in this case, IMO the most important thing that needs to happen in the funding ecosystem is people grappling with the huge changes that have occurred, and I think a lot of OP communication has been actively pushing back on that (not necessarily intentionally, I just think it’s a tempting and recurring error mode for established institutions to react to people freaking out with a “calm down” attitude, even when that’s inappropriate, cf. CDC and pandemics and many past instances of similar dynamics)
In particular, I am confident the majority of readers of your original comment interpreted what you said as meaning that GV has no substantial dispreference for right-of-center grants, which I think was substantially harmful to the epistemic landscape (though I am glad that further prodding by me and Jason cleared that up).
I would take bets on this! It is of course important to assess counterfactualness of recommendations from OP. If you recommend a grant a funder would have made anyways, it doesn’t make any sense to count that as something OP “influenced”.
With that adjustment, I would take bets that more than 90% of influence-adjusted grants from OP in 2024 will have been made by GV (I don’t think it’s true in “AI governance and policy” where I can imagine it being substantially lower, I have much less visibility into that domain. My median for all of OP is 95%, but that doesn’t imply my betting odds, since I want at least a bit of profit margin).
Happy to refer to some trusted third-party arbiter for adjudicating.
I’d rather not spend more time engaging here, but see e.g. this.
Sure, my guess is OP gets around 50%[1] of the credit for that and GV is about 20% of the funding in the pool, making the remaining portion a ~$10M/yr grant ($20M/yr for 4 years of non-GV funding[2]). GV gives out ~$600M[3] grants per year recommended by OP, so to get to >5% you would need the equivalent of 3 projects of this size per year, which I haven’t seen (and don’t currently think exist).
Even at 100% credit, which seems like a big stretch, my guess is you don’t get over 5%.
To substantially change the implications of my sentence I think you need to get closer to 10%, which I think seems implausible from my viewpoint. It seems pretty clear the right number is around 95% (and IMO it’s bad form given that to just respond with a “this was never true” when it’s clearly and obviously been true in some past years, and it’s at the very least very close to true this year).
Mostly chosen for schelling-ness. I can imagine it being higher or lower. It seems like lots of other people outside of OP have been involved, and the choice of area seems heavily determined by what OP could get buy-in for from other funders, seeming somewhat more constrained than other grants, so I think a lower number seems more reasonable.
I have also learned to really not count your chickens before they are hatched with projects like this, so I think one should discount this funding by an expected 20-30% for a 4-year project like this, since funders frequently drop out and leadership changes, but we can ignore that for now
https://www.goodventures.org/our-portfolio/grantmaking-approach/
I’m confused by the wording of your bet—I thought you had been arguing than more than 90% are by GV, not ‘more than 90% are by a non-GV funder’
Sorry, just a typo!
I used the double negative here very intentionally. Funding recommendations don’t get made by majority vote, and there isn’t such a thing as “the Open Phil view” on a grant, but up until 2023 I had long and intense conversations with staff at OP who said that it would be very weird and extraordinary if OP rejected a grant that most of its staff considered substantially more cost-effective than your average grant.
That of course stopped being true recently (and I also think past OP staff overstated a bit the degree to which it was true previously, but it sure was something that OP staff actively reached out to me about and claimed was true when I disputed it). You saying “this was never true” is in direct contradiction to statements made by OP staff to me up until late 2023 (bar what people claimed were very rare exceptions).
I don’t currently believe this, and think you are mostly not exposed to most people who could be doing good work in the space (which is downstream of a bunch of other choices OP and GV made), and also overestimate the degree to which OP is helpful in getting the relevant projects funding (I know of 1-2 projects in this space which did ultimately get funding, where OP was a bit involved, but my sense is was overall slightly anti-helpful).
If you know people who could do good work in the space, please point them to our RFP! As for being anti-helpful in some cases, I’m guessing that was cases where we thought the opportunity wasn’t a great opportunity despite it being right-of-center (which is a point in favor, in my opinion), but I’m not sure.