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 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).