I’m confused by the use of the term “expert” throughout this report. What exactly is the expertise that these individual donors and staff members are meant to be contributing? Something more neutral like ‘stakeholder’ seems more accurate.
Generally, they have a combination of the following characteristics: (a) a direct understanding of what their own grantmaking organization is doing and why, (b) deep knowledge of the object-level issue (e.g. what GHD/animal welfare/longtermist projects to fund, and (c) extensive knowledge of the overall meta landscape (e.g. in terms of what other important people/organizations there are, the background history of EA funding up to a decade in the past, etc).
I’d suggest using a different term or explicitly outlining how you use “expert” (ideally both in the post and in the report, where you first use the term) since I’m guessing that many readers will expect that if someone is called “expert” in this context, they’re probably “experts in EA meta funding” specifically — e.g. someone who’s been involved in the meta EA funding space for a long time, or someone with deep knowledge of grantmaking approaches at multiple organizations. (As an intuition pump and personal datapoint, I wouldn’t expect “experts” in the context of a report on how to run good EA conference sessions to include me, despite the fact that I’ve been a speaker at EA Global a few times.) Given your description of “experts” above, which seems like it could include (for instance) someone who’s worked at a specific organization and maybe fundraised for it, my sense is that the default expectation of what “expert” means in the report would this be mistaken.
Relatedly, I’d appreciate it if you listed numbers (and possibly other specific info) in places like this:
We interviewed numerous experts, including but not limited to staff employed by (or donors associated with) the following organizations: OP, EA Funds, MCF, GiveWell, ACE, SFF, FP, GWWC, CE, HLI and CEA. We also surveyed the EA community at large.
E.g. the excerpt above might turn into something like the following:
We interviewed [10?] [experts], including staff at [these organizations] and donors who have supported [these organizations]. We also ran an “EA Meta Funding Survey” of people involved in the EA community and got 25 responses.
This probably also applies in places where you say things like “some experts” or that something is “generally agreed”. (In case it helps, a post I love has a section on how to be (epistemically) legible.)
I’m inferring from other comments that AGB as an individual EtG donor is the “expert [who] funded [80k] at an early stage of their existence, but has not funded them since” mentioned in the report. If this is the case, how do individual EtG donors relate to the criteria you mention here?
I’m confused by the use of the term “expert” throughout this report. What exactly is the expertise that these individual donors and staff members are meant to be contributing? Something more neutral like ‘stakeholder’ seems more accurate.
Generally, they have a combination of the following characteristics: (a) a direct understanding of what their own grantmaking organization is doing and why, (b) deep knowledge of the object-level issue (e.g. what GHD/animal welfare/longtermist projects to fund, and (c) extensive knowledge of the overall meta landscape (e.g. in terms of what other important people/organizations there are, the background history of EA funding up to a decade in the past, etc).
I’d suggest using a different term or explicitly outlining how you use “expert” (ideally both in the post and in the report, where you first use the term) since I’m guessing that many readers will expect that if someone is called “expert” in this context, they’re probably “experts in EA meta funding” specifically — e.g. someone who’s been involved in the meta EA funding space for a long time, or someone with deep knowledge of grantmaking approaches at multiple organizations. (As an intuition pump and personal datapoint, I wouldn’t expect “experts” in the context of a report on how to run good EA conference sessions to include me, despite the fact that I’ve been a speaker at EA Global a few times.) Given your description of “experts” above, which seems like it could include (for instance) someone who’s worked at a specific organization and maybe fundraised for it, my sense is that the default expectation of what “expert” means in the report would this be mistaken.
Relatedly, I’d appreciate it if you listed numbers (and possibly other specific info) in places like this:
E.g. the excerpt above might turn into something like the following:
We interviewed [10?] [experts], including staff at [these organizations] and donors who have supported [these organizations]. We also ran an “EA Meta Funding Survey” of people involved in the EA community and got 25 responses.
This probably also applies in places where you say things like “some experts” or that something is “generally agreed”. (In case it helps, a post I love has a section on how to be (epistemically) legible.)
I’m inferring from other comments that AGB as an individual EtG donor is the “expert [who] funded [80k] at an early stage of their existence, but has not funded them since” mentioned in the report. If this is the case, how do individual EtG donors relate to the criteria you mention here?