How do you put a meaningful probability on this? That 10% number is totally arbitrary.
I could equally say that the growing number of governance problems in EVF discussed in this forum make it 80% likely that it would be disavowed in the coming years. (This number is still meaningless)
This is a pretty uncertain question, and I’m not arguing that there’s a precise or rigorous way to answer it! But you can’t not put a probability on it—ultimately, everything we do is making a decision under uncertainty, and implicitly putting a probability on things. Eg, OpenPhil is implicitly putting a, say, less than 10% probability of EVF taking the money and running.
I’m making 10% explicit for illustrative purposes, and if I were making a grant here I’d be trying to think through the clearest evidence for or against (notably, I think that EVF has a decent track record, even if CEA as a whole doesn’t, has had so for a while, and provides a significant amount of infrastructure to a range of orgs doing good work, so I’d put the probability of such a large break that the money is basically burned as fairly low). And I think it’s generally unwise to make decisions that strongly rest on some specific and brittle assumptions re the right numbers. But if plausible feeling numbers don’t greatly shift the decision, this feels like useful data.
How do you put a meaningful probability on this? That 10% number is totally arbitrary.
I could equally say that the growing number of governance problems in EVF discussed in this forum make it 80% likely that it would be disavowed in the coming years. (This number is still meaningless)
This is a pretty uncertain question, and I’m not arguing that there’s a precise or rigorous way to answer it! But you can’t not put a probability on it—ultimately, everything we do is making a decision under uncertainty, and implicitly putting a probability on things. Eg, OpenPhil is implicitly putting a, say, less than 10% probability of EVF taking the money and running.
I’m making 10% explicit for illustrative purposes, and if I were making a grant here I’d be trying to think through the clearest evidence for or against (notably, I think that EVF has a decent track record, even if CEA as a whole doesn’t, has had so for a while, and provides a significant amount of infrastructure to a range of orgs doing good work, so I’d put the probability of such a large break that the money is basically burned as fairly low). And I think it’s generally unwise to make decisions that strongly rest on some specific and brittle assumptions re the right numbers. But if plausible feeling numbers don’t greatly shift the decision, this feels like useful data.