Very interesting, valuable, and thorough overview!
I notice you mentioned providing grants of 30k and 16k that were or are likely to be turned down. Do you think this might have been due to the amounts of funding? Might levels of funding an order of magnitude higher have caused a change in preferences?
Given the amount of funding in longtermist EA, if a project is valuable, I wonder if amounts closer to that level might be warranted. Obviously the project only had 300k in funding, so that level of funding might not have been practical here. However, from the perspective of EA longtermist funding as a whole, routinely giving away this level of funding for projects would be practical.
Hey Michael! I don’t know if more money would have changed their decisions, but I want to clarify that the funding panel wasn’t funding constrained (we actually had more than $300k set aside for this), and funders didn’t make the decision with that as a limitation.
The cases aren’t actually that similar — in one, the funding panel gave a low amount to discourage the individual from pursuing the idea and support a career transition, in the other they gave the individuals more than requested — but in both cases the uncertainty of what the people would do was the key cause in giving a relatively small amount of money, not being funding constrained.
Both groups were being funded for open-ended plans (in one case, a career transition, in the other “exploring EA field-building”), rather than a specific venture, hence the uncertainty.
“If you don’t want someone to do something” -->
This isn’t the case—if the funders hadn’t wanted the recipients to move forward, they wouldn’t have given funding. In that case, the funder offered to support a different plan than the one that was originally pitched, namely instead of a venture, a career transition.
Very interesting, valuable, and thorough overview!
I notice you mentioned providing grants of 30k and 16k that were or are likely to be turned down. Do you think this might have been due to the amounts of funding? Might levels of funding an order of magnitude higher have caused a change in preferences?
Given the amount of funding in longtermist EA, if a project is valuable, I wonder if amounts closer to that level might be warranted. Obviously the project only had 300k in funding, so that level of funding might not have been practical here. However, from the perspective of EA longtermist funding as a whole, routinely giving away this level of funding for projects would be practical.
Hey Michael! I don’t know if more money would have changed their decisions, but I want to clarify that the funding panel wasn’t funding constrained (we actually had more than $300k set aside for this), and funders didn’t make the decision with that as a limitation.
The cases aren’t actually that similar — in one, the funding panel gave a low amount to discourage the individual from pursuing the idea and support a career transition, in the other they gave the individuals more than requested — but in both cases the uncertainty of what the people would do was the key cause in giving a relatively small amount of money, not being funding constrained.
If you don’t want someone to do something, makes sense not to offer a large amount of $. For the second case, I’m a bit confused by this statement:
“the uncertainty of what the people would do was the key cause in giving a relatively small amount of money”
What do you mean here? That you were uncertain in which path was best?
“the uncertainty of what the people would do” -->
Both groups were being funded for open-ended plans (in one case, a career transition, in the other “exploring EA field-building”), rather than a specific venture, hence the uncertainty.
“If you don’t want someone to do something” -->
This isn’t the case—if the funders hadn’t wanted the recipients to move forward, they wouldn’t have given funding. In that case, the funder offered to support a different plan than the one that was originally pitched, namely instead of a venture, a career transition.