MichaelA🔸 comments on Long-Term Future Fund: Ask Us Anything!

[MichaelA🔸]

Just to make sure I’m understanding, are you also indicating that the LTFF doesn’t write down in advance what sort of proxies you’d want to see from this grant after x amount of time? And that you think the same challenges with doing useful forecasting for your LessWrong work would also apply to that?

These two things (forecasts and proxies) definitely seem related, and both would involve challenges in operationalising things. But they also seem meaningfully different.

I’d also think that, in evaluating a grant, I might find it useful to partly think in terms of “What would I like to see from this grantee x months/​years from now? What sorts of outputs or outcomes would make me update more in favour of renewing this grant—if that’s requested—and making similar grants in future?”

[Habryka [Deactivated]]

We’ve definitely written informally things like “this is what would convince me that this grant was a good idea”, but we don’t have a more formalized process for writing down specific objective operationalizations that we all forecast on.