This post is a bit weak in making its case but it is blindingly obvious that Helena is a grift and I’m a bit unimpressed by galaxy brain’d reasons (hit based, etc) for thinking it might be good.
But in the big picture, occasionally a grant is bad. We can’t treat every bad grant as a scandal.
Though there’s a point of diminishing returns to treating every bad grant as a scandal, 500000 $ seems non negligible and worth scandaling about at least a little. If we do scandals on all large grants, then it incentivizes to start with smaller grants for hits based giving (where possible)
I disagree with this. For one, OpenPhil has a higher bar now. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done. ASB and others might already think this was a very bad grant. There’s a cost to dwelling on these things, especially as EA Forums drama rather than a high quality post mortem.
I don’t think anyone has actually treated this as a scandal. There have been fair questions and criticisms, but I don’t think anyone has suggested improper conduct by Open Phil.
This post is a bit weak in making its case but it is blindingly obvious that Helena is a grift and I’m a bit unimpressed by galaxy brain’d reasons (hit based, etc) for thinking it might be good.
But in the big picture, occasionally a grant is bad. We can’t treat every bad grant as a scandal.
Though there’s a point of diminishing returns to treating every bad grant as a scandal, 500000 $ seems non negligible and worth scandaling about at least a little. If we do scandals on all large grants, then it incentivizes to start with smaller grants for hits based giving (where possible)
I disagree with this. For one, OpenPhil has a higher bar now. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done. ASB and others might already think this was a very bad grant. There’s a cost to dwelling on these things, especially as EA Forums drama rather than a high quality post mortem.
I don’t think anyone has actually treated this as a scandal. There have been fair questions and criticisms, but I don’t think anyone has suggested improper conduct by Open Phil.