This doesn’t seem to be quite comparing things at the right level to me. It compares ‘AI safety research’ as a priority cause area to ‘EA movement building’, which seems very reasonable, but then says that ‘EA movement building’ constitutes only funding local groups of a particular type (for example, it seems to be leaving out student groups run by current students, who get funding from their university for doing it; it seems to leave out work being done on thinking through how effective altruism might grow in China).
It strikes me that in the sense in which ‘EA movement building’ is a priority cause area like ‘AI safety research’ it in fact has quite a few other donors, including OpenPhil and the Meta fund. EA movement building in this sense would surely include lots of different interventions from running EA Global to the EA Facebook group to curating what news coverage EA gets to Will writing a book on the importance of longtermism. Building EA local groups seems more plausibly compared to a specific AI safety research agenda. You might well think that eg MIRI’s agenda should be more widely worked on, or that it would be better if MIRI had more sources of funding. But it doesn’t seem worrying that that isn’t case.
This doesn’t seem to be quite comparing things at the right level to me. It compares ‘AI safety research’ as a priority cause area to ‘EA movement building’, which seems very reasonable, but then says that ‘EA movement building’ constitutes only funding local groups of a particular type (for example, it seems to be leaving out student groups run by current students, who get funding from their university for doing it; it seems to leave out work being done on thinking through how effective altruism might grow in China).
I think the main point of the post is not to highlight that there are no other possible ways of doing EA community building related efforts except CB grants – of course there are many things that aspiring EAs can do to support the movement. Rather it seems to highlight the fact that the institutional funding mechanisms available for a broad range of CB (be it for local groups, national groups, or smaller CB related projects) are more centralized than might be ideal. CB grants are not everything but they do cover a very broad scope where they are the only meaningful option available as other funders regularly defer to the CB grants project for funding. This makes them a very powerful force for directing the development of the EA community which may or may not be intended by the broader EA community.
From my perspective, I am, first, glad that institutional funding mechanisms like CB grants exist and appreciate the efforts that have gone (and continue to go) into the program. Second, I also see value in having a discussion about how to further improve the overall funding pipeline for EA CB. One straightforward step mentioned in the post could be that funders outside of CEA are sensitized to also consider EA CB efforts for funding (maybe even in consultation with CEA).
I agree that there is more to movement building than local groups and that the comparison to AI safety was not on the right level.
I still stand by my main point and think that it deserves consideration:
My main point is that there is a certain set of movement building efforts for which the CEA community building grant programme seems to be the only option. This set includes local groups and national EA networks but also other things. Some common characteristics might be that these efforts are oriented towards the earlier stages of the movement building funnel (compared to say, EAG) and can be conducted by independent movement builders.
Ideally, there should be more diverse “official” funding for this set of movement building efforts. As things currently are, private funders should at least be aware that only one major official funding source exists.
(If students running student groups can get funded by the university, that is another funding source that I wasn’t aware of before).
In practice, it’s almost never the inly option—e.g. CZEA was able to find some private funding even before CBG existed; several other groups were at least partially professional before CBG. In general it’s more like it’s better if national-level groups are funded from EA
CZEA was able to find some private funding even before CBG existed
Interesting! Up until now, my intuition was that private funding is only feasible after the group has been around for a few years, gathered sufficient evidence for their impact and some (former student) members earn enough and donate to it (at least this was the case for EA Norway, as far as I know).
Somewhat off-topic, but if you have time, I’d be curious to hear how CZEA managed to secure early private funding. How long had CZEA been active when it first received funding, what kind of donor and what do you think convinced them? (If you’d rather not share that publicly, feel free to email me at manuel.allgaier@ea-berlin.org and if you lack time to elaborate that’s fine too!)
It seems worth bearing in mind that what’s essentially happening here is you’re setting up a new charity which needs to fundraise, which happens pretty frequently in lots of different formats. There are often local advice groups around. Eg the one I used when we were setting up CEA was Oxfordshire Community and Voluntary Action—https://ocva.org.uk/ They give free sessions for people setting up charities to come in and ask questions—whether that’s about how to write their constitution, or what groups there are around which are looking to fund new charities.
Supporting embryonic charities often feels like an exciting proposition donors / foundations, because it feels like you can have strong counterfactual impact. So there are various organisations around which look specifically for charities that are at really early stages, eg The Funding Network—https://www.thefundingnetwork.org.uk/about-us
You might well think that eg MIRI’s agenda should be more widely worked on, or that it would be better if MIRI had more sources of funding. But it doesn’t seem worrying that that isn’t case.
This consideration seems important and I couldn’t understand it (I’m talking about the general consideration, not its specific application to MIRI’s agenda). I’d be happy to read more about it.
Sorry my example wasn’t clear. I meant to be distinguishing the level of granularity of the intervention, and saying that the more specific the intervention, the less worrying it seems if there’s only one funder in the space.
A clearer example might be: if the Gates foundation was the only funder of malaria interventions, that would be really bad not just because it would mean insufficient funding was going to fighting malaria, but also because they might focus on the wrong types of interventions, and because it’s showing a really surprising lack of interest in funding malaria interventions by the rest of the world. On the other hand, if there’s some particular malaria vaccine being researched and the funding from that is all coming from Gates, you might think that was less worrying: the optimal level of funding for such a vaccine is much lower than for the whole set of malaria interventions, and it’s less surprising that something that specific is funded by just one donor so it’s less likely to indicate systemic problems with the malaria-funding-space.
For similar reasons, it would seem much more worrying to me if there were only one funder for ‘EA community building’ than if there were just one funder for (for example) EA Global.
This doesn’t seem to be quite comparing things at the right level to me. It compares ‘AI safety research’ as a priority cause area to ‘EA movement building’, which seems very reasonable, but then says that ‘EA movement building’ constitutes only funding local groups of a particular type (for example, it seems to be leaving out student groups run by current students, who get funding from their university for doing it; it seems to leave out work being done on thinking through how effective altruism might grow in China).
It strikes me that in the sense in which ‘EA movement building’ is a priority cause area like ‘AI safety research’ it in fact has quite a few other donors, including OpenPhil and the Meta fund. EA movement building in this sense would surely include lots of different interventions from running EA Global to the EA Facebook group to curating what news coverage EA gets to Will writing a book on the importance of longtermism. Building EA local groups seems more plausibly compared to a specific AI safety research agenda. You might well think that eg MIRI’s agenda should be more widely worked on, or that it would be better if MIRI had more sources of funding. But it doesn’t seem worrying that that isn’t case.
I think the main point of the post is not to highlight that there are no other possible ways of doing EA community building related efforts except CB grants – of course there are many things that aspiring EAs can do to support the movement. Rather it seems to highlight the fact that the institutional funding mechanisms available for a broad range of CB (be it for local groups, national groups, or smaller CB related projects) are more centralized than might be ideal. CB grants are not everything but they do cover a very broad scope where they are the only meaningful option available as other funders regularly defer to the CB grants project for funding. This makes them a very powerful force for directing the development of the EA community which may or may not be intended by the broader EA community.
From my perspective, I am, first, glad that institutional funding mechanisms like CB grants exist and appreciate the efforts that have gone (and continue to go) into the program. Second, I also see value in having a discussion about how to further improve the overall funding pipeline for EA CB. One straightforward step mentioned in the post could be that funders outside of CEA are sensitized to also consider EA CB efforts for funding (maybe even in consultation with CEA).
I agree that there is more to movement building than local groups and that the comparison to AI safety was not on the right level.
I still stand by my main point and think that it deserves consideration:
My main point is that there is a certain set of movement building efforts for which the CEA community building grant programme seems to be the only option. This set includes local groups and national EA networks but also other things. Some common characteristics might be that these efforts are oriented towards the earlier stages of the movement building funnel (compared to say, EAG) and can be conducted by independent movement builders.
Ideally, there should be more diverse “official” funding for this set of movement building efforts. As things currently are, private funders should at least be aware that only one major official funding source exists.
(If students running student groups can get funded by the university, that is another funding source that I wasn’t aware of before).
In practice, it’s almost never the inly option—e.g. CZEA was able to find some private funding even before CBG existed; several other groups were at least partially professional before CBG. In general it’s more like it’s better if national-level groups are funded from EA
Interesting! Up until now, my intuition was that private funding is only feasible after the group has been around for a few years, gathered sufficient evidence for their impact and some (former student) members earn enough and donate to it (at least this was the case for EA Norway, as far as I know).
Somewhat off-topic, but if you have time, I’d be curious to hear how CZEA managed to secure early private funding. How long had CZEA been active when it first received funding, what kind of donor and what do you think convinced them? (If you’d rather not share that publicly, feel free to email me at manuel.allgaier@ea-berlin.org and if you lack time to elaborate that’s fine too!)
It seems worth bearing in mind that what’s essentially happening here is you’re setting up a new charity which needs to fundraise, which happens pretty frequently in lots of different formats. There are often local advice groups around. Eg the one I used when we were setting up CEA was Oxfordshire Community and Voluntary Action—https://ocva.org.uk/ They give free sessions for people setting up charities to come in and ask questions—whether that’s about how to write their constitution, or what groups there are around which are looking to fund new charities.
Supporting embryonic charities often feels like an exciting proposition donors / foundations, because it feels like you can have strong counterfactual impact. So there are various organisations around which look specifically for charities that are at really early stages, eg The Funding Network—https://www.thefundingnetwork.org.uk/about-us
(unrelated to the OP)
This consideration seems important and I couldn’t understand it (I’m talking about the general consideration, not its specific application to MIRI’s agenda). I’d be happy to read more about it.
Sorry my example wasn’t clear. I meant to be distinguishing the level of granularity of the intervention, and saying that the more specific the intervention, the less worrying it seems if there’s only one funder in the space.
A clearer example might be: if the Gates foundation was the only funder of malaria interventions, that would be really bad not just because it would mean insufficient funding was going to fighting malaria, but also because they might focus on the wrong types of interventions, and because it’s showing a really surprising lack of interest in funding malaria interventions by the rest of the world. On the other hand, if there’s some particular malaria vaccine being researched and the funding from that is all coming from Gates, you might think that was less worrying: the optimal level of funding for such a vaccine is much lower than for the whole set of malaria interventions, and it’s less surprising that something that specific is funded by just one donor so it’s less likely to indicate systemic problems with the malaria-funding-space.
For similar reasons, it would seem much more worrying to me if there were only one funder for ‘EA community building’ than if there were just one funder for (for example) EA Global.
Thanks for this helpful explanation!
Do you mean about the object level (MIRI in particular) or the meta-level (diversification of funding not being ideal)?
The latter (not MIRI in particular).