Yes, we (Open Phil) have funded, and in some cases continue to fund, many non-EA think tanks, including the six you named and also Brookings, National Academies, Niskanen, Peterson Institute, CGD, CSIS, CISAC, CBPP, RAND, CAP, Perry World House, Urban Institute, Economic Policy Institute, Roosevelt Institute, Dezernat Zukunft, Sightline Institute, and probably a few others I’m forgetting.
I don’t know why the original post claimed “it is pretty rare for EAs to fund non-EA think tanks to do things.”
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light research (hours not days) a few years ago on the differences between US and European think tanks and the (perhaps out of date) conventional wisdom seemed to be that they play a relatively outsized role in the U.S. (there are various hypotheses for why).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!
Yes, we (Open Phil) have funded, and in some cases continue to fund, many non-EA think tanks, including the six you named and also Brookings, National Academies, Niskanen, Peterson Institute, CGD, CSIS, CISAC, CBPP, RAND, CAP, Perry World House, Urban Institute, Economic Policy Institute, Roosevelt Institute, Dezernat Zukunft, Sightline Institute, and probably a few others I’m forgetting.
I don’t know why the original post claimed “it is pretty rare for EAs to fund non-EA think tanks to do things.”
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.