Oh cool—thanks, I wasn’t aware! I think it is potentially quite rare in the UK, which is my context. London has a lot of big think tanks and I don’t know of any that have received EA funding. I agree that ‘rare’ is an unhelpful (and evidently inaccurate) word, though even in the US, as a proportion of EA policy research funding, am I right that the vast majority would still go to EA orgs?
What EA orgs do you have in mind? I guess this would be policy development at places like GovAI and maybe Rethink Priorities? My guess is that the policy-focused funding for EAish orgs like that is dwarfed by the Open Phil funding for CSET and CHS alone, which IIRC is >$130M so far.
Fwiw, I did some light research (hours not days) a few years ago on the differences between US and European think tanks and the (perhaps out of date) conventional wisdom seemed to be that they play a relatively outsized role in the U.S. (there are various hypotheses for why). So That may be one reason for the US/UK difference (though funders being in the US and many other issues could also be playing a role).
Yes, this is part of the reason I personally haven’t prioritized funding European think tanks much, in addition to my grave lack of context on how policy and politics works in the most AI-relevant European countries.
I’d guess the answer is “no”, based in part on the $55m grant to CSET. (Though it’s debatable whether CSET is EA vs EA-adjacent vs non-EA, and CSET was basically “incubated” by that grant rather than already having been a well-known think tank.) Also there’s lots of funding to places like Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Centre for Global Development.
One could look at OP’s grants database to get a more systematic sense of this. (Of course OP doesn’t account for all of EA funding, but does account for a big chunk.)
(That apparent error aside, I still thought this was a good post and feel glad you wrote it :) )
Thanks both—this is really interesting and not what I expected. I think in the UK context there is policy-adjacent research being funded for CSER, CLTR and FHI, and a bit for CE, which I count as all in the EA org bucket, whereas I don’t know of any EA funding going to non-EA policy think tanks. I had also put CSET more in the EA category, but it’s great to hear that things are different in DC and there’s a real interest in funding policy think tanks!
Oh cool—thanks, I wasn’t aware! I think it is potentially quite rare in the UK, which is my context. London has a lot of big think tanks and I don’t know of any that have received EA funding. I agree that ‘rare’ is an unhelpful (and evidently inaccurate) word, though even in the US, as a proportion of EA policy research funding, am I right that the vast majority would still go to EA orgs?
What EA orgs do you have in mind? I guess this would be policy development at places like GovAI and maybe Rethink Priorities? My guess is that the policy-focused funding for EAish orgs like that is dwarfed by the Open Phil funding for CSET and CHS alone, which IIRC is >$130M so far.
Fwiw, I did some light research (hours not days) a few years ago on the differences between US and European think tanks and the (perhaps out of date) conventional wisdom seemed to be that they play a relatively outsized role in the U.S. (there are various hypotheses for why). So That may be one reason for the US/UK difference (though funders being in the US and many other issues could also be playing a role).
Yes, this is part of the reason I personally haven’t prioritized funding European think tanks much, in addition to my grave lack of context on how policy and politics works in the most AI-relevant European countries.
I guess the US is generally more important also.
I’d guess the answer is “no”, based in part on the $55m grant to CSET. (Though it’s debatable whether CSET is EA vs EA-adjacent vs non-EA, and CSET was basically “incubated” by that grant rather than already having been a well-known think tank.) Also there’s lots of funding to places like Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Centre for Global Development.
One could look at OP’s grants database to get a more systematic sense of this. (Of course OP doesn’t account for all of EA funding, but does account for a big chunk.)
(That apparent error aside, I still thought this was a good post and feel glad you wrote it :) )
Thanks both—this is really interesting and not what I expected. I think in the UK context there is policy-adjacent research being funded for CSER, CLTR and FHI, and a bit for CE, which I count as all in the EA org bucket, whereas I don’t know of any EA funding going to non-EA policy think tanks. I had also put CSET more in the EA category, but it’s great to hear that things are different in DC and there’s a real interest in funding policy think tanks!
Yeah CSET isn’t an EA think tank, though a few EAs have worked there over the years.