Thanks for the post, I appreciate the clarity it brings.
Given FTX Foundation’s focus on existential risk and longtermism, the most direct impacts are on our longtermist work. We don’t anticipate any immediate changes to our Global Health and Wellbeing work as a result of the recent news.
Would it not make sense for Open Phil to shift some of its neartermist/global health funds to longtermist causes?
Although any neartermist:longtermist funds ratio is, in my opinion, fairly arbitrary, this ratio has increased significantly following the FTX event. Thus, seems to me that Open Phil should maybe consider acting to rebalance it.
The FTX Future Fund launched in Feb 2022, and Open Phil were hiring for a program officer for their new Global Health and Wellbeing program in Feb 2022 (see here).
For context, all FTX funds go/went to longtermist causes; Open Phil currently has two grantmaking programs (see here): one in Longtermism and the other one being the Global Health and Wellbeing program that launched—I assume—around Feb ’22.
So my guess, though I’m not certain, is that the launches of FTX Future Fund and Open Phil’s Global Health and Wellbeing program were linked, and that Open Phil did increase its neartermist:longtermist funding ratio when FTX funds became available.
OPP was making grants in the Global Health and Wellbeing space (which includes animal welfare) long before this.
The data exist via their grants database[1] — it doesn’t look to me like there was any shift away from longtermism that coincided with SBF/FTX entering the space (if anything, it looks like the opposite could be true in 2022).
(It’s interesting to note that, at present, my above comment is on −1 agreement karma after 50 votes. This suggests that the question of rebalancing the neartermist:longtermist funding ratio is genuinely controversial, as opposed to there being a community consensus either way.)
It looks like Open Phil’s approach to this is to evaluate all programs (neartermist and longtermist) against cash transfers (they use an internal ‘unit of impact’, I think, to try to compare all programs). As I understand it, any program funded by Open Phil needs to beat this standardised bar—it isn’t that they actually believe longtermist projects are much more impactful but still grant to neartermist causes for political reasons or similar. Or, to put it another way, the bar in neartermist funding isn’t lower than it is in longtermist funding.
Accordingly, they wouldn’t necessarily reallocate funds from one place to another in advance, but if the new longtermist applications seem to be more impactful in expectation that the neartermist ones, they might choose to fund more longtermist programs than neartermist ones going forward.
For what it’s worth, things like the GiveWell charities actually perform extraordinarily well in this analysis, so my prior is that FTX-funded projects won’t outperform them significantly in Open Phil’s evaluation, and so won’t lead to a reallocation of funding.
A) If we call the quality threshold for projects T, T_G = T_L = T. In addition, project-funding is allocated by whether, for project p, p > T... ...and G vs L allocations are determined by how many projects are (anticipated to) pass this threshold from each category.
B) With OP = all projects p such that p was not funded by FTX and is likely to seek Open Philanthropy funding, and L_OP being the longtermist subset of OP, and L_FTX = all L such that L was funded by FTX and now seeks OP funding:
sum_of_funding(p in L_OP such that ((p > T) and (p > x for all x in L_FTX))) >= current_OP_longtermist_funding.
First of all, OP funding won’t currently be reallocated to FTX projects, because better non-FTX projects crowd them out of OP’s current allocation for this area. And also:
count(p in OP such that ((p > T) and (p > x for all x in G_FTX))) is large -> count(L_OP > T)/(cout(OP > T)) ~= count((L_OP +FTX) > T)/count((OP + FTX) > T)
Second of all, since there are so many projects applying to OPhil which are better than T AND better than the FTX ones... ...the addition of the FTX projects shouldn’t significantly affect the proportion of ‘good enough’ projects which are longtermist... ...meaning that long-term funding allocations between global-health vs longtermist cause-categories also shouldn’t be affected.
Of course, I know very little about this topic, having come in from the LessWrong side of things, so I can’t comment as to the accuracy of the above claims.
Thanks for the post, I appreciate the clarity it brings.
Would it not make sense for Open Phil to shift some of its neartermist/global health funds to longtermist causes?
Although any neartermist:longtermist funds ratio is, in my opinion, fairly arbitrary, this ratio has increased significantly following the FTX event. Thus, seems to me that Open Phil should maybe consider acting to rebalance it.
(I’d be curious to hear a solid counterargument.)
Did Open Phil shift funds away from longtermist causes when FTX funds became available?
The FTX Future Fund launched in Feb 2022, and Open Phil were hiring for a program officer for their new Global Health and Wellbeing program in Feb 2022 (see here).
For context, all FTX funds go/went to longtermist causes; Open Phil currently has two grantmaking programs (see here): one in Longtermism and the other one being the Global Health and Wellbeing program that launched—I assume—around Feb ’22.
So my guess, though I’m not certain, is that the launches of FTX Future Fund and Open Phil’s Global Health and Wellbeing program were linked, and that Open Phil did increase its neartermist:longtermist funding ratio when FTX funds became available.
OPP was making grants in the Global Health and Wellbeing space (which includes animal welfare) long before this.
The data exist via their grants database [1] — it doesn’t look to me like there was any shift away from longtermism that coincided with SBF/FTX entering the space (if anything, it looks like the opposite could be true in 2022).
Credit to Tyler Muale for data collection
This data point doesn’t update me much.
(It’s interesting to note that, at present, my above comment is on −1 agreement karma after 50 votes. This suggests that the question of rebalancing the neartermist:longtermist funding ratio is genuinely controversial, as opposed to there being a community consensus either way.)
It looks like Open Phil’s approach to this is to evaluate all programs (neartermist and longtermist) against cash transfers (they use an internal ‘unit of impact’, I think, to try to compare all programs). As I understand it, any program funded by Open Phil needs to beat this standardised bar—it isn’t that they actually believe longtermist projects are much more impactful but still grant to neartermist causes for political reasons or similar. Or, to put it another way, the bar in neartermist funding isn’t lower than it is in longtermist funding.
Accordingly, they wouldn’t necessarily reallocate funds from one place to another in advance, but if the new longtermist applications seem to be more impactful in expectation that the neartermist ones, they might choose to fund more longtermist programs than neartermist ones going forward.
For what it’s worth, things like the GiveWell charities actually perform extraordinarily well in this analysis, so my prior is that FTX-funded projects won’t outperform them significantly in Open Phil’s evaluation, and so won’t lead to a reallocation of funding.
I’ve read this comment a few times, and I don’t understand what it is saying.
Just to make it more concrete, suppose that the estimated cost-effectiveness for global health (G) and speculative longtermist (L) projects look like:
For example, this could look like:
Then what are you saying applies to this list of marginal impacts?
If I may:
I interpreted Jack as saying that...
A) If we call the quality threshold for projects T, T_G = T_L = T.
In addition, project-funding is allocated by whether, for project p, p > T...
...and G vs L allocations are determined by how many projects are (anticipated to) pass this threshold from each category.
B) With OP = all projects p such that p was not funded by FTX and is likely to seek Open Philanthropy funding, and L_OP being the longtermist subset of OP,
and L_FTX = all L such that L was funded by FTX and now seeks OP funding:
sum_of_funding(p in L_OP such that ((p > T) and (p > x for all x in L_FTX)))
>=
current_OP_longtermist_funding.
First of all, OP funding won’t currently be reallocated to FTX projects, because better non-FTX projects crowd them out of OP’s current allocation for this area. And also:
count(p in OP such that ((p > T) and (p > x for all x in G_FTX))) is large
->
count(L_OP > T)/(cout(OP > T)) ~= count((L_OP +FTX) > T)/count((OP + FTX) > T)
Second of all, since there are so many projects applying to OPhil which are better than T AND better than the FTX ones...
...the addition of the FTX projects shouldn’t significantly affect the proportion of ‘good enough’ projects which are longtermist...
...meaning that long-term funding allocations between global-health vs longtermist cause-categories also shouldn’t be affected.
Of course, I know very little about this topic, having come in from the LessWrong side of things, so I can’t comment as to the accuracy of the above claims.