Speaking just for myself on why I tend to prefer the smaller individual grants:
Currently when I look at the funding landscape, it seems that without the LTFF there would be a pretty big hole in available funding for projects to get off the ground and for individuals to explore interesting new projects or enter new domains. Open Phil very rarely makes grants smaller than ~$300k, and even many donors don’t really like giving to individuals and early-stage organizations because they often lack established charity status, which makes their donations non-tax-deductable.
CEA has set up infrastructure to allow tax-deductible grants to individuals and organizations without charity status, and the fund itself seems well-suited to evaluate organizations by individuals, since we all have pretty wide networks and can pretty quickly gather good references on individuals that are working on projects that don’t yet have an established track record.
I think in a world without Open Phil or the Survival and Flourishing Fund, much more of our funding would go to established organizations.
Separately, I also think that I personally view a lot of the intellectual work to be done on the Long Term Future to be quite compatible with independent researchers asking for grants for just them, or maybe small teams around them. This feels kind of similar to how academic funding is often distributed, and I think makes sense for domains where a lot of people should explore a lot of different directions and we have set up infrastructure so that researchers and distillers can make contributions without necessarily needing a whole organization around them (which I think the EA Forum enables pretty well).
In addition to both of those points, I also think evaluating organizations requires a somewhat different skillset than evaluating individuals and small team projects, and we are currently better at the second than the first (though I think we would reskill if we thought it was more likely that more organizational grants would become more important again).
Speaking just for myself on why I tend to prefer the smaller individual grants:
Currently when I look at the funding landscape, it seems that without the LTFF there would be a pretty big hole in available funding for projects to get off the ground and for individuals to explore interesting new projects or enter new domains. Open Phil very rarely makes grants smaller than ~$300k, and even many donors don’t really like giving to individuals and early-stage organizations because they often lack established charity status, which makes their donations non-tax-deductable.
CEA has set up infrastructure to allow tax-deductible grants to individuals and organizations without charity status, and the fund itself seems well-suited to evaluate organizations by individuals, since we all have pretty wide networks and can pretty quickly gather good references on individuals that are working on projects that don’t yet have an established track record.
I think in a world without Open Phil or the Survival and Flourishing Fund, much more of our funding would go to established organizations.
Separately, I also think that I personally view a lot of the intellectual work to be done on the Long Term Future to be quite compatible with independent researchers asking for grants for just them, or maybe small teams around them. This feels kind of similar to how academic funding is often distributed, and I think makes sense for domains where a lot of people should explore a lot of different directions and we have set up infrastructure so that researchers and distillers can make contributions without necessarily needing a whole organization around them (which I think the EA Forum enables pretty well).
In addition to both of those points, I also think evaluating organizations requires a somewhat different skillset than evaluating individuals and small team projects, and we are currently better at the second than the first (though I think we would reskill if we thought it was more likely that more organizational grants would become more important again).
Thanks for this detailed answer. I think that all makes a lot of sense.