My understanding is that people were mostly speculating on the EAF about the rejection rate and distribution of $ per grantee. What might have caused the propagation of “free-spending” EA stories:
the selection bias at EAG(X) conferences where there was a high % of grantees.
the fact that FTX did not (afaik) release their rejection rate publicly
other grants made by other orgs happening concurrently (eg. CEA)
I found this sentence in Will’s recent post “For example, Future Fund is trying to scale up its giving rapidly, but in the recent open call it rejected over 95% of applications” useful to shed light on the rejection rate situation.
I’m surprised that this is helpful fwiw. My impression is that the denominator of who applies to funding varies a lot across funding agencies, and it’s pretty easy to (sometimes artificially) inflate or deflate the rejection rate from e.g. improper advertising/marketing to less suitable audiences, or insufficient advertising to marginal audiences.
Concretely, Walmart DC allegedly had a rejection rate of 97.4% in 2014, but overall we should not expect Walmart to be substantially more selective than Future Fund.
My understanding is that people were mostly speculating on the EAF about the rejection rate and distribution of $ per grantee. What might have caused the propagation of “free-spending” EA stories:
the selection bias at EAG(X) conferences where there was a high % of grantees.
the fact that FTX did not (afaik) release their rejection rate publicly
other grants made by other orgs happening concurrently (eg. CEA)
I found this sentence in Will’s recent post “For example, Future Fund is trying to scale up its giving rapidly, but in the recent open call it rejected over 95% of applications” useful to shed light on the rejection rate situation.
I’m surprised that this is helpful fwiw. My impression is that the denominator of who applies to funding varies a lot across funding agencies, and it’s pretty easy to (sometimes artificially) inflate or deflate the rejection rate from e.g. improper advertising/marketing to less suitable audiences, or insufficient advertising to marginal audiences.
Concretely, Walmart DC allegedly had a rejection rate of 97.4% in 2014, but overall we should not expect Walmart to be substantially more selective than Future Fund.