Open Phil was in fact on our short list but it only made it into the third priority tier (it was only mentioned by one survey respondent, I think), so we didn’t get to developing a profile for it and thus it wasn’t among the 41 institutions that we developed quantitative estimates for. FTX is an interesting oversight, it wasn’t mentioned by anyone who took the survey although I agree it should have been. I’m somewhat skeptical (less so with FTX) that either of these would have been competitive with the 13 that we highlighted in the end, for two reasons. First, the marginal/counterfactual room for improvement is not that high with either of these funders and that would bring down our estimate of the opportunity space associated with each of them. In addition, funders are generally at least one step removed from the actual decisions that matter most, so that’s another factor that would hold their score down. With that said, when we do this again I’ll certainly want to include both in the analysis.
The mix of survey respondents was an intentional choice. I definitely wanted EA and longtermist voices represented (and they are—about 1⁄3 of the respondents had some connection to those communities), but I also felt it was really important to draw from perspectives across the broader landscape of institutions, geographies, and policy domains while ensuring that all respondents were approaching the question through a global and cross-issue lens. I’d also note that EAs are disproportionately early-career, which means that they have had fewer opportunities to experience important institutions directly from the inside and develop diverse professional networks that can give them access to relevant non-public (or just not well-known) information about those institutions. As a result I tried to balance things by inviting some very senior and retired people into the mix. I actually thought this would lead to more divergence in the survey results than we saw, but basically the EAs and non-EAs mostly picked up on the same top institutions in the end.
Open Phil was in fact on our short list but it only made it into the third priority tier (it was only mentioned by one survey respondent, I think), so we didn’t get to developing a profile for it and thus it wasn’t among the 41 institutions that we developed quantitative estimates for. FTX is an interesting oversight, it wasn’t mentioned by anyone who took the survey although I agree it should have been. I’m somewhat skeptical (less so with FTX) that either of these would have been competitive with the 13 that we highlighted in the end, for two reasons. First, the marginal/counterfactual room for improvement is not that high with either of these funders and that would bring down our estimate of the opportunity space associated with each of them. In addition, funders are generally at least one step removed from the actual decisions that matter most, so that’s another factor that would hold their score down. With that said, when we do this again I’ll certainly want to include both in the analysis.
The mix of survey respondents was an intentional choice. I definitely wanted EA and longtermist voices represented (and they are—about 1⁄3 of the respondents had some connection to those communities), but I also felt it was really important to draw from perspectives across the broader landscape of institutions, geographies, and policy domains while ensuring that all respondents were approaching the question through a global and cross-issue lens. I’d also note that EAs are disproportionately early-career, which means that they have had fewer opportunities to experience important institutions directly from the inside and develop diverse professional networks that can give them access to relevant non-public (or just not well-known) information about those institutions. As a result I tried to balance things by inviting some very senior and retired people into the mix. I actually thought this would lead to more divergence in the survey results than we saw, but basically the EAs and non-EAs mostly picked up on the same top institutions in the end.