Thoughts on your recommendations. I appreciate your making suggestions, and providing helpful context on the spirit in which you intend them. Here I only address suggestions for Open Phil.
Maintaining a list of open investigations: I see some case for this, but at the moment we don’t plan on it. I don’t think we can succinctly and efficiently maintain such a list without incurring a number of risks (e.g., causing people to excessively plan on our support; causing controversy due to hasty communication or miscommunication). Instead, we encourage people who want to know whether we’re working on something to contact us and ask.
We have considered and in some cases done some (limited) execution on all of the suggestions you make under “Symmetry,” and all remain potential tools if we want to ramp up giving further in the future. I think they are all good ideas, perhaps things we should have done more of already, and perhaps things we will do more of later on. However, I do not think the situation is “symmetrical” as you imply because our mission—which we are building up expertise and capacity around optimizing for—is giving away large sums of money effectively and according to the basic stance of effective altruism. The same is not generally true of our grantees. We generally try to do something approximating “give to grantees up until the point where marginal dollars would be worse than our last dollar” (though of course very imprecisely and with many additional considerations. Finally, I’ll add that any of the four options you list—and many more—are things we could probably find a way of doing if we put in some time and internal discussion, resulting in good outcomes. But we think that time and internal discussion is better spent on other priorities that will lead to better outcomes. In general, any new idea we pursue involves a fair amount of discussion and refinement, which itself has major opportunity costs, so we accept a degree of inertia in our policies and approaches.
For reasons stated above and in previous posts, I don’t believe the optimal level of funding for top charities is 100% of the gap or 0%. I also wish to note that your comment “I expect fairly few donors would accept this offer. But it still seems like it would be a powerful, credible signal of cooperative intent.” highlights what I suspect may be one of the most important disagreements underlying this discussion. As noted above, we are comfortable with “hacky” approaches to dilemmas that let us move on to our next priority, and we are very unlikely to undertake time-consuming projects with little expected impact other than to signal cooperative intent in a general and undirected way. For us, a disagreement whose importance is mostly symbolic is not likely to become a priority. We would be more likely to prioritize disagreements that implied we could do much more good (or much less harm) if we took some action, such that this action is competitive with our other priorities.
I think your final suggestion would have substantial costs, and don’t agree that you’ve identified sufficient harms to consider it.
I’m not sure I’ve understood all of your points, but hopefully this is helpful in identifying which threads would be useful to pursue further. Thanks again for your thoughtful feedback.
(Continued from previous comment)
Thoughts on your recommendations. I appreciate your making suggestions, and providing helpful context on the spirit in which you intend them. Here I only address suggestions for Open Phil.
Maintaining a list of open investigations: I see some case for this, but at the moment we don’t plan on it. I don’t think we can succinctly and efficiently maintain such a list without incurring a number of risks (e.g., causing people to excessively plan on our support; causing controversy due to hasty communication or miscommunication). Instead, we encourage people who want to know whether we’re working on something to contact us and ask.
We have considered and in some cases done some (limited) execution on all of the suggestions you make under “Symmetry,” and all remain potential tools if we want to ramp up giving further in the future. I think they are all good ideas, perhaps things we should have done more of already, and perhaps things we will do more of later on. However, I do not think the situation is “symmetrical” as you imply because our mission—which we are building up expertise and capacity around optimizing for—is giving away large sums of money effectively and according to the basic stance of effective altruism. The same is not generally true of our grantees. We generally try to do something approximating “give to grantees up until the point where marginal dollars would be worse than our last dollar” (though of course very imprecisely and with many additional considerations. Finally, I’ll add that any of the four options you list—and many more—are things we could probably find a way of doing if we put in some time and internal discussion, resulting in good outcomes. But we think that time and internal discussion is better spent on other priorities that will lead to better outcomes. In general, any new idea we pursue involves a fair amount of discussion and refinement, which itself has major opportunity costs, so we accept a degree of inertia in our policies and approaches.
For reasons stated above and in previous posts, I don’t believe the optimal level of funding for top charities is 100% of the gap or 0%. I also wish to note that your comment “I expect fairly few donors would accept this offer. But it still seems like it would be a powerful, credible signal of cooperative intent.” highlights what I suspect may be one of the most important disagreements underlying this discussion. As noted above, we are comfortable with “hacky” approaches to dilemmas that let us move on to our next priority, and we are very unlikely to undertake time-consuming projects with little expected impact other than to signal cooperative intent in a general and undirected way. For us, a disagreement whose importance is mostly symbolic is not likely to become a priority. We would be more likely to prioritize disagreements that implied we could do much more good (or much less harm) if we took some action, such that this action is competitive with our other priorities.
I think your final suggestion would have substantial costs, and don’t agree that you’ve identified sufficient harms to consider it.
I’m not sure I’ve understood all of your points, but hopefully this is helpful in identifying which threads would be useful to pursue further. Thanks again for your thoughtful feedback.