It’s more that the grant was speculative and still is low-transparency (why did OP think there was a huge potential upside?) There can be rational grounds for making low-transparency grants, though—cf. my speculation in another comment.
I think if you’re going to make speculative, low-transparency grants, you have to be squeaky clean on conflicts of interest and related matters. There’s zero evidence of COI at present, and a plausible rationale for the grant that would be undermined by its disclosure, so I am not terribly worried about this one.
Completely agree about the long applications. I don’t think they are super useful at all. I wasn’t using that as example of good process, just as a recognition I might have some emotional bias against this kind of grant.
The thing i might be most interested in here is the track record Helena has in the area. Have they done good stuff in biosecurity before? For a grant of 500k I would expect a reasonable track record in the field, regardless of how speculative it is or isn’t.
And yes a big question is how good are OpenPhil atpredicting the fruits of this kind of grant. I have no clue. I wonder what odds you would get on forecasting for this one ;).
It’s more that the grant was speculative and still is low-transparency (why did OP think there was a huge potential upside?) There can be rational grounds for making low-transparency grants, though—cf. my speculation in another comment.
I think if you’re going to make speculative, low-transparency grants, you have to be squeaky clean on conflicts of interest and related matters. There’s zero evidence of COI at present, and a plausible rationale for the grant that would be undermined by its disclosure, so I am not terribly worried about this one.
Completely agree about the long applications. I don’t think they are super useful at all. I wasn’t using that as example of good process, just as a recognition I might have some emotional bias against this kind of grant.
The thing i might be most interested in here is the track record Helena has in the area. Have they done good stuff in biosecurity before? For a grant of 500k I would expect a reasonable track record in the field, regardless of how speculative it is or isn’t.
And yes a big question is how good are OpenPhil atpredicting the fruits of this kind of grant. I have no clue. I wonder what odds you would get on forecasting for this one ;).
Thanks for the reply, appreciate it.