Do the LTFF fund managers make forecasts about potential outcomes of grants?
To add to Habryka’s response: we do give each grant a quantitative score (on −5 to +5, where 0 is zero impact). This obviously isn’t as helpful as a detailed probabilistic forecast, but I think it does give a lot of the value. For example, one question I’d like to answer from retrospective evaluation is whether we should be more consensus driven or fund anything that at least one manager is excited about. We could address this by scrutinizing past grants that had a high variance in scores between managers.
I think it might make sense to start doing forecasting for some of our larger grants (where we’re willing to invest more time), and when the key uncertainties are easy to operationalize.
To add to Habryka’s response: we do give each grant a quantitative score (on −5 to +5, where 0 is zero impact). This obviously isn’t as helpful as a detailed probabilistic forecast, but I think it does give a lot of the value. For example, one question I’d like to answer from retrospective evaluation is whether we should be more consensus driven or fund anything that at least one manager is excited about. We could address this by scrutinizing past grants that had a high variance in scores between managers.
I think it might make sense to start doing forecasting for some of our larger grants (where we’re willing to invest more time), and when the key uncertainties are easy to operationalize.