it is frequently imprudent, impractical, or straightforwardly unethical to directly make public our reasons for rejection.
I think these are all sensible reasons, the trouble is that all of these considerations also apply to the private communication networks proposed as solutions, not in the body of the post but in thee comment section (such as common slack channel which only funders are on, norm of checking in with LTFF, etc).
It seems like a rare scenario that something is, by professional standards, too “private” or too “punching down” for a public statement, but sufficiently public and free of power disparities to be fair game for spreading around the rumor network. And concerns about reifying your subjective choices and fears by applicants that you would share negative information about them arguably become worse when the reification and spread occurs in private, rather than in public.
I think an expectation that longtermist nonprofit grantmakers talk to each other by default would be an improvement over the status quo.
This sounds obviously good in general if we talk to each other, but I get the impression that in this context we’re talking not about the latest research and best practices but specifically about the communication of sensitive applicant info which would ordinarily be a bit private… if negative evaluations of people which are too time consuming to bother with and are not made public, not even to the applicant themselves, tend to just disappear or remain privately held—maybe that’s basically fine as a status quo? Does negative-tinged information that is too trivial to bother with for public statements and formal channels being spread through private informal channels that only the inner grantmaker circle can access really constitute an improvement?
I thought I’d work through how my reasoning goes for the provided examples.
Many of these examples are grants that have later been funded by other grantmakers or private donors.
In my judgement, most of these (very helpful) concrete examples fall under either a) this deserves a public statement, or b) this represents a subjective judgement call where other funders should make that call independently. It’s not that I think a private communication is never the right way to handle it, it’s just that it seems to me like they usually aren’t, even in the examples that are picked out.
The first three examples all involve subjective judgement calls, by a scientist, by yourself, and by an acquaintance, and it would be bad if these judgement calls (especially by just an acquantance!) propagated via a whisper network instead of other people making an independent decision.
The next two examples, which involve grantees not delivering on promises, if they involve sufficiently large grants...well, I think a grantmaker ought to state what the impact of their grant are, and if a grant didn’t have impact then that should be a made a note of publicly. This should not be an attack on the grantee, this is transparency by the grantmaker about what the impact their grant had, and bad grants should be acknowledged. However, I guess in the scenario where the grantee is intended to remain anonymous, then it is fair to propagate that info via whisper network but not public statement, but I would question the practice of giving large grants to anonymous grantees. For small grants to individuals, I guess if someone failed to deliver once isn’t it best to let it go and let them try again elsewhere with someone else, the way it would be in any other professional realm? If they failed to deliver multiple times a whisper network is justified. If they seem to be running a scam then it’s time for a public statement.
The rest of the examples save the last, which involve concerns about character...I mean, outright plagiarism and faking data absolutely should be called out publicly. When it’s about less substantial and more vague reputational concerns, I can see the case for private comms a bit more, although it’s a goldilocks scenario even then because if the concerns aren’t substantially verified then shouldn’t others independently make their judgement calls?
(The final example is valid for a private check, but tautologically so—yes of course, if the rational for a grantmaker is “LTFF would probably fund it” they ought to check if LTFF did in fact evaluate and reject it.)
In summary I think for the majority of these examples, I think either the public statement should be made, or the issue should be dropped, and it’s only the very rare borderline case where private communications such that all grantmakers are actually secretly talking to each other and deferring to each other are the way to go.
In general, I think the bar for sharing (alleged) competency judgements to be a lot higher for sharing potential character issues.
And just so we’re on the same page, I consider the first example a character issue, not a competency issue. The second and third examples are kind of borderline between character vs competency issues; I think my anonymized description does not make the assessment clear to onlookers and more details are necessary.
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.
I think these are all sensible reasons, the trouble is that all of these considerations also apply to the private communication networks proposed as solutions, not in the body of the post but in thee comment section (such as common slack channel which only funders are on, norm of checking in with LTFF, etc).
It seems like a rare scenario that something is, by professional standards, too “private” or too “punching down” for a public statement, but sufficiently public and free of power disparities to be fair game for spreading around the rumor network. And concerns about reifying your subjective choices and fears by applicants that you would share negative information about them arguably become worse when the reification and spread occurs in private, rather than in public.
This sounds obviously good in general if we talk to each other, but I get the impression that in this context we’re talking not about the latest research and best practices but specifically about the communication of sensitive applicant info which would ordinarily be a bit private… if negative evaluations of people which are too time consuming to bother with and are not made public, not even to the applicant themselves, tend to just disappear or remain privately held—maybe that’s basically fine as a status quo? Does negative-tinged information that is too trivial to bother with for public statements and formal channels being spread through private informal channels that only the inner grantmaker circle can access really constitute an improvement?
I thought I’d work through how my reasoning goes for the provided examples.
In my judgement, most of these (very helpful) concrete examples fall under either a) this deserves a public statement, or b) this represents a subjective judgement call where other funders should make that call independently. It’s not that I think a private communication is never the right way to handle it, it’s just that it seems to me like they usually aren’t, even in the examples that are picked out.
The first three examples all involve subjective judgement calls, by a scientist, by yourself, and by an acquaintance, and it would be bad if these judgement calls (especially by just an acquantance!) propagated via a whisper network instead of other people making an independent decision.
The next two examples, which involve grantees not delivering on promises, if they involve sufficiently large grants...well, I think a grantmaker ought to state what the impact of their grant are, and if a grant didn’t have impact then that should be a made a note of publicly. This should not be an attack on the grantee, this is transparency by the grantmaker about what the impact their grant had, and bad grants should be acknowledged. However, I guess in the scenario where the grantee is intended to remain anonymous, then it is fair to propagate that info via whisper network but not public statement, but I would question the practice of giving large grants to anonymous grantees. For small grants to individuals, I guess if someone failed to deliver once isn’t it best to let it go and let them try again elsewhere with someone else, the way it would be in any other professional realm? If they failed to deliver multiple times a whisper network is justified. If they seem to be running a scam then it’s time for a public statement.
The rest of the examples save the last, which involve concerns about character...I mean, outright plagiarism and faking data absolutely should be called out publicly. When it’s about less substantial and more vague reputational concerns, I can see the case for private comms a bit more, although it’s a goldilocks scenario even then because if the concerns aren’t substantially verified then shouldn’t others independently make their judgement calls?
(The final example is valid for a private check, but tautologically so—yes of course, if the rational for a grantmaker is “LTFF would probably fund it” they ought to check if LTFF did in fact evaluate and reject it.)
In summary I think for the majority of these examples, I think either the public statement should be made, or the issue should be dropped, and it’s only the very rare borderline case where private communications such that all grantmakers are actually secretly talking to each other and deferring to each other are the way to go.
In general, I think the bar for sharing (alleged) competency judgements to be a lot higher for sharing potential character issues.
And just so we’re on the same page, I consider the first example a character issue, not a competency issue. The second and third examples are kind of borderline between character vs competency issues; I think my anonymized description does not make the assessment clear to onlookers and more details are necessary.
You make good points. Initial thoughts:
Rejection reasons that are fine/good to spread through whisper network:
Poor performance on a previous grant project that you directly evaluated
Reasonably verified character issues
Rejection reasons that should not be shared through whisper network:
Grant proposal content did not meet granting threshold
Someone in a related field told you of weak job performance
(The idea being other granters should find out those reasons for themselves. Seek out the field experts, maybe talk to new ones).
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.