Hmm, I think “funding overhang” has some helpful connotations that you don’t describe here. It evokes (for me) a sense of: not being in equilibrium on current spending; of the elasticity-of-activity-with-funding being very low; of discount rates being higher for labour than money.
I think all of those are basically accurate at the moment in traditionally longtermist areas. Perhaps most importantly, I like how it evokes “if you can find a great idea and people to implement it, there’s probably funding available for it that isn’t directly trading off against other projects people are implementing now”.
And although you say it’s better not to think of blacks and whites, I do think there’s something binary about this dynamic according to whether funding is a significant bottleneck on more good work happening right now (with a decent size grey area in the middle). And in longtermist EA we’ve been fairly firmly at the “funding overhang” end of the spectrum for the last three years, even while the bar moves around a bit.
So overall I think the issue is not using the term “funding overhang” but the connotation that if there’s a funding overhang the value of marginal funds is zero (which I think is badly wrong). So I’m kinda wondering if we can keep the term “funding overhang” and just get rid of that association … it feels like it should be achievable … OTOH there are few cases where it’s necessary to talk about (I don’t think talking about the funding bar just does the same work, but it’s not too hard to find other ways to frame it).
I realized I seemed to be understanding the term very differently than you—e.g. this sentence didn’t resonate for me …
Funding ‘overhang’ makes it sound like there’s a ‘correct’ amount of funding, and we can have too little or too much.
… so I wrote an explanation of how I’d use the term funding overhang. It might still be correct to stop using the term (and have a different term for the thing I’m calling funding overhang), but I do think there’s a valuable concept there and we can have a better version of the conversation if we have common knowledge of what that is.
I agree it’s pointing at something – in the penultimate paragraph I say:
Given all this, is there a sensible interpretation of the term ‘funding overhang’? You could use it to label situations where a sudden increase in funding has driven the bar down; or perhaps for situations where skill-sets that are complementary with spending money have become a lot more valuable. But overall I think it’s better to avoid the term altogether – it’s so easy to start thinking in black and whites and get confused.
That said, I think it’s usually better to describe this as “becoming less funding constrained” rather than “there’s a funding overhang”, because it makes it sound more like a continuum.
(Or even better “less funding constrained and more constrained by X”.)
So I’ve made some edits to the original post to suggest replace funding overhang with either (i) talking about the bar changing or (ii) talking about becoming more or less funding constrained. Thank you for the prompt!
So I think the state of affairs right now for some key work is “barely funding constrained at all”. I think that’s helpful to be able to talk about, and it doesn’t seem egregious to me if people round it off as “not funding constrained”. But I’m worried that that has more (incorrect) connotations of “extra money isn’t helpful” than “funding overhang”.
The issue is that we need to be able to talk about two different things:
The value of deploying funding now for getting marginal work to happen right now;
The all-things-considered value of funding.
These are obviously related, but they can vary separately. I want to be able to express that #1 is very low (where it’s unproblematic if people approximate it as zero), but I’m definitely not OK with people approximating #2 as zero. In a different world #1 could be high while #2 was relatively low (in this case borrowing-to-give would be a good strategy).
[A very rough figure I’d be OK with people using for #2 is 100 nanodooms averted /$M (for funding that isn’t significantly correlated with other future EA funding sources; lower if correlated).]
I’m now noticing I’m unsure whether you disagree that it’s okay to approximate #1 as zero. I read your post as arguing against approximating #2 as zero, but maybe that’s just because that’s something I agree with, and you actually intended to cover both 1+2.
Hmm, I think “funding overhang” has some helpful connotations that you don’t describe here. It evokes (for me) a sense of: not being in equilibrium on current spending; of the elasticity-of-activity-with-funding being very low; of discount rates being higher for labour than money.
I think all of those are basically accurate at the moment in traditionally longtermist areas. Perhaps most importantly, I like how it evokes “if you can find a great idea and people to implement it, there’s probably funding available for it that isn’t directly trading off against other projects people are implementing now”.
And although you say it’s better not to think of blacks and whites, I do think there’s something binary about this dynamic according to whether funding is a significant bottleneck on more good work happening right now (with a decent size grey area in the middle). And in longtermist EA we’ve been fairly firmly at the “funding overhang” end of the spectrum for the last three years, even while the bar moves around a bit.
So overall I think the issue is not using the term “funding overhang” but the connotation that if there’s a funding overhang the value of marginal funds is zero (which I think is badly wrong). So I’m kinda wondering if we can keep the term “funding overhang” and just get rid of that association … it feels like it should be achievable … OTOH there are few cases where it’s necessary to talk about (I don’t think talking about the funding bar just does the same work, but it’s not too hard to find other ways to frame it).
I realized I seemed to be understanding the term very differently than you—e.g. this sentence didn’t resonate for me …
… so I wrote an explanation of how I’d use the term funding overhang. It might still be correct to stop using the term (and have a different term for the thing I’m calling funding overhang), but I do think there’s a valuable concept there and we can have a better version of the conversation if we have common knowledge of what that is.
I agree it’s pointing at something – in the penultimate paragraph I say:
That said, I think it’s usually better to describe this as “becoming less funding constrained” rather than “there’s a funding overhang”, because it makes it sound more like a continuum.
(Or even better “less funding constrained and more constrained by X”.)
So I’ve made some edits to the original post to suggest replace funding overhang with either (i) talking about the bar changing or (ii) talking about becoming more or less funding constrained. Thank you for the prompt!
So I think the state of affairs right now for some key work is “barely funding constrained at all”. I think that’s helpful to be able to talk about, and it doesn’t seem egregious to me if people round it off as “not funding constrained”. But I’m worried that that has more (incorrect) connotations of “extra money isn’t helpful” than “funding overhang”.
The issue is that we need to be able to talk about two different things:
The value of deploying funding now for getting marginal work to happen right now;
The all-things-considered value of funding.
These are obviously related, but they can vary separately. I want to be able to express that #1 is very low (where it’s unproblematic if people approximate it as zero), but I’m definitely not OK with people approximating #2 as zero. In a different world #1 could be high while #2 was relatively low (in this case borrowing-to-give would be a good strategy).
[A very rough figure I’d be OK with people using for #2 is 100 nanodooms averted /$M (for funding that isn’t significantly correlated with other future EA funding sources; lower if correlated).]
I’m now noticing I’m unsure whether you disagree that it’s okay to approximate #1 as zero. I read your post as arguing against approximating #2 as zero, but maybe that’s just because that’s something I agree with, and you actually intended to cover both 1+2.