Interesting, I think I share some of your intuitions and disagree with others. From my perspective, when Funder A is considering whether to share information to Funder B, the following should not be shared through whisper network:
Grant proposal content did not meet granting threshold of Funder A.
Poor performance on a previous grant project with public outputs, especially in an area of the other grantmaker’s presumed expertise (Eg for a technical AI safety project or longtermist philosophy project, other AI safety etc grantmakers can presumably make up their own minds about whether the research is sufficiently high quality; they’re operating on the same information as Funder A is).
Any information told in implicit or explicit confidence to Funder A, eg “did not complete project Y due to a family tragedy”
Whereas I think the following should be shared:
Whether the grantee previously received a grant from Funder A (unless there were implicit or explicit promises to keep it anonymous even to other funders)
The most trivial example is if it’s public information that someone received a grant from Funder A but Funder B didn’t notice.
Grantee previously applied to Funder A for a grant with a private output; relevant judgements (since Funder B can’t evaluate the same private outputs for themselves).
Information Funder A received when investigating a potential grantee’s character issues; if there’s consent to pass the information on.
Judgements Funder A formed when investigating a potential grantee’s character issues, if there’s no consent to directly pass the information on.
Information Funder A received from an expert in a related field (outside of Funder B’s area of expertise) about whether a potential grantee’s work is novel, considered high-quality within the field, etc.
My reasoning is that the following is worth passing on (very fictionalized examples)
a grantseeker claims to be investigating a novel approach to asteroid risks, but an advisor tells me their approach is standard in NEO astrophysics
a grantseeker claims to be an expert in a field, but the evidence they present is something experts in that field knows isn’t very good evidence, but external people might be misled
eg they published several papers in top journals of academic field Y, but it’s well-known within field Y that journal publications in Y are easy, and most high-quality is identified from other venues (conference publications or books or blog posts or w/e).
I think this type of information is worth passing on partially because I have some cynicism about the time constraints/investigative abilities of others in this ecosystem, plausibly (without my prompting) others could miss key info, especially outside of their presumed areas of expertise.
I will be sad but not too surprised if I later learned that one of my own past grants have fallen into this category.
In the case of severely misrepresenting your work to funders, I consider this to be a subset of character issues, especially if there’s reasonable doubt as to whether the funder is expected to know the ground truth.
Interesting, I think I share some of your intuitions and disagree with others. From my perspective, when Funder A is considering whether to share information to Funder B, the following should not be shared through whisper network:
Grant proposal content did not meet granting threshold of Funder A.
Poor performance on a previous grant project with public outputs, especially in an area of the other grantmaker’s presumed expertise (Eg for a technical AI safety project or longtermist philosophy project, other AI safety etc grantmakers can presumably make up their own minds about whether the research is sufficiently high quality; they’re operating on the same information as Funder A is).
Any information told in implicit or explicit confidence to Funder A, eg “did not complete project Y due to a family tragedy”
Whereas I think the following should be shared:
Whether the grantee previously received a grant from Funder A (unless there were implicit or explicit promises to keep it anonymous even to other funders)
The most trivial example is if it’s public information that someone received a grant from Funder A but Funder B didn’t notice.
Grantee previously applied to Funder A for a grant with a private output; relevant judgements (since Funder B can’t evaluate the same private outputs for themselves).
Information Funder A received when investigating a potential grantee’s character issues; if there’s consent to pass the information on.
Judgements Funder A formed when investigating a potential grantee’s character issues, if there’s no consent to directly pass the information on.
Information Funder A received from an expert in a related field (outside of Funder B’s area of expertise) about whether a potential grantee’s work is novel, considered high-quality within the field, etc.
My reasoning is that the following is worth passing on (very fictionalized examples)
a grantseeker claims to be investigating a novel approach to asteroid risks, but an advisor tells me their approach is standard in NEO astrophysics
a grantseeker claims to be an expert in a field, but the evidence they present is something experts in that field knows isn’t very good evidence, but external people might be misled
eg they published several papers in top journals of academic field Y, but it’s well-known within field Y that journal publications in Y are easy, and most high-quality is identified from other venues (conference publications or books or blog posts or w/e).
I think this type of information is worth passing on partially because I have some cynicism about the time constraints/investigative abilities of others in this ecosystem, plausibly (without my prompting) others could miss key info, especially outside of their presumed areas of expertise.
I will be sad but not too surprised if I later learned that one of my own past grants have fallen into this category.
In the case of severely misrepresenting your work to funders, I consider this to be a subset of character issues, especially if there’s reasonable doubt as to whether the funder is expected to know the ground truth.