Thank you for the write-up super helpful. Amazing to see so much good stuff get funding.
Some feedback and personal reflections as a donor to the fund:
The inclusion of things on this list that might be better suited to other funds (e.g the LTFF) without an explanation of why they are being funded from the Infrastructure Fund makes me slightly less likely in future to give directly to the Infrastructure Fund and slightly more likely to just give to one of the bigger meta orgs you give to (like Rethink Priorities).
It basically creates some amount of uncertainty and worry in my mind that the the funds will give to the areas I expect them to give too with my donation.
(I recognise it is possible that there are equal amounts going across established EA cause areas or something like that from this fund but if that is the case it is not very clear)
This should not take away form the fact that I think the fund has genuinely done a great job here. For example saying that I would lean towards directly following the funds recommendations is recognition that I trust the fund and the work you have done to evaluate these projects – so well done!
Also I do support innovative longtermist projects (especially love CLTR – mega-super to see them funded!!) it is just not what I expect to see this fund doing so leaves me a bit confused / tempted to give elsewhere.
I basically agree with the conclusion MichaelA and Ben Pace have below. I think EAIF’s scope could do with being a bit more clearly defined, and we’ll be working on that. Otoh, I see the Lohmar and CLTR grants as fitting fairly clearly into the ‘Fund scope’ as pasted by MichaelA below. Currently, grants do get passed from one fund to the other, but that happens mostly when the fund they initially applied to deems them not to fall easily into their scope, rather than if they seem to fall centrally into the scope of the fund they apply for and also another fund. My view is that CLTR, for example, is good example of increasing the extent to which policy makers are likely to use EA principles when making decisions, which makes it seem like a good example of the kind of thing I think EAIF should be funding.
I think that there are a number of ways in which someone might disagree: One is that they might think that ‘EA infrastructure’ should be to do with building the EA _community_ specifically, rather than being primarily concerned with people outside community. Another is that they might want EAIF to only fund organisations which have the same portfolio of cause activities as is representative of the whole EA movement. I think it would be worse to narrow the fund’s scope in either of these ways, though I think your comment highlights that we could do with being clearer about it not being limited in that way.
Over the long run, I do think the fund should aim to support projects which represent different ways of understanding and framing EA principles, and which promote different EA principles to different extents. I think one way in which this fund pay out looks less representative than it felt to me is that there was a grant application for an organisation which was mostly fundraising for global development and animal welfare which didn’t get funded due to getting funding from elsewhere while we were deliberating.
The scope of the EAIF is likely to continue overlapping in some uneasy ways with the other funds. My instinct would be not to be too worried about that, as long as we’re clear about what kinds of things we’re aiming at funding and do fund. But it would be interesting to hear other people’s hunches about the importance of the funds being mutually exclusive in terms of remit.
Thanks for writing this reply and, more generally, for an excellent write-up and selection of projects!
I’d be grateful if you could address a potential, related concern, namely that EAIIF might end up as a sort of secondary LTFF, and that this would be to the detriment of non-longtermist applicants to the fund, as well being, presumably, against the wishes of EAIIF’s current donors. I note the introduction says:
we generally strive to maintain an overall balance between different worldviews according to the degree they seem plausible to the committee.
and also that Buck, Max, and yourself are enthusiastic longtermists—I am less sure about Ben and Jonas is a temporary member. Putting these together, combined with what you say about funding projects which could/should have applied to the LTFF, it would seem to follow you could (/should?) put the vast majority of the EAIIF towards long-terminist projects.
Is this what you plan to do? If not, why not? If yes, do you plan to inform the current donors?
I emphasise I don’t see any signs of this in the current round, nor do I expect you to do this. I’m mostly asking so you can set my mind at rest, not least because the Happier Lives Institute (disclosure: I am its Director) has been funded by EAIIF and its forerunner, would likely apply again, and is primarily non-longtermism (although we plan to do some LT work—see the new research agenda).
If the EAIIF radically changes directly, it would hugely affect us, as well as meaning more pluralistic/meta EA donors would lack an EA fund to donate to.
FWIW, a similar question was raised on the post about the new management teams, and Jonas replied there. I’ll quote the question and response. (But, to be clear, I don’t mean to “silence this thread”, imply this has been fully covered already, or the like.)
Question:
It seems like everyone affiliated with the EA Infrastructure Fund is also strongly affiliated with longtermism. I admire that you are going to use guest managers to add more worldview diversity, but insofar as the infrastructure fund is funding a lot of the community building efforts for effective altruism writ large should we worry about the cause neutrality here?
Jonas’s reply:
I agree that greater representation of different viewpoints on the EA Infrastructure Fund seems useful. We aim to add more permanent neartermist fund managers (not just guest managers). Quoting from above:
We’ve struggled to round out the EAIF with a balance of neartermism- and longtermism-focused grantmakers because we received a much larger number of strong applications from longtermist candidates. To better reflect the distribution of views in the EA community, we would like to add more neartermists to the EAIF and have proactively approached some additional candidates. That said, we plan to appoint candidates mostly based on their performance in our hiring process rather than their philosophical views.
Does that answer your question? Please let me know if you had already seen that paragraph and thought it didn’t address your concern.
EDIT: Also note that Ben Kuhn is serving as a guest manager this round. He works on neartermist issues.
(Terminological nitpick: It seems this is not an issue of “cause neutrality” but one of representation of different viewpoints. See here – the current fund managers are all cause-impartial; neartermist fund managers wouldn’t be cause-agnostic either; and the fund is supporting cause-general and cause-divergent work either way.)
Thanks for finding and pasting Jonas’ reply to this concern MichaelA. I don’t feel I have further information to add to it. One way to frame my plans: I intend to fund projects which promote EA principles, where both ‘promote’ and ‘EA principles’ may be understood in a number of different ways. I can imagine the projects aiming at both the long-run future and at helping current beings. It’s hard to comment in detail since I don’t yet know what projects will apply.
Hello Michelle. Thanks for replying, but I was hoping you would engage more with the substance of my question—your comment doesn’t really give me any more information than I already had about what to expect.
Let me try again with a more specific case. Suppose you are choosing between projects A and B—perhaps they have each asked for $100k but you only have $100k left. Project A is only eligible for funding from EAIF—the other EA funds consider it outside their respective purviews. Project B is eligible for funding from one of the other EA funds, but so happens to have applied to EAIF. Suppose, further, you think B is more cost-effective at doing good.
What would you do? I can’t think of any other information you would need.
FWIW, I think you must pick A. I think we can assume donors expect the funds not to be overlapping—otherwise, why even have different ones? - and they don’t want their money to go to another fund’s area—otherwise, that’s where they have put it. Hence, picking B would be tantamount to a breach of trust.
(By the same token, if I give you £50, ask you to put it in the collection box for a guide dog charity, and you agree, I don’t think you should send the money to AMF, even if you think AMF is better. If you decide you want to spend my money somewhere else from what we agreed to, you should tell me and offer to return the money.)
Buck, Max, and yourself are enthusiastic longtermists (…) it would seem to follow you could (/should?) put the vast majority of the EAIIF towards long-terminist projects
In my view, being an enthusiastic longtermist is compatible with finding neartermist worldviews plausible and allocating some funding to them. See, e.g., Ajeya Cotra on the 80,000 Hours podcast. I personally feel excited to fund high-quality projects that develop or promote EA principles, whether they’re longtermist or not. (And Michelle suggested this as well.) For the EAIF, I would evaluate a project like HLI based on whether it seems like it overall furthers the EA project (i.e., makes EA thinking more sophisticated, leads to more people making important decisions according to EA principles, etc.).
Let me try again with a more specific case. Suppose you are choosing between projects A and B—perhaps they have each asked for $100k but you only have $100k left. Project A is only eligible for funding from EAIF—the other EA funds consider it outside their respective purviews. Project B is eligible for funding from one of the other EA funds, but so happens to have applied to EAIF. Suppose, further, you think B is more cost-effective at doing good.
FWIW, I think this example is pretty unrealistic, as I don’t think funding constraints will become relevant in this way. I also want to note that funding A violates some principles of donor coordination. In practice, I would probably recommend a split between A and B (recommending my ‘fair share’ to B, and the rest to A); I would probably coordinate this explicitly with the other funds. I would probably also try to refer both A and B to other funders to ensure both get fully funded.
In my view, being an enthusiastic longtermist is compatible with finding neartermist worldviews plausible and allocating some funding to them
Thanks for this reply, which I found reassuring.
FWIW, I think this example is pretty unrealistic, as I don’t think funding constraints will become relevant in this way. I also want to note that funding A violates some principles of donor coordination
Okay, this is interesting and helpful to know. I’m trying to put my finger on the source of what seems to be a perspectival difference, and I wonder if this relates to the extent to which fund managers should be trying to instantiate donor’s wishes vs fund managers allocating the money by their own lights of what’s best (i.e. as if it were just their money). I think this is probably a matter of degree, but I lean towards the former, not least for long-term concerns about reputation, integrity, and people just taking their money elsewhere.
To explain how this could lead us to different conclusions, if I believed I had been entrusted with money to give to A but not B, then I should give to A, even if I personally thought B was better.
I suspect you would agree with this in principle: you wouldn’t want an EA fund manager to recommend a grant clearly/wildly outside the scope of their fund even if they sincerely thought it was great, e.g. the animal welfare fund recommended something that only benefitted humans even if they thought it was more cost-effective than something animal-focused.
However, I imagine you would disagree that this is a problem in practice, because donors expect there to be some overlap between funds and, in any case, fund managers will not recommend things wildly outside their fund’s remit. (I am not claiming this is a problem in practice; might concern is that it may become one and I want to avoid that.)
I haven’t thought lots about the topic, but all these concerns strike me as a reason to move towards a set of funds that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive—this gives donors greater choice and minimises worries about permissible fund allocation.
the extent to which fund managers should be trying to instantiate donor’s wishes vs fund managers allocating the money by their own lights of what’s best (i.e. as if it were just their money). I think this is probably a matter of degree, but I lean towards the former
This is a longer discussion, but I lean towards the latter, both because I think this will often lead to better decisions, and because many donors I’ve talked to actually want the fund managers to spend the money that way (the EA Funds pitch is “defer to experts” and donors want to go all in on that, with only minimal scope constraints).
To explain how this could lead us to different conclusions, if I believed I had been entrusted with money to give to A but not B, then I should give to A, even if I personally thought B was better.
I suspect you would agree with this in principle: you wouldn’t want an EA fund manager to recommend a grant clearly/wildly outside the scope of their fund even if they sincerely thought it was great, e.g. the animal welfare fund recommended something that only benefitted humans even if they thought it was more cost-effective than something animal-focused.
Yeah, I agree that all grants should be broadly in scope – thanks for clarifying.
I haven’t thought lots about the topic, but all these concerns strike me as a reason to move towards a set of funds that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive—this gives donors greater choice and minimises worries about permissible fund allocation.
Fund scope definitions are always a bit fuzzy, many grants don’t fit into a particular bucket very neatly, and there are lots of edge cases. So while I’m sympathetic to the idea in principle, I think it would be really hard to do in practice. See Max’s comment.
I think we can assume donors expect the funds not to be overlapping—otherwise, why even have different ones?
I care about donor expectations, and so I’d be interested to learn how many donors have a preference for fund scopes to not overlap.
However, I’m not following the suggested reasoning for why we should expect such a preference to be common. I think people—including donors—choose between partly-but-not-fully overlapping bundles of goods all the time, and that there is nothing odd or bad about these choices, the preferences revealed by them, or the partial overlap. I might prefer ice cream vendor A over B even though there is overlap in flavours offered; I might prefer newspaper A over B even though there is overlap in topics covered (there might even be overlap in authors); I might prefer to give to nonprofit A over B even though there is overlap in the interventions they’re implementing or the countries they’re working in; I might prefer to vote for party A over B even though there is overlap between their platforms; and so on. I think all of this is extremely common, and that for a bunch of messy reasons it is not clearly the case that generally it would be best for the world or the donors/customers/voters if overlap was reduced to zero.
I rather think it is the other way around: the only thing that would be clearly odd is if scopes were not overlapping but identical. (And even then there could be other reasons for why this makes sense, e.g., different criteria for making decisions within that scope.)
However, I’m not following the suggested reasoning for why we should expect such a preference to be common.
I definitely have the intuition the funds should be essentially non-overlapping. In the past I’ve given to the LTFF, and would be disappointed if it funded something that fit better within one of the other funds that I chose not to donate to.
With non-overlapping funds, donors can choose their allocation between the different areas (within the convex hull). If the funds overlap, donors can no longer donate to the extremal points. This is basically a tax on donors who want to e.g. care about EA Meta but not Longtermist things.
Consider the ice-cream case. Most ice-cream places will offer Vanilla, Chocolate, Strawberry, Mint etc. If instead they only offered different blends, someone who hated strawberry—or was allergic to chocolate—would have little recourse. By offering each as a separate flavour, they accommodate purists and people who want a mixture. Better for the place to offer each as a standalone option, and let donors/customers combine. In fact, for most products it is possible to buy 100% of one thing if you so desire.
This approach is also common in finance; firms will offer e.g. a Tech Fund, a Healthcare Fund and so on, and let investors decide the relative ratio they want between them. This is also (part of) the reason for the decline of conglomerates—investors want to be able to make their own decisions about which business to invest in, not have it decided by managers.
I agree the finance example is useful. I would expect that in both our case and the finance case the best implementation isn’t actually mutually exclusive funds, but funds with clear and explicit ‘central cases’ and assumptions, plus some sensible (and preferably explicit) heuristics to be used across funds like ‘try to avoid multiple funds investing too much in the same thing’.
That seems to be both because there will (as Max suggests) often be no fact of the matter as to which fund some particular company fits in, and also because the thing you care about when investing in a financial fund is in large part profit. In the case of the healthcare and tech fund, there will be clear overlaps—firms using tech to improve healthcare. If I were investing in one or other of these funds, I would be less interested in whether some particular company is more exactly described as a ‘healthcare’ or ‘tech’ company, and care more about whether they seem to be a good example of the thing I invested in. Eg if I invested in a tech fund, presumably I think some things along the lines of ‘technological advancements are likely to drive profit’ and ‘there are low hanging fruit in terms of tech innovations to be applied to market problems’. If some company is doing good tech innovation and making profit in the healthcare space, I’d be keen for the tech fund to invest in it. I wouldn’t be that fussed about whether the healthcare fund also invested in it. Though if the healthcare fund had invested substantially in the company, presumably the price would go up and it would look like a less good option for the tech fund and by extension, for me. I’d expect it to be best for EA Funds to work similarly: set clear expectations around the kinds of thing each fund aims for and what assumptions it makes, and then worry about overlap predominantly insofar as there are large potential donations which aren’t being made because some specific fund is missing (which might be a subset of a current fund, like ‘non-longtermist EA infrastructure’).
I would guess that EAF isn’t a good option for people with very granular views about how best to do good. Analogously, if I had a lot of views about the best ways for technology companies to make a profit (for example, that technology in healthcare was a dead end) I’d often do better to fund individual companies than broad funds.
In case it doesn’t go without saying, I think it’s extremely important to use money in accordance with the (communicated) intentions with which it was solicited. It seems very important to me that EAs act with integrity and are considerate of others.
Thanks for sharing your intuition, which of course moves me toward preferences for less/no overlap being common.
I’m probably even more moved by your comparison to finance because I think it’s a better analogy to EA Funds than the analogies I used in my previous comments.
However, I still maintain that there is no strong reason to think that zero overlap is optimal in some sense, or would widely be preferred. I think the situation is roughly:
There are first-principles arguments (e.g., your ‘convex hull’ argument) for why, under certain assumptions, zero overlap allows for optimal satisfaction of donor preferences.
(Though note that, due to standard arguments for why at least at first glance and under ‘naive’ assumptions splitting small donations is suboptimal, I think it’s at least somewhat unclear how significant the ‘convex hull’ point is in practice. I think there is some tension here as the loss of the extremal points seems most problematic from a ‘maximizing’ perspective, while I think that donor preferences to split their giving across causes are better construed as being the result of “intra-personal bargaining”, and it’s less clear to me how much that decision/allocation process cares about the ‘efficiency loss’ from moving away from the extremal points.)
However, reality is more messy, and I would guess that usually the optimum is somewhere on the spectrum between zero and full overlap, and that this differs significantly on a case-by-case basis. There are things pushing toward zero overlap, and others pushing toward more overlap (see e.g. the examples given for EA Funds below), and they need to be weighed up. It depends on things like transaction costs, principal-agent problems, the shape of market participants’ utility functions, etc.
Here are some reasons that might push toward more overlap for EA Funds:
Efficiency, transaction/communication cost, etc., as mentioned by Jonas.
My view is that ‘zero overlap’ just fails to carve reality at its joints, and significantly so.
I think there will be grants that seem very valuable from, e.g., both a ‘meta’ and a ‘global health’ perspective, and that it would be a judgment call whether the grant fits ‘better’ with the scope of the GHDF or the EAIF. Examples might be pre-cause-neutral GWWC, a fundraising org covering multiple causes but de facto generating 90% of its donations in global health, or an organization that does research on both meta and global health but doesn’t want to apply for ‘restricted’ grants.
If funders adopted a ‘zero overlap’ policy, grantees might worry that they will only be assessed a long one dimension of their impact. So, e.g., an organization that does research on several causes might feel incentivized to split up, or to apply for ‘restricted’ grants. However, this can incur efficiency losses because sometimes it would in fact be better to have less internal separation between activities in different causes than required by such a funding landscape.
More generally, it seems to me that incomplete contracting is everywhere.
If I as a donor made an ex-ante decision that I want my donations to go to cause X but not Y, I think there realistically would be ‘borderline cases’ I simply did not anticipate when making that decision. Even if I wanted, I probably could not tell EA Funds which things I do and don’t want to give to based on their scope, and neither could EA Funds get such a fine-grained preference out of me if they asked me.
Similarly, when EA Funds provides funding to a grantee, we cannot anticipate all the concrete activities the grantee might want to undertake. The conditions implied by the grant application and any restrictions attached to the grant just aren’t fine-grained enough. This is particularly acute for grants that support someone’s career – which might ultimately go in a different direction than anticipated. More broadly, a grantee will sometimes realize they might want to fund activities for which neither of us have previously thought about if they’re covered by the ‘intentions’ or ‘spirit’ of the grant, and this can include activities that would be more clearly in another fund’s scope.
To drive home how strongly I feel about the import of the previous points, my immediate reaction to hearing “care about EA Meta but not Longtermist things” is literally “I have no idea what that’s supposed to even mean”. When I think a bit about it, I can come up with a somewhat coherent and sensible-seeming scope of “longtermist but not meta”, but I have a harder time making sense of “meta but not longtermist” as a reasonable scope. I think if donors wanted that everything that’s longtermist (whether meta or not) was handled by the LTFF, then we should clarify the LTFF’s scope, remove the EAIF, and introduce a “non-longtermist EA fund” or something like that instead—as opposed to having an EAIF that funds things that overlap with some object-level cause areas but not others.
Some concrete examples:
Is 80k meta or longtermist? They have been funded by the EAIF before, but my understanding is that their organizational position is pro-longtermism, that many if not most of their staff are longtermist, and that this has significant implications for what they do (e.g., which sorts of people to advise, which sorts of career profiles to write, etc.).
What about Animal Advocacy Careers? If they wanted funding from EA Funds, should they get it from the AWF or the EAIF?
What about local EA groups? Do we have to review their activities and materials to understand which fund they should be funded by? E.g., I’ve heard that EA NYC is unusually focused on animal welfare (idk how strongly, and if this is still true), and I’m aware of other groups that seem pretty longtermist. Should such groups then not be funded by the EAIF? Should groups with activities in several cause areas and worldviews be co-funded by three or more funds, creating significant overhead?
What about CFAR? Longtermist? Meta?
--
Taking a step back, I think what this highlights is that feedback like this in the comment may well move me toward “be willing to incur a bit more communication cost to discuss where a grant fits best, and to move grants that arguably fit somewhat better with a different fund”. But (i) I think where I’d end up is still a far cry from ‘zero overlap’, and (ii) I think that even if I made a good-faith efforts it’s unclear if I would better fulfil any particular donor’s preference because, due to the “fund scopes don’t carve reality at its joint” point, donors and me might make different judgment calls on ‘where some grant fits best’.
In addition, I expect that different donors would disagree with each other about how to delineate scopes, which grants fits best where, etc.
This also means it would probably more help me to better satisfy donor preferences if I got specific feedback like “I feel grant X would have better fitted with fund Y” as opposed to more abstract preferences about the amount of overlap in fund scope. (Though I recognize that I’m kind of guilty having started/fueled the discussion in more abstract terms.)
However, taking yet another step back, I think that when deciding about the best strategy for EA Funds/the EAIF going forward, I think there are stakeholders besides the donors whose interests matter as well: e.g., grantees, fund managers, and beneficiaries. As implied by some of my points above, I think there can be some tensions between these interests. How to navigate this is messy, and depends crucially on the answer to this question among other things.
My impression is that when the goal is to “maximize impact” – even within a certain cause or by the lights of a certain worldview – we’re less bottlenecked by funding than by high-quality applications, highly capable people ‘matched’ with highly valuable projects they’re a good fit for, etc. This makes me suspect that the optimal strategy would put somewhat less weight on maximally satisfying donor preferences – when they’re in tension with other desiderata – than might be the case in some other nonprofit contexts. So even if we got a lot of feedback along the lines of “I feel grant X would have fitted better with fund Y”, I’m not sure how much that would move the EAIF’s strategy going forward.
(Note that the above is about what ‘products’ to offer donors going forward. Separately from that, I think it’s of course very important to not be misleading, and to make a good-faith effort to use past donations in a way that is consistent with what we told them we’d do at the time. And these demands are ‘quasi-deontological’ and can’t be easily sacrificed for the sake of better meeting other stakeholders’ interests.)
Nothing I have seen makes me thinks the EAIF should change the decision criteria. It seems to be working very well and good stuff is getting funded. So don’t change that to address a comparatively very minor issue like this, would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater!!
-- If you showed me the list here and said ‘Which EA Fund should fund each of these?’ I would have put the Lohmar and the CLTR grants (which both look like v good grants and glad they are getting funded) in the longtermist fund. Based on your comments above you might have made the same call as well.
From an outside view the actual cost of making the grants from the pot of another fund seems incredibly small. At minimum it could just be having someone to look over the end decisions and see if any feel like they belong in a different fund and then quickly double checking with the other fund’s grantmakers that they have no strong objections and then granting the money from a different pot. (You could even do that after the decision to grant has been communicated to applicants, no reason to hold up, if the second fund objects then can still be given by the first fund).
And then all those dogmatic donors to the EAIF who don’t like longtermist stuff can go to bed happy and all those dogmatic donors to the LTFF who don’t like meta stuff can go to bed happy and everyone feels like there money is going to where they expect it to go, etc. Which does matter a little bit because as a donor you feel that you really need to trust that the money is going to where it says on the tin and not to something else.
(But sure if the admin costs here are actually really high or something then not a big deal, it matters a little bit to some donors but is not the most important thing to get right)
From an outside view the actual cost of making the grants from the pot of another fund seems incredibly small. At minimum it could just be having someone to look over the end decisions and see if any feel like they belong in a different fund and then quickly double checking with the other fund’s grantmakers that they have no strong objections and then granting the money from a different pot. (You could even do that after the decision to grant has been communicated to applicants, no reason to hold up, if the second fund objects then can still be given by the first fund).
Thank you for this suggestion. It makes sense to me that this is how the situation looks from the outside.
I’ll think about the general issue and suggestions like this one a bit more, but currently don’t expect large changes to how we operate. I do think this might mean that in future rounds there may be a similar fraction of grants that some donors perceive to better fit with another fund. I acknowledge that this is not ideal, but I currently expect it will seem best after considering the cost and benefits of alternatives.
So please view the following points of me trying to explain why I don’t expect to adopt what may sound like a good suggestion, while still being appreciative of the feedback and suggestions.
I think based on my EA Funds experience so far, I’m less optimistic that the cost would be incredibly small. E.g., I would expect less correlation between “EAIF managers think something is good to fund from a longtermist perspective” and “LTFF managers think something is good to fund from a longtermist perspective” (and vice versa for ‘meta’ grants) than you seem to expect.
This is because grantmaking decisions in these areas rely a lot on judgment calls that different people might make differently even if they’re aligned on broad “EA principes” and other fundamental views. I have this view both because of some cases I’ve seen where we actually discussed (aspects of) grants across both the EAIF and LTFF managers and because within the EAIF committee large disagreements are not uncommon (and I have no reasons to believe that disagreements would be smaller between LTFF and EAIF managers than just within EAIF managers).
To be clear, I would expect decision-relevant disagreements for a minority of grants—but not a sufficiently clear minority that I’d be comfortable acting on “the other fund is going to make this grant” as a default assumption.
Your suggestion of retaining the option to make the grant through the ‘original’ fund would help with this, but not with the two following points.
I think another issue is duplication of time cost. If the LTFF told me “here is a grant we want to make, but we think it fits better for the EAIF—can you fund it?”, then I would basically always want to have a look at it. In maybe 50% [?, unsure] of cases this would only take me like 10 minutes, though the real attention + time cost would be higher. In the other 50% of cases I would want to invest at least another hour—and sometimes significantly more—assessing the grant myself. E.g., I might want to talk to the grantee myself or solicit additional references. This is because I expect that donors and grantees would hold me accountable for that decision, and I’d feel uncomfortable saying “I don’t really have an independent opinion on this grant, we just made it b/c it was recommended by the LTFF”.
(In general, I worry that “quickly double-checking” something is close to impossible between two groups of 4 or so people, all of whom are very opinionated and can’t necessarily predict each other’s views very well, are in parallel juggling dozens of grant assessments, and most of whom are very time-constrained and are doing all of this next to their main jobs.)
A third issue is that increasing the delay between the time of a grant application and the time of a grant payout is somewhat costly. So, e.g., inserting another ‘review allocation of grants to funds’ step somewhere would somewhat help with the time & attention cost by bundling all scoping decisions together; but it would also mean a delay of potentially a few days or even more given fund managers’ constrained availabilities. This is not clearly prohibitive, but significant since I think that some grantees care about the time window between application and potential payments being short.
However, there may be some cases where grants could be quickly transferred (e.g., if for some reason managers from different funds had been involved in a discussion anyway), or there may be other, less costly processes for how to organize transfers. This is definitely something I will be paying a bit more attention to going forward, but for the reasons explained in this and other comments I currently don’t expect significant changes to how we operate.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful and considered reply.
I think based on my EA Funds experience so far, I’m less optimistic that the cost would be incredibly small. E.g., I would expect less correlation between “EAIF managers think something is good to fund from a longtermist perspective” and “LTFF managers think something is good to fund from a longtermist perspective” (and vice versa for ‘meta’ grants) than you seem to expect.
This is because grantmaking decisions in these areas rely a lot on judgment calls that different people might make differently even if they’re aligned on broad “EA principes” and other fundamental views. I have this view both because of some cases I’ve seen where we actually discussed (aspects of) grants across both the EAIF and LTFF managers and because within the EAIF committee large disagreements are not uncommon (and I have no reasons to believe that disagreements would be smaller between LTFF and EAIF managers than just within EAIF managers).
Sorry to change topic but this is super fascinating and more interesting to me than questions of fund admin time (however much I like discussing organisational design I am happy to defer to you / Jonas / etc on if the admin cost is too high – ultimately only you know that).
Why would there be so much disagreement (so much that you would routinely want to veto each others decisions if you had the option)? It seems plausible that if there is such levels of disagreement maybe:
One fund is making quite poor decisions AND/OR
There is significant potential to use consensus decisions making tools as a large group to improve decision quality AND/OR
There are some particularly interesting lessons to be learned by identifying the cruxes of these disagreements.
Just curious and typing up my thoughts. Not expecting good answers to this.
I think all funds are generally making good decisions.
I think a lot of the effect is just that making these decisions is hard, and so that variance between decision-makers is to some extent unavoidable. I think some of the reasons are quite similar to why, e.g., hiring decisions, predicting startup success, high-level business strategy, science funding decisions, or policy decisions are typically considered to be hard/unreliable. Especially for longtermist grants, on top of this we have issues around cluelessness, potentially missing crucial considerations, sign uncertainty, etc.
I think you are correct that both of the following are true:
There is potential of improving decision quality by spending time on discussing diverging views, improving the way we aggregate opinions to the extent they still differ after the amount of discussion that is possible, and maybe by using specific ‘decision making tools’ (e.g., certain ways of a structured discussion + voting).
There are interesting lessons to be learned by identifying cruxes. Some of these lessons might directly improve future decisions, others might be valuable for other reasons—e.g., generating active grantmaking ideas or cruxes/results being shareable and thereby being a tiny bit epistemically helpful to many people.
I think a significant issue is that both of these cost time—both identifying how to improve in these areas and then implementing the improvements -, which is a very scarce resource for fund managers.
I don’t think it’s obvious whether at the margin the EAIF committee should spend more or less time to get more or fewer benefits in these areas. Hopefully this means we’re not too far away from the optimum.
I think there are different views on this within EA Funds (both within the EAIF committee, and potentially between the average view of the EAIF committee and the average view of the LTFF committee—or at least this is suggested by revealed preferences as my loose impression is that LTFF fund managers spend more time in discussions with each other). Personally, I actually lean toward spending less time and less aggregation of opinions across fund managers—but I think currently this view isn’t sufficiently widely shared that I expect it to be reflected in how we’re going to make decisions in the future.
But I also feel a bit confused because some people (e.g., some LTFF fund managers, Jonas) have told me that spending more time discussing disagreements seemed really helpful to them, while I feel like my experience with this and my inside-view prediction of how spending more time on discussions would look like make me expect less value. I don’t really know why that is—it could be that I’m just bad at getting value out of discussions, or updating my views, or something like that.
think a significant issue is that both of these cost time
I am always amazed at how much you fund managers all do given this isn’t your paid job!
I don’t think it’s obvious whether at the margin the EAIF committee should spend more or less time to get more or fewer benefits in these areas
Fair enough. FWIW my general approach to stuff like this is not to aim for perfection but to aim for each iteration/round to be a little bit better than the last.
… it could be that I’m just bad at getting value out of discussions, or updating my views, or something like that.
That is possible. But also possible that you are particularly smart and have well thought-out views and people learn more from talking to you than you do from talking to them! (And/or just that everyone is different and different ways of learning work for different people)
I think based on my EA Funds experience so far, I’m less optimistic that the cost would be incredibly small. E.g., I would expect less correlation between “EAIF managers think something is good to fund from a longtermist perspective” and “LTFF managers think something is good to fund from a longtermist perspective” (and vice versa for ‘meta’ grants) than you seem to expect.
This is because grantmaking decisions in these areas rely a lot on judgment calls that different people might make differently even if they’re aligned on broad “EA principes” and other fundamental views. I have this view both because of some cases I’ve seen where we actually discussed (aspects of) grants across both the EAIF and LTFF managers and because within the EAIF committee large disagreements are not uncommon (and I have no reasons to believe that disagreements would be smaller between LTFF and EAIF managers than just within EAIF managers).
Thanks for writing up this detailed response. I agree with your intuition here that ‘review, refer, and review again’ could be quite time consuming.
However, I think it’s worth considering why this is the case. Do we think that the EAIF evaluators are similarly qualified to judge primarily-longtermist activities as the LTFF people, and the differences of views is basically noise? If so, it seems plausible to me that the EAIF evaluators should be able to unilaterally make disbursements from the LTFF money. In this setup, the specific fund you apply to is really about your choice of evaluator, not about your choice of donor, and the fund you donate to is about your choice of cause area, not your choice of evaluator-delegate.
In contrast, if the EAIF people are not as qualified to judge primarily-longtermist (or primarily animal rights, etc.) projects as the specialised funds’ evaluators, then they should probably refer the application early on in the process, prior to doing detailed due diligence etc.
If you showed me the list here and said ‘Which EA Fund should fund each of these?’ I would have put the Lohmar and the CLTR grants (which both look like v good grants and glad they are getting funded) in the longtermist fund. Based on your comments above you might have made the same call as well.
Thank you for sharing—as I mentioned I find this concrete feedback spelled out in terms of particular grants particularly useful.
[ETA: btw I do think part of the issue here is an “object-level” disagreement about where the grants best fit—personally, I definitely see why among the grants we’ve made they are among the ones that seem ‘closest’ to the LTFF’s scope; but I don’t personally view them as clearly being more in scope for the LTFF than for the EAIF.]
[ETA: btw I do think part of the issue here is an “object-level” disagreement about where the grants best fit—personally, I definitely see why among the grants we’ve made they are among the ones that seem ‘closest’ to the LTFF’s scope; but I don’t personally view them as clearly being more in scope for the LTFF than for the EAIF.]
Thank you Max. A guess the interesting question then is why do we think different things. Is it just a natural case of different people thinking differently or have I made a mistake or is there some way the funds could better communicate.
One way to consider this might be to looking at juts the basic info / fund scope on the both EAIF and LTFF pages and ask: “if the man on the Clapham omnibus only read this information here and the description of these funds where do they think these grants would sit?”
A further point is donor coordination / moral trade / fair-share giving. Treating it as a tax (as Larks suggests) could often amount to defecting in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma between donors who care about different causes. E.g., if the EAIF funded only one org, which raised $0.90 for MIRI, $0.90 for AMF, and $0.90 for GFI for every dollar spent, this approach would lead to it not getting funded, even though co-funding with donors who care about other cause areas would be a substantially better approach.
You might respond that there’s no easy way to verify whether others are cooperating. I might respond that you can verify how much money the fund gets in total and can ask EA Funds about the funding sources. (Also, I think that acausal cooperation works in practice, though perhaps the number of donors who think about it in this way is too small for it to work here.)
I’m afraid I don’t quite understand why such an org would end up unfunded. Such an organisation is not longtermist or animal rights or global poverty specific, and hence seems to fall within the natural remit of the Meta/Infrastructure fund. Indeed according to the goal of the EAIF it seems like a natural fit:
While the other three Funds support direct work on various causes, this Fund supports work that could multiply the impact of direct work, including projects that provide intellectual infrastructure for the effective altruism community, run events, disseminate information, or fundraise for effective charities. [emphasis added]
Nor would this be disallowed by weeatquince’s policy, as no other fund is more appropriate than EAIF:
we aim for the funds to be mutually exclusive. If multiple funds would fund the same project we make the grant from whichever of the Funds seems most appropriate to the project in question.
Just a half-formed thought how something could be “meta but not longtermist” because I thought that was a conceptually interesting issue to unpick.
I suppose one could distinguish between meaning “meta” as (1) does non-object level work or (2) benefits more than one value-bearer group, where the classic, not-quite-mutually-exclusive three options for value-bearer groups are (1) near-term humans, (2) animals, and (3) far future lives.
If one is thinking the former way, something is meta to the degree it does non-object level vs object-level work (I’m not going to define these), regardless of what domain it works towards. In this sense, ‘meta’ and (e.g.) ‘longtermist’ are independent: you could be one, or the other, both, or neither. Hence, if you did non-object level work that wasn’t focused on the longterm, you would be meta but not longtermist (although it might be more natural to say “meta and not longtermist” as there is no tension between them).
If one is thinking the latter way, one might say that an org is less “meta”, and more “non-meta”, the greater the fraction of its resources are intentionally spent to benefit just only one value-bearer group. Here “meta” and “non-meta” are mutually exclusive and a matter of degree. A “non-meta” org is one that spends, say, more than 50% of its resources aimed at one group. The thought is of this is that, on this framework, Animal Advocacy Careers and 80k are not meta, whereas, say, GWWC is meta. Thinking this way, something is meta but not longtermist if it primarily focuses on non-longtermist stuff.
(In both cases, we will run into familiar issues about to making precise what an agent ‘focuses on’ or ‘intends’.)
It seems like, from what you and Jonas are saying, that the fund scopes currently overlap so there might be some grants that could be covered by multiple funds and even if they are arguably more appropriate to another fund than another they tend to get funded with by whoever gets to them first as currently the admin burden of shifting to another fund is large.
That all seems pretty reasonable.
I guess my suggestion would be that I would be excited to see these kinks minimised over time and funding come from which ever pool seems most appropriate. That overlap is seen as a bug to be ironed out not a feature.
FWIW I think you and all the other fund managers made really really good decisions. I am not just saying that to counteract saying something negative but I am genuinely very excited by how much great stuff is getting funded by the EAIF. Well done.
the importance of the funds being mutually exclusive in terms of remit.
I lean (as you might guess) towards the funds being mutually exclusive. The basic principle is that In general the more narrow the scope of each fund then the more control donors have about where their funds go.
If the Fund that seemed more appropriate pays out for any thing where there is overlap then you would expect:
More satisfied donors. You would expect the average amount of grants that donors strongly approve to go up.
More donations. As well as the above satisfaction point, if donors know more precisely how their money will be spent then they would have more confident that giving to the fund makes sense comapred to some other option.
Theoretically better donations? If you think donors wishes are a good measure of expected impact it can arguably improve the targeting of funds to ensure amounts moved are closer to donors wishes (although maybe it makes the relationship between donors and specific fund managers weaker as there might be crossover with fund mangers moving money across multiple of the Funds).
None of these are big improvements, so maybe not a priority, but the cost is also small. (I cannot speak for CEA but as a charity trustee we regularly go out our way to make sure we are meeting donors wishes, regranting money hither and thither and it has not been a big time cost).
OTOH my impression is that the Funds aren’t very funding-constrained, so it might not make sense to heavily weigh your first two reasons (though all else equal donor satisfaction and increased donation quantity seems good).
I also think there are just a lot of grants that legitimately have both a strong meta/infrastructure and also object-level benefit and it seems kind of unfair to grantees that provide multiple kinds of value that they still can only be considered from one funding perspective/with focus on one value proposition. If a grantee is both producing some kind of non-meta research and also doing movement-building, I think it deserves the chance to maybe get funded based on the merits of either of those value adds.
Yeah, I agree with Dicentra. Basically I’m fine if donors don’t donate to the EA Funds for these reasons; I think it’s not worth bothering (time cost is small, but benefit even smaller).
There’s also a whole host of other issues; Max Daniel is planning to post a comment reply to Larks’ above comment that mentions those as well. Basically it’s not really possible to clearly define the scope in a mutually exclusive way.
Basically it’s not really possible to clearly define the scope in a mutually exclusive way.
Maybe we are talking past each other but I was imagining something easy like: just defining the scope as mutually exclusive. You write: we aim for the funds to be mutually exclusive. If multiple funds would fund the same project we make the grant from whichever of the Funds seems most appropriate to the project in question.
Then before you grant money you look over and see if any stuff passed by one fund looks to you like it is more for another fund. If so (unless the fund mangers of the second fund veto the switch) you fund the project with money from the second fund.
Sure it might be a very minor admin hassle but it helps make sure donor’s wishes are met and avoids the confusion of donors saying – hold on a min why am I funding this I didn’t expect that.
This is not a huge issue so maybe not the top of your to do list. And you are the expert on how much of an admin burden something like this is and if it is worth it, but from the outside it seems very easy and the kind of action I would just naturally expect of a fund / charity.
Upon reflection and reading the replies I think I perhaps I was underestimating how broad this Fund’s scope is (and perhaps was too keen to find fault).
I do think there could be advantages for donors of narrowing the scope of this Fund / limiting overlap between Funds (see other comments), but recognise there are costs to doing that.
All my positive comments remain and great to see so much good stuff get funded.
Hi Sam, thank you for this feedback. Hearing such reactions is super useful.
Could you tell us more about which specific grants you perceive as potentially “better suited to other funds”? I have some guesses (e.g. I would have guessed you’d say CLTR), but I would still find it helpful to see if our perceptions match here. Feel free to send me a PM on that if that seemed better.
If someone had asked me beforehand which fund would evaluate CLTR for funding, I would’ve confidently said LTFF.
For the other two, I’d have been uncertain, because:
The Lohmar grant is for a project that’s not necessarily arguing for longtermism, but rather working out how longtermist we should be, when, how the implications of that differ from what we’d do for other reasons, etc.
But GPI and Hilary Greaves seem fairly sold on longtermism, and I expect this research to mostly push in more longtermism-y directions
And I’d find it surprising if the Infrastructure Fund funded something about how much to care about insects as compared to humans—that’s likewise not necessarily going to conclude that we should update towards more focus on animal welfare, but it still seems a better fit for the Animal Welfare Fund
Climate change isn’t necessarily strongly associated with longtermism within EA
I guess Giving Green could also be seen as aimed at bringing more people into EA by providing people who care about climate change with EA-related products and services they’d find interesting?
But this report doesn’t explicitly state that that’s why the EAIF is interested in this grant, and I doubt that that’s Giving Green’s own main theory of change
But this isn’t to say that any of those grants seem bad to me. I was just somewhat surprised they were funded by the EAIF rather than the LTFF (at least in the case of CLTR and Jakob Lohmar).
A big part of the reason was simply that CLTR and Jakob Lohmar happened to apply to the EAIF, not the LTFF. Referring grants takes time (not a lot, but I don’t think doing such referrals is a particularly good use of time if the grants are in scope for both funds). This is partly explained in the introduction of the grant report.
I recognise there is admin hassle. Although, as I note in my other comment, this becomes an issue if the EAIIF in effect becomes a top-up for another fund.
FWIW, it’s not just admin hassle but also mental attention for the fund chairs that’s IMO much better spent on improving their decisions. I think there are large returns from fund managers focusing fully on whether a grant is a good use of money or on how to make the grantees even more successful. I therefore think the costs of having to take into account (likely heterogeneous) donor preferences when evaluating specific grants are quite high, and so as long as a majority of assessed grants seems to be somewhat “in scope” it’s overall better if fund managers can keep their head free from scope concerns and other ‘meta’ issues.
I believe that we can do the most good by attracting donors who endorse the above. I’m aware this means that donors with different preferences may want to give elsewhere.
(Made some edits to the above comment to make it less disagreeable.)
without an explanation of why they are being funded from the Infrastructure Fund
In the introduction, we wrote the following. Perhaps you missed it? (Or perhaps you were interested in a per-grant explanation, or the explanation seemed insufficient to you?)
Some of the grants are oriented primarily towards causes that are typically prioritized from a ‘non-longtermist’ perspective; others primarily toward causes that are typically prioritized for longtermist reasons. The EAIF makes grants towards longtermist projects if a) the grantseeker decided to apply to the EAIF (rather than the Long-Term Future Fund), b) the intervention is at a meta level or aims to build infrastructure in some sense, or c) the work spans multiple causes (whether the case for them is longtermist or not). We generally strive to maintain an overall balance between different worldviews according to the degree they seem plausible to the committee.
I agree with Michael above that a) seems is a legit administrative hassle but it seems like the kind of think I would be excited to see resolved when you have capacity to think about it. Maybe each fund could have some discretionary money from the other fund.
An explanation per grant would be super too as an where such a thing is possible!
I don’t suppose you would mind clarifying the logical structure here:
The EAIF makes grants towards longtermist projects if a) the grantseeker decided to apply to the EAIF (rather than the Long-Term Future Fund), b) the intervention is at a meta level or aims to build infrastructure in some sense, or c) the work spans multiple causes (whether the case for them is longtermist or not).
My intuitive reading of this (based on the commas, the ‘or’, and the absence of ‘and’) is:
a OR b OR c
i.e., satisfying any one of the three suffices. But I’m guessing that what you meant to write was
The inclusion of things on this list that might be better suited to other funds (e.g the LTFF) without an explanation of why they are being funded from the Infrastructure Fund makes me slightly less likely in future to give directly to the Infrastructure Fund and slightly more likely to just give to one of the bigger meta orgs you give to (like Rethink Priorities).
I think that different funders have different tastes, and if you endorse their tastes you should consider giving to them. I don’t really see a case for splitting responsibilities like this. If Funder A thinks a grant is good, Funder B thinks it’s bad, but it’s nominally in Funder B’s purview, this just doesn’t seem like a strong arg against Funder A doing it if it seems like a good idea to them. What’s the argument here? Why should Funder A not give a grant that seems good to them?
I find this perspective (and its upvotes) pretty confusing, because:
I’m pretty confident that the majority of EA Funds donors choose which fund to donate to based far more on the cause area than the fund managers’ tastes
And I think this really makes sense; it’s a better idea to invest time in forming views about cause areas than in forming views about specifically the funding tastes of Buck, Michelle, Max, Ben, and Jonas, and then also the fund management teams for the other 3 funds.
The EA Funds pages also focus more on the cause area than on the fund managers.
The fund manager team regularly changes composition at least somewhat.
Some fund managers have not done any grantmaking before, at least publicly, so people won’t initially know their fund tastes.
In this particular case, I think all fund managers except Jonas haven’t done public grantmaking before.
I think a donation to an EA Fund is typically intended to delegate to some fund managers to do whatever is best in a given area, in line with the principles described on the EA Funds page. It is not typically intended to delegate to those fund managers to do whatever they think is best with that money, except if we assume that what they think is best will always be something that is in that area and is in line with those principles described (in which case it would still be problematic for them to donate in other ways).
Likewise, if you pay a contractor to do X and then instead they do Y, this may well be problematic even if they think doing Y is better and even if they might have good judgement. And especially so if their ad for their services focused on X rather than on their individual track record, tastes, or good judgement.
To be clear, this comment isn’t intended as sharp criticism of any choices the EAIF made this round. I also didn’t donate to the EAIF this round and lean quite longtermist myself, so I don’t personally have any sense of my donation being used a way I don’t like, or something like that. I’m just responding to your comment.
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Another way to put this is that if you don’t really see “a case for splitting responsibilities like this”, then I think that means you don’t see a case for the current set up of the EA Funds (at least as a place for you specifically to donate), and so you’re not the relevant target audience?
(I feel like this will sound rude or something in written text without tone—apologies in advance if it does sound that way; that’s not my intent.)
Yeah, that’s a good point, that donors who don’t look at the grants (or know the individuals on the team much) will be confused if they do things outside the purpose of the team (e.g. donations to GiveDirectly, or a random science grant that just sounds cool), that sounds right. But I guess all of these grants seem to me fairly within the purview of EA Infrastructure?
The one-line description of the fund says:
The Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund aims to increase the impact of projects that use the principles of effective altruism, by increasing their access to talent, capital, and knowledge.
I expect that for all of these grants the grantmakers think that they’re orgs that either “use the principle of effective altruism” or help others do so.
I think I’d suggest instead that weeatquince name some specific grants and ask the fund managers the basic reason for why those grants seem to them like they help build EA Infrastructure (e.g. ask Michelle why CLTR seems to help things according to her) if that’s unclear to weeatquince.
Yeah, good point that these grants do seem to all fit that one-line description.
That said, I think that probably most or all grants from all 4 EA Funds would fit that description—I think that that one-line description should probably be changed to make it clearer what’s distinctive about the Infrastructure Fund. (I acknowledge I’ve now switched from kind-of disagreeing with you to kind-of disagreeing with that part of how the EAIF present themselves.)
I think the rest of the “Fund Scope” section helps clarify the distinctive scope:
While the other three Funds support direct work on various causes, this Fund supports work that could multiply the impact of direct work, including projects that provide intellectual infrastructure for the effective altruism community, run events, disseminate information, or fundraise for effective charities. This will be achieved by supporting projects that:
Directly increase the number of people who are exposed to principles of effective altruism, or develop, refine or present such principles
Support the recruitment of talented people who can use their skills to make progress on important problems
Aim to build a global community of people who use principles of effective altruism as a core part of their decision-making process when deciding how they can have a positive impact on the world
Conduct research into prioritizing between or within different cause areas
Raise funds or otherwise support other highly-effective projects
Improve community health by promoting healthy norms for interaction and discourse, or assist in resolving grievances
Re-reading that, I now think Giving Green clearly does fit under EAIF’s scope (“Raise funds or otherwise support other highly-effective projects”). And it seems a bitclearer why the CLTR and Jakob Lohmar grants might fit, since I think they partly target the 1st, 3rd, and 4th of those things.
Though it still does seem to me like those two grants are probably better fits for LTFF.
And I also think “Conduct research into prioritizing [...] within different cause areas” seems like a better fit for the relevant cause area. E.g., research about TAI timelines or the number of shrimp there are in the world should pretty clearly be under the scope of the LTFF and AWF, respectively, rather than EAIF. (So that’s another place where I’ve accidentally slipped into providing feedback on that fund page rather than disagreeing with you specifically.)
Though it still does seem to me like those two grants are probably better fits for LTFF.
But this line is what I am disagreeing with. I’m saying there’s a binary of “within scope” or not, and then otherwise it’s up to the fund to fund what they think is best according to their judgment about EA Infrastructure or the Long-Term Future or whatever. Do you think that the EAIF should be able to tell the LTFF to fund a project because the EAIF thinks it’s worthwhile for EA Infrastructure, instead of using the EAIF’s money? Alternatively, if the EAIF thinks something is worth money for EA Infrastructure reasons, if the grant is probably more naturally under the scope of “Long-Term Future”, do you think they shouldn’t fund the grantee even if LTFF isn’t going to either?
Ah, this is a good point, and I think I understand where you’re coming from better now. Your first comment made me think you were contesting the idea that the funds should each have a “scope” at all. But now I see it’s just that you think the scopes will sometimes overlap, and that in those cases the grant should be able to be evaluated and funded by any fund it’s within-scope for, without consideration of which fund it’s more centrally within scope for. Right?
I think that sounds right to me, and I think that that argument + re-reading that “Fund Scope” section have together made it so that I think that EAIF granting to CLTR and Jakob Lohmar just actually makes sense. I.e., I think I’ve now changed my mind and become less confused about those decisions.
Though I still think it would probably make sense for Fund A to refer an application to Fund B if the project seems more centrally in-scope for Fund B, and let Fund B evaluate it first. Then if Fund B declines, Fund A could do their own evaluation and (if they want) fund the project, though perhaps somewhat updating negatively based on the info that Fund B declined funding. (Maybe this is roughly how it already works. And also I haven’t thought about this until writing this comment, so maybe there are strong arguments against this approach.)
(Again, I feel I should state explicitly—to avoid anyone taking this as criticism of CLTR or Jakob—that the issue was never that I thought CLTR or Jakob just shouldn’t get funding; it was just about clarity over what the EAIF would do.)
Though I still think it would probably make sense for Fund A to refer an application to Fund B if the project seems more centrally in-scope for Fund B, and let Fund B evaluate it first.
In theory, I agree. In practice, this shuffling around of grants costs some time (both in terms of fund manager work time, and in terms of calendar time grantseekers spend waiting for a decision), and I prefer spending that time making a larger number of good grants rather than on minor allocation improvements.
(That seems reasonable—I’d have to have a clearer sense of relevant time costs etc. to form a better independent impression, but that general argument + the info that you believe this would overall not be worthwhile is sufficient to update me to that view.)
And btw, I think if there are particular grants that seem not in scope from a fund, is seems totally reasonable to ask them for their reasoning and update pos/neg on them if the reasoning does/doesn’t check out. And it’s also generally good to question the reasoning of a grant that doesn’t make sense to you.
Tl;dr: I was to date judging the funds by the cause area rather than the fund managers tastes and this has left me a bit surprised. I think in future I will judge more based on the fund mangers tastes.
Thank you Ben – I agree with all of this
Maybe I was just confused by the fund scope.
The fund scope is broad and that is good. The webpage says the scope includes: “Raise funds or otherwise support other highly-effective projects” which basically means everything! And I do think it needs to be broad – for example to support EAs bringing EA ideas into new cause areas.
But maybe in my mind I had classed it as something like “EA meta” or as “everything that is EA aligned that would not be better covered by one of the other 3 funds” or similar. But maybe that was me reading too much into things and the scope is just “anything and everything that is EA aligned”.
It is not bad that it has a broader scope than I had realised, and maybe the fault is mine, but I guess my reaction to seeing the scope is different to what I realised is to take a step back and reconsider if my giving to date is going where I expect.
To date I have been judging the EAIF as the easy option when I am not sure where to give and have been judging the fund mostly by the cause area it gives too.
I think taking a step back will likely involve spending an hour or two going though all of the things given in recent fund rounds and thinking about how much I agree with each one then deciding if I think the EAIF is the best place for me to give, and if I think I can do better giving to one of the existing EA meta orgs that takes donations. (Probably I should have been doing this already so maybe a good nudge).
Does that make sense / answer your query?
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If the EAIF had a slightly more well defined narrower scope that could make givers slightly more confident in where their funds will go but has a cost in terms of admin time and flexibility for the Funds. So there is a trade-off.
My gut feel is that in the long run the trade-off is worth it but maybe feedback from other donors would say otherwise.
Thank you for the write-up super helpful. Amazing to see so much good stuff get funding.
Some feedback and personal reflections as a donor to the fund:
The inclusion of things on this list that might be better suited to other funds (e.g the LTFF) without an explanation of why they are being funded from the Infrastructure Fund makes me slightly less likely in future to give directly to the Infrastructure Fund and slightly more likely to just give to one of the bigger meta orgs you give to (like Rethink Priorities).
It basically creates some amount of uncertainty and worry in my mind that the the funds will give to the areas I expect them to give too with my donation.
(I recognise it is possible that there are equal amounts going across established EA cause areas or something like that from this fund but if that is the case it is not very clear)
This should not take away form the fact that I think the fund has genuinely done a great job here. For example saying that I would lean towards directly following the funds recommendations is recognition that I trust the fund and the work you have done to evaluate these projects – so well done!
Also I do support innovative longtermist projects (especially love CLTR – mega-super to see them funded!!) it is just not what I expect to see this fund doing so leaves me a bit confused / tempted to give elsewhere.
Thanks for the feedback!
I basically agree with the conclusion MichaelA and Ben Pace have below. I think EAIF’s scope could do with being a bit more clearly defined, and we’ll be working on that. Otoh, I see the Lohmar and CLTR grants as fitting fairly clearly into the ‘Fund scope’ as pasted by MichaelA below. Currently, grants do get passed from one fund to the other, but that happens mostly when the fund they initially applied to deems them not to fall easily into their scope, rather than if they seem to fall centrally into the scope of the fund they apply for and also another fund. My view is that CLTR, for example, is good example of increasing the extent to which policy makers are likely to use EA principles when making decisions, which makes it seem like a good example of the kind of thing I think EAIF should be funding.
I think that there are a number of ways in which someone might disagree: One is that they might think that ‘EA infrastructure’ should be to do with building the EA _community_ specifically, rather than being primarily concerned with people outside community. Another is that they might want EAIF to only fund organisations which have the same portfolio of cause activities as is representative of the whole EA movement. I think it would be worse to narrow the fund’s scope in either of these ways, though I think your comment highlights that we could do with being clearer about it not being limited in that way.
Over the long run, I do think the fund should aim to support projects which represent different ways of understanding and framing EA principles, and which promote different EA principles to different extents. I think one way in which this fund pay out looks less representative than it felt to me is that there was a grant application for an organisation which was mostly fundraising for global development and animal welfare which didn’t get funded due to getting funding from elsewhere while we were deliberating.
The scope of the EAIF is likely to continue overlapping in some uneasy ways with the other funds. My instinct would be not to be too worried about that, as long as we’re clear about what kinds of things we’re aiming at funding and do fund. But it would be interesting to hear other people’s hunches about the importance of the funds being mutually exclusive in terms of remit.
Thanks for writing this reply and, more generally, for an excellent write-up and selection of projects!
I’d be grateful if you could address a potential, related concern, namely that EAIIF might end up as a sort of secondary LTFF, and that this would be to the detriment of non-longtermist applicants to the fund, as well being, presumably, against the wishes of EAIIF’s current donors. I note the introduction says:
and also that Buck, Max, and yourself are enthusiastic longtermists—I am less sure about Ben and Jonas is a temporary member. Putting these together, combined with what you say about funding projects which could/should have applied to the LTFF, it would seem to follow you could (/should?) put the vast majority of the EAIIF towards long-terminist projects.
Is this what you plan to do? If not, why not? If yes, do you plan to inform the current donors?
I emphasise I don’t see any signs of this in the current round, nor do I expect you to do this. I’m mostly asking so you can set my mind at rest, not least because the Happier Lives Institute (disclosure: I am its Director) has been funded by EAIIF and its forerunner, would likely apply again, and is primarily non-longtermism (although we plan to do some LT work—see the new research agenda).
If the EAIIF radically changes directly, it would hugely affect us, as well as meaning more pluralistic/meta EA donors would lack an EA fund to donate to.
FWIW, a similar question was raised on the post about the new management teams, and Jonas replied there. I’ll quote the question and response. (But, to be clear, I don’t mean to “silence this thread”, imply this has been fully covered already, or the like.)
Question:
Jonas’s reply:
Thanks for finding and pasting Jonas’ reply to this concern MichaelA. I don’t feel I have further information to add to it. One way to frame my plans: I intend to fund projects which promote EA principles, where both ‘promote’ and ‘EA principles’ may be understood in a number of different ways. I can imagine the projects aiming at both the long-run future and at helping current beings. It’s hard to comment in detail since I don’t yet know what projects will apply.
Hello Michelle. Thanks for replying, but I was hoping you would engage more with the substance of my question—your comment doesn’t really give me any more information than I already had about what to expect.
Let me try again with a more specific case. Suppose you are choosing between projects A and B—perhaps they have each asked for $100k but you only have $100k left. Project A is only eligible for funding from EAIF—the other EA funds consider it outside their respective purviews. Project B is eligible for funding from one of the other EA funds, but so happens to have applied to EAIF. Suppose, further, you think B is more cost-effective at doing good.
What would you do? I can’t think of any other information you would need.
FWIW, I think you must pick A. I think we can assume donors expect the funds not to be overlapping—otherwise, why even have different ones? - and they don’t want their money to go to another fund’s area—otherwise, that’s where they have put it. Hence, picking B would be tantamount to a breach of trust.
(By the same token, if I give you £50, ask you to put it in the collection box for a guide dog charity, and you agree, I don’t think you should send the money to AMF, even if you think AMF is better. If you decide you want to spend my money somewhere else from what we agreed to, you should tell me and offer to return the money.)
In my view, being an enthusiastic longtermist is compatible with finding neartermist worldviews plausible and allocating some funding to them. See, e.g., Ajeya Cotra on the 80,000 Hours podcast. I personally feel excited to fund high-quality projects that develop or promote EA principles, whether they’re longtermist or not. (And Michelle suggested this as well.) For the EAIF, I would evaluate a project like HLI based on whether it seems like it overall furthers the EA project (i.e., makes EA thinking more sophisticated, leads to more people making important decisions according to EA principles, etc.).
FWIW, I think this example is pretty unrealistic, as I don’t think funding constraints will become relevant in this way. I also want to note that funding A violates some principles of donor coordination. In practice, I would probably recommend a split between A and B (recommending my ‘fair share’ to B, and the rest to A); I would probably coordinate this explicitly with the other funds. I would probably also try to refer both A and B to other funders to ensure both get fully funded.
Thanks for this reply, which I found reassuring.
Okay, this is interesting and helpful to know. I’m trying to put my finger on the source of what seems to be a perspectival difference, and I wonder if this relates to the extent to which fund managers should be trying to instantiate donor’s wishes vs fund managers allocating the money by their own lights of what’s best (i.e. as if it were just their money). I think this is probably a matter of degree, but I lean towards the former, not least for long-term concerns about reputation, integrity, and people just taking their money elsewhere.
To explain how this could lead us to different conclusions, if I believed I had been entrusted with money to give to A but not B, then I should give to A, even if I personally thought B was better.
I suspect you would agree with this in principle: you wouldn’t want an EA fund manager to recommend a grant clearly/wildly outside the scope of their fund even if they sincerely thought it was great, e.g. the animal welfare fund recommended something that only benefitted humans even if they thought it was more cost-effective than something animal-focused.
However, I imagine you would disagree that this is a problem in practice, because donors expect there to be some overlap between funds and, in any case, fund managers will not recommend things wildly outside their fund’s remit. (I am not claiming this is a problem in practice; might concern is that it may become one and I want to avoid that.)
I haven’t thought lots about the topic, but all these concerns strike me as a reason to move towards a set of funds that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive—this gives donors greater choice and minimises worries about permissible fund allocation.
This is a longer discussion, but I lean towards the latter, both because I think this will often lead to better decisions, and because many donors I’ve talked to actually want the fund managers to spend the money that way (the EA Funds pitch is “defer to experts” and donors want to go all in on that, with only minimal scope constraints).
Yeah, I agree that all grants should be broadly in scope – thanks for clarifying.
Fund scope definitions are always a bit fuzzy, many grants don’t fit into a particular bucket very neatly, and there are lots of edge cases. So while I’m sympathetic to the idea in principle, I think it would be really hard to do in practice. See Max’s comment.
I care about donor expectations, and so I’d be interested to learn how many donors have a preference for fund scopes to not overlap.
However, I’m not following the suggested reasoning for why we should expect such a preference to be common. I think people—including donors—choose between partly-but-not-fully overlapping bundles of goods all the time, and that there is nothing odd or bad about these choices, the preferences revealed by them, or the partial overlap. I might prefer ice cream vendor A over B even though there is overlap in flavours offered; I might prefer newspaper A over B even though there is overlap in topics covered (there might even be overlap in authors); I might prefer to give to nonprofit A over B even though there is overlap in the interventions they’re implementing or the countries they’re working in; I might prefer to vote for party A over B even though there is overlap between their platforms; and so on. I think all of this is extremely common, and that for a bunch of messy reasons it is not clearly the case that generally it would be best for the world or the donors/customers/voters if overlap was reduced to zero.
I rather think it is the other way around: the only thing that would be clearly odd is if scopes were not overlapping but identical. (And even then there could be other reasons for why this makes sense, e.g., different criteria for making decisions within that scope.)
I definitely have the intuition the funds should be essentially non-overlapping. In the past I’ve given to the LTFF, and would be disappointed if it funded something that fit better within one of the other funds that I chose not to donate to.
With non-overlapping funds, donors can choose their allocation between the different areas (within the convex hull). If the funds overlap, donors can no longer donate to the extremal points. This is basically a tax on donors who want to e.g. care about EA Meta but not Longtermist things.
Consider the ice-cream case. Most ice-cream places will offer Vanilla, Chocolate, Strawberry, Mint etc. If instead they only offered different blends, someone who hated strawberry—or was allergic to chocolate—would have little recourse. By offering each as a separate flavour, they accommodate purists and people who want a mixture. Better for the place to offer each as a standalone option, and let donors/customers combine. In fact, for most products it is possible to buy 100% of one thing if you so desire.
This approach is also common in finance; firms will offer e.g. a Tech Fund, a Healthcare Fund and so on, and let investors decide the relative ratio they want between them. This is also (part of) the reason for the decline of conglomerates—investors want to be able to make their own decisions about which business to invest in, not have it decided by managers.
I agree the finance example is useful. I would expect that in both our case and the finance case the best implementation isn’t actually mutually exclusive funds, but funds with clear and explicit ‘central cases’ and assumptions, plus some sensible (and preferably explicit) heuristics to be used across funds like ‘try to avoid multiple funds investing too much in the same thing’.
That seems to be both because there will (as Max suggests) often be no fact of the matter as to which fund some particular company fits in, and also because the thing you care about when investing in a financial fund is in large part profit. In the case of the healthcare and tech fund, there will be clear overlaps—firms using tech to improve healthcare. If I were investing in one or other of these funds, I would be less interested in whether some particular company is more exactly described as a ‘healthcare’ or ‘tech’ company, and care more about whether they seem to be a good example of the thing I invested in. Eg if I invested in a tech fund, presumably I think some things along the lines of ‘technological advancements are likely to drive profit’ and ‘there are low hanging fruit in terms of tech innovations to be applied to market problems’. If some company is doing good tech innovation and making profit in the healthcare space, I’d be keen for the tech fund to invest in it. I wouldn’t be that fussed about whether the healthcare fund also invested in it. Though if the healthcare fund had invested substantially in the company, presumably the price would go up and it would look like a less good option for the tech fund and by extension, for me. I’d expect it to be best for EA Funds to work similarly: set clear expectations around the kinds of thing each fund aims for and what assumptions it makes, and then worry about overlap predominantly insofar as there are large potential donations which aren’t being made because some specific fund is missing (which might be a subset of a current fund, like ‘non-longtermist EA infrastructure’).
I would guess that EAF isn’t a good option for people with very granular views about how best to do good. Analogously, if I had a lot of views about the best ways for technology companies to make a profit (for example, that technology in healthcare was a dead end) I’d often do better to fund individual companies than broad funds.
In case it doesn’t go without saying, I think it’s extremely important to use money in accordance with the (communicated) intentions with which it was solicited. It seems very important to me that EAs act with integrity and are considerate of others.
Thanks for sharing your intuition, which of course moves me toward preferences for less/no overlap being common.
I’m probably even more moved by your comparison to finance because I think it’s a better analogy to EA Funds than the analogies I used in my previous comments.
However, I still maintain that there is no strong reason to think that zero overlap is optimal in some sense, or would widely be preferred. I think the situation is roughly:
There are first-principles arguments (e.g., your ‘convex hull’ argument) for why, under certain assumptions, zero overlap allows for optimal satisfaction of donor preferences.
(Though note that, due to standard arguments for why at least at first glance and under ‘naive’ assumptions splitting small donations is suboptimal, I think it’s at least somewhat unclear how significant the ‘convex hull’ point is in practice. I think there is some tension here as the loss of the extremal points seems most problematic from a ‘maximizing’ perspective, while I think that donor preferences to split their giving across causes are better construed as being the result of “intra-personal bargaining”, and it’s less clear to me how much that decision/allocation process cares about the ‘efficiency loss’ from moving away from the extremal points.)
However, reality is more messy, and I would guess that usually the optimum is somewhere on the spectrum between zero and full overlap, and that this differs significantly on a case-by-case basis. There are things pushing toward zero overlap, and others pushing toward more overlap (see e.g. the examples given for EA Funds below), and they need to be weighed up. It depends on things like transaction costs, principal-agent problems, the shape of market participants’ utility functions, etc.
Here are some reasons that might push toward more overlap for EA Funds:
Efficiency, transaction/communication cost, etc., as mentioned by Jonas.
My view is that ‘zero overlap’ just fails to carve reality at its joints, and significantly so.
I think there will be grants that seem very valuable from, e.g., both a ‘meta’ and a ‘global health’ perspective, and that it would be a judgment call whether the grant fits ‘better’ with the scope of the GHDF or the EAIF. Examples might be pre-cause-neutral GWWC, a fundraising org covering multiple causes but de facto generating 90% of its donations in global health, or an organization that does research on both meta and global health but doesn’t want to apply for ‘restricted’ grants.
If funders adopted a ‘zero overlap’ policy, grantees might worry that they will only be assessed a long one dimension of their impact. So, e.g., an organization that does research on several causes might feel incentivized to split up, or to apply for ‘restricted’ grants. However, this can incur efficiency losses because sometimes it would in fact be better to have less internal separation between activities in different causes than required by such a funding landscape.
More generally, it seems to me that incomplete contracting is everywhere.
If I as a donor made an ex-ante decision that I want my donations to go to cause X but not Y, I think there realistically would be ‘borderline cases’ I simply did not anticipate when making that decision. Even if I wanted, I probably could not tell EA Funds which things I do and don’t want to give to based on their scope, and neither could EA Funds get such a fine-grained preference out of me if they asked me.
Similarly, when EA Funds provides funding to a grantee, we cannot anticipate all the concrete activities the grantee might want to undertake. The conditions implied by the grant application and any restrictions attached to the grant just aren’t fine-grained enough. This is particularly acute for grants that support someone’s career – which might ultimately go in a different direction than anticipated. More broadly, a grantee will sometimes realize they might want to fund activities for which neither of us have previously thought about if they’re covered by the ‘intentions’ or ‘spirit’ of the grant, and this can include activities that would be more clearly in another fund’s scope.
To drive home how strongly I feel about the import of the previous points, my immediate reaction to hearing “care about EA Meta but not Longtermist things” is literally “I have no idea what that’s supposed to even mean”. When I think a bit about it, I can come up with a somewhat coherent and sensible-seeming scope of “longtermist but not meta”, but I have a harder time making sense of “meta but not longtermist” as a reasonable scope. I think if donors wanted that everything that’s longtermist (whether meta or not) was handled by the LTFF, then we should clarify the LTFF’s scope, remove the EAIF, and introduce a “non-longtermist EA fund” or something like that instead—as opposed to having an EAIF that funds things that overlap with some object-level cause areas but not others.
Some concrete examples:
Is 80k meta or longtermist? They have been funded by the EAIF before, but my understanding is that their organizational position is pro-longtermism, that many if not most of their staff are longtermist, and that this has significant implications for what they do (e.g., which sorts of people to advise, which sorts of career profiles to write, etc.).
What about Animal Advocacy Careers? If they wanted funding from EA Funds, should they get it from the AWF or the EAIF?
What about local EA groups? Do we have to review their activities and materials to understand which fund they should be funded by? E.g., I’ve heard that EA NYC is unusually focused on animal welfare (idk how strongly, and if this is still true), and I’m aware of other groups that seem pretty longtermist. Should such groups then not be funded by the EAIF? Should groups with activities in several cause areas and worldviews be co-funded by three or more funds, creating significant overhead?
What about CFAR? Longtermist? Meta?
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Taking a step back, I think what this highlights is that feedback like this in the comment may well move me toward “be willing to incur a bit more communication cost to discuss where a grant fits best, and to move grants that arguably fit somewhat better with a different fund”. But (i) I think where I’d end up is still a far cry from ‘zero overlap’, and (ii) I think that even if I made a good-faith efforts it’s unclear if I would better fulfil any particular donor’s preference because, due to the “fund scopes don’t carve reality at its joint” point, donors and me might make different judgment calls on ‘where some grant fits best’.
In addition, I expect that different donors would disagree with each other about how to delineate scopes, which grants fits best where, etc.
This also means it would probably more help me to better satisfy donor preferences if I got specific feedback like “I feel grant X would have better fitted with fund Y” as opposed to more abstract preferences about the amount of overlap in fund scope. (Though I recognize that I’m kind of guilty having started/fueled the discussion in more abstract terms.)
However, taking yet another step back, I think that when deciding about the best strategy for EA Funds/the EAIF going forward, I think there are stakeholders besides the donors whose interests matter as well: e.g., grantees, fund managers, and beneficiaries. As implied by some of my points above, I think there can be some tensions between these interests. How to navigate this is messy, and depends crucially on the answer to this question among other things.
My impression is that when the goal is to “maximize impact” – even within a certain cause or by the lights of a certain worldview – we’re less bottlenecked by funding than by high-quality applications, highly capable people ‘matched’ with highly valuable projects they’re a good fit for, etc. This makes me suspect that the optimal strategy would put somewhat less weight on maximally satisfying donor preferences – when they’re in tension with other desiderata – than might be the case in some other nonprofit contexts. So even if we got a lot of feedback along the lines of “I feel grant X would have fitted better with fund Y”, I’m not sure how much that would move the EAIF’s strategy going forward.
(Note that the above is about what ‘products’ to offer donors going forward. Separately from that, I think it’s of course very important to not be misleading, and to make a good-faith effort to use past donations in a way that is consistent with what we told them we’d do at the time. And these demands are ‘quasi-deontological’ and can’t be easily sacrificed for the sake of better meeting other stakeholders’ interests.)
Nothing I have seen makes me thinks the EAIF should change the decision criteria. It seems to be working very well and good stuff is getting funded. So don’t change that to address a comparatively very minor issue like this, would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater!!
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If you showed me the list here and said ‘Which EA Fund should fund each of these?’ I would have put the Lohmar and the CLTR grants (which both look like v good grants and glad they are getting funded) in the longtermist fund. Based on your comments above you might have made the same call as well.
From an outside view the actual cost of making the grants from the pot of another fund seems incredibly small. At minimum it could just be having someone to look over the end decisions and see if any feel like they belong in a different fund and then quickly double checking with the other fund’s grantmakers that they have no strong objections and then granting the money from a different pot. (You could even do that after the decision to grant has been communicated to applicants, no reason to hold up, if the second fund objects then can still be given by the first fund).
And then all those dogmatic donors to the EAIF who don’t like longtermist stuff can go to bed happy and all those dogmatic donors to the LTFF who don’t like meta stuff can go to bed happy and everyone feels like there money is going to where they expect it to go, etc. Which does matter a little bit because as a donor you feel that you really need to trust that the money is going to where it says on the tin and not to something else.
(But sure if the admin costs here are actually really high or something then not a big deal, it matters a little bit to some donors but is not the most important thing to get right)
Thank you for this suggestion. It makes sense to me that this is how the situation looks from the outside.
I’ll think about the general issue and suggestions like this one a bit more, but currently don’t expect large changes to how we operate. I do think this might mean that in future rounds there may be a similar fraction of grants that some donors perceive to better fit with another fund. I acknowledge that this is not ideal, but I currently expect it will seem best after considering the cost and benefits of alternatives.
So please view the following points of me trying to explain why I don’t expect to adopt what may sound like a good suggestion, while still being appreciative of the feedback and suggestions.
I think based on my EA Funds experience so far, I’m less optimistic that the cost would be incredibly small. E.g., I would expect less correlation between “EAIF managers think something is good to fund from a longtermist perspective” and “LTFF managers think something is good to fund from a longtermist perspective” (and vice versa for ‘meta’ grants) than you seem to expect.
This is because grantmaking decisions in these areas rely a lot on judgment calls that different people might make differently even if they’re aligned on broad “EA principes” and other fundamental views. I have this view both because of some cases I’ve seen where we actually discussed (aspects of) grants across both the EAIF and LTFF managers and because within the EAIF committee large disagreements are not uncommon (and I have no reasons to believe that disagreements would be smaller between LTFF and EAIF managers than just within EAIF managers).
To be clear, I would expect decision-relevant disagreements for a minority of grants—but not a sufficiently clear minority that I’d be comfortable acting on “the other fund is going to make this grant” as a default assumption.
Your suggestion of retaining the option to make the grant through the ‘original’ fund would help with this, but not with the two following points.
I think another issue is duplication of time cost. If the LTFF told me “here is a grant we want to make, but we think it fits better for the EAIF—can you fund it?”, then I would basically always want to have a look at it. In maybe 50% [?, unsure] of cases this would only take me like 10 minutes, though the real attention + time cost would be higher. In the other 50% of cases I would want to invest at least another hour—and sometimes significantly more—assessing the grant myself. E.g., I might want to talk to the grantee myself or solicit additional references. This is because I expect that donors and grantees would hold me accountable for that decision, and I’d feel uncomfortable saying “I don’t really have an independent opinion on this grant, we just made it b/c it was recommended by the LTFF”.
(In general, I worry that “quickly double-checking” something is close to impossible between two groups of 4 or so people, all of whom are very opinionated and can’t necessarily predict each other’s views very well, are in parallel juggling dozens of grant assessments, and most of whom are very time-constrained and are doing all of this next to their main jobs.)
A third issue is that increasing the delay between the time of a grant application and the time of a grant payout is somewhat costly. So, e.g., inserting another ‘review allocation of grants to funds’ step somewhere would somewhat help with the time & attention cost by bundling all scoping decisions together; but it would also mean a delay of potentially a few days or even more given fund managers’ constrained availabilities. This is not clearly prohibitive, but significant since I think that some grantees care about the time window between application and potential payments being short.
However, there may be some cases where grants could be quickly transferred (e.g., if for some reason managers from different funds had been involved in a discussion anyway), or there may be other, less costly processes for how to organize transfers. This is definitely something I will be paying a bit more attention to going forward, but for the reasons explained in this and other comments I currently don’t expect significant changes to how we operate.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful and considered reply.
Sorry to change topic but this is super fascinating and more interesting to me than questions of fund admin time (however much I like discussing organisational design I am happy to defer to you / Jonas / etc on if the admin cost is too high – ultimately only you know that).
Why would there be so much disagreement (so much that you would routinely want to veto each others decisions if you had the option)? It seems plausible that if there is such levels of disagreement maybe:
One fund is making quite poor decisions AND/OR
There is significant potential to use consensus decisions making tools as a large group to improve decision quality AND/OR
There are some particularly interesting lessons to be learned by identifying the cruxes of these disagreements.
Just curious and typing up my thoughts. Not expecting good answers to this.
I think all funds are generally making good decisions.
I think a lot of the effect is just that making these decisions is hard, and so that variance between decision-makers is to some extent unavoidable. I think some of the reasons are quite similar to why, e.g., hiring decisions, predicting startup success, high-level business strategy, science funding decisions, or policy decisions are typically considered to be hard/unreliable. Especially for longtermist grants, on top of this we have issues around cluelessness, potentially missing crucial considerations, sign uncertainty, etc.
I think you are correct that both of the following are true:
There is potential of improving decision quality by spending time on discussing diverging views, improving the way we aggregate opinions to the extent they still differ after the amount of discussion that is possible, and maybe by using specific ‘decision making tools’ (e.g., certain ways of a structured discussion + voting).
There are interesting lessons to be learned by identifying cruxes. Some of these lessons might directly improve future decisions, others might be valuable for other reasons—e.g., generating active grantmaking ideas or cruxes/results being shareable and thereby being a tiny bit epistemically helpful to many people.
I think a significant issue is that both of these cost time—both identifying how to improve in these areas and then implementing the improvements -, which is a very scarce resource for fund managers.
I don’t think it’s obvious whether at the margin the EAIF committee should spend more or less time to get more or fewer benefits in these areas. Hopefully this means we’re not too far away from the optimum.
I think there are different views on this within EA Funds (both within the EAIF committee, and potentially between the average view of the EAIF committee and the average view of the LTFF committee—or at least this is suggested by revealed preferences as my loose impression is that LTFF fund managers spend more time in discussions with each other). Personally, I actually lean toward spending less time and less aggregation of opinions across fund managers—but I think currently this view isn’t sufficiently widely shared that I expect it to be reflected in how we’re going to make decisions in the future.
But I also feel a bit confused because some people (e.g., some LTFF fund managers, Jonas) have told me that spending more time discussing disagreements seemed really helpful to them, while I feel like my experience with this and my inside-view prediction of how spending more time on discussions would look like make me expect less value. I don’t really know why that is—it could be that I’m just bad at getting value out of discussions, or updating my views, or something like that.
I am always amazed at how much you fund managers all do given this isn’t your paid job!
Fair enough. FWIW my general approach to stuff like this is not to aim for perfection but to aim for each iteration/round to be a little bit better than the last.
That is possible. But also possible that you are particularly smart and have well thought-out views and people learn more from talking to you than you do from talking to them!
(And/or just that everyone is different and different ways of learning work for different people)
Thanks for writing up this detailed response. I agree with your intuition here that ‘review, refer, and review again’ could be quite time consuming.
However, I think it’s worth considering why this is the case. Do we think that the EAIF evaluators are similarly qualified to judge primarily-longtermist activities as the LTFF people, and the differences of views is basically noise? If so, it seems plausible to me that the EAIF evaluators should be able to unilaterally make disbursements from the LTFF money. In this setup, the specific fund you apply to is really about your choice of evaluator, not about your choice of donor, and the fund you donate to is about your choice of cause area, not your choice of evaluator-delegate.
In contrast, if the EAIF people are not as qualified to judge primarily-longtermist (or primarily animal rights, etc.) projects as the specialised funds’ evaluators, then they should probably refer the application early on in the process, prior to doing detailed due diligence etc.
Thank you for sharing—as I mentioned I find this concrete feedback spelled out in terms of particular grants particularly useful.
[ETA: btw I do think part of the issue here is an “object-level” disagreement about where the grants best fit—personally, I definitely see why among the grants we’ve made they are among the ones that seem ‘closest’ to the LTFF’s scope; but I don’t personally view them as clearly being more in scope for the LTFF than for the EAIF.]
Thank you Max. A guess the interesting question then is why do we think different things. Is it just a natural case of different people thinking differently or have I made a mistake or is there some way the funds could better communicate.
One way to consider this might be to looking at juts the basic info / fund scope on the both EAIF and LTFF pages and ask: “if the man on the Clapham omnibus only read this information here and the description of these funds where do they think these grants would sit?”
A further point is donor coordination / moral trade / fair-share giving. Treating it as a tax (as Larks suggests) could often amount to defecting in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma between donors who care about different causes. E.g., if the EAIF funded only one org, which raised $0.90 for MIRI, $0.90 for AMF, and $0.90 for GFI for every dollar spent, this approach would lead to it not getting funded, even though co-funding with donors who care about other cause areas would be a substantially better approach.
You might respond that there’s no easy way to verify whether others are cooperating. I might respond that you can verify how much money the fund gets in total and can ask EA Funds about the funding sources. (Also, I think that acausal cooperation works in practice, though perhaps the number of donors who think about it in this way is too small for it to work here.)
I’m afraid I don’t quite understand why such an org would end up unfunded. Such an organisation is not longtermist or animal rights or global poverty specific, and hence seems to fall within the natural remit of the Meta/Infrastructure fund. Indeed according to the goal of the EAIF it seems like a natural fit:
Nor would this be disallowed by weeatquince’s policy, as no other fund is more appropriate than EAIF:
Just a half-formed thought how something could be “meta but not longtermist” because I thought that was a conceptually interesting issue to unpick.
I suppose one could distinguish between meaning “meta” as (1) does non-object level work or (2) benefits more than one value-bearer group, where the classic, not-quite-mutually-exclusive three options for value-bearer groups are (1) near-term humans, (2) animals, and (3) far future lives.
If one is thinking the former way, something is meta to the degree it does non-object level vs object-level work (I’m not going to define these), regardless of what domain it works towards. In this sense, ‘meta’ and (e.g.) ‘longtermist’ are independent: you could be one, or the other, both, or neither. Hence, if you did non-object level work that wasn’t focused on the longterm, you would be meta but not longtermist (although it might be more natural to say “meta and not longtermist” as there is no tension between them).
If one is thinking the latter way, one might say that an org is less “meta”, and more “non-meta”, the greater the fraction of its resources are intentionally spent to benefit just only one value-bearer group. Here “meta” and “non-meta” are mutually exclusive and a matter of degree. A “non-meta” org is one that spends, say, more than 50% of its resources aimed at one group. The thought is of this is that, on this framework, Animal Advocacy Careers and 80k are not meta, whereas, say, GWWC is meta. Thinking this way, something is meta but not longtermist if it primarily focuses on non-longtermist stuff.
(In both cases, we will run into familiar issues about to making precise what an agent ‘focuses on’ or ‘intends’.)
Yes, I read that and raised this issue privately with Jonas.
Thank you Michelle.
Really useful to hear. I agree with all of this.
It seems like, from what you and Jonas are saying, that the fund scopes currently overlap so there might be some grants that could be covered by multiple funds and even if they are arguably more appropriate to another fund than another they tend to get funded with by whoever gets to them first as currently the admin burden of shifting to another fund is large.
That all seems pretty reasonable.
I guess my suggestion would be that I would be excited to see these kinks minimised over time and funding come from which ever pool seems most appropriate. That overlap is seen as a bug to be ironed out not a feature.
FWIW I think you and all the other fund managers made really really good decisions. I am not just saying that to counteract saying something negative but I am genuinely very excited by how much great stuff is getting funded by the EAIF. Well done.
(EDIT: PS. My reply to Ben below might be useful context too: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zAEC8BuLYdKmH54t7/ea-infrastructure-fund-may-2021-grant-recommendations?commentId=qHMosynpxRB8hjycp#sPabLWWyCjxWfrA6E
Basically a more tightly defined fund scope could be nice and makes it easier for donors but harder for the Funds so there is a trade-off)
I lean (as you might guess) towards the funds being mutually exclusive. The basic principle is that In general the more narrow the scope of each fund then the more control donors have about where their funds go.
If the Fund that seemed more appropriate pays out for any thing where there is overlap then you would expect:
More satisfied donors. You would expect the average amount of grants that donors strongly approve to go up.
More donations. As well as the above satisfaction point, if donors know more precisely how their money will be spent then they would have more confident that giving to the fund makes sense comapred to some other option.
Theoretically better donations? If you think donors wishes are a good measure of expected impact it can arguably improve the targeting of funds to ensure amounts moved are closer to donors wishes (although maybe it makes the relationship between donors and specific fund managers weaker as there might be crossover with fund mangers moving money across multiple of the Funds).
None of these are big improvements, so maybe not a priority, but the cost is also small. (I cannot speak for CEA but as a charity trustee we regularly go out our way to make sure we are meeting donors wishes, regranting money hither and thither and it has not been a big time cost).
OTOH my impression is that the Funds aren’t very funding-constrained, so it might not make sense to heavily weigh your first two reasons (though all else equal donor satisfaction and increased donation quantity seems good).
I also think there are just a lot of grants that legitimately have both a strong meta/infrastructure and also object-level benefit and it seems kind of unfair to grantees that provide multiple kinds of value that they still can only be considered from one funding perspective/with focus on one value proposition. If a grantee is both producing some kind of non-meta research and also doing movement-building, I think it deserves the chance to maybe get funded based on the merits of either of those value adds.
Yeah, I agree with Dicentra. Basically I’m fine if donors don’t donate to the EA Funds for these reasons; I think it’s not worth bothering (time cost is small, but benefit even smaller).
There’s also a whole host of other issues; Max Daniel is planning to post a comment reply to Larks’ above comment that mentions those as well. Basically it’s not really possible to clearly define the scope in a mutually exclusive way.
Maybe we are talking past each other but I was imagining something easy like: just defining the scope as mutually exclusive. You write: we aim for the funds to be mutually exclusive. If multiple funds would fund the same project we make the grant from whichever of the Funds seems most appropriate to the project in question.
Then before you grant money you look over and see if any stuff passed by one fund looks to you like it is more for another fund. If so (unless the fund mangers of the second fund veto the switch) you fund the project with money from the second fund.
Sure it might be a very minor admin hassle but it helps make sure donor’s wishes are met and avoids the confusion of donors saying – hold on a min why am I funding this I didn’t expect that.
This is not a huge issue so maybe not the top of your to do list. And you are the expert on how much of an admin burden something like this is and if it is worth it, but from the outside it seems very easy and the kind of action I would just naturally expect of a fund / charity.
[minor edits]
It also makes it easier for applicants to know what fund to apply to (or apply to first).
(FWIW, that all makes sense and seems like a good approach to me.)
Retracted:
Upon reflection and reading the replies I think I perhaps I was underestimating how broad this Fund’s scope is (and perhaps was too keen to find fault).
I do think there could be advantages for donors of narrowing the scope of this Fund / limiting overlap between Funds (see other comments), but recognise there are costs to doing that.
All my positive comments remain and great to see so much good stuff get funded.
Hi Sam, thank you for this feedback. Hearing such reactions is super useful.
Could you tell us more about which specific grants you perceive as potentially “better suited to other funds”? I have some guesses (e.g. I would have guessed you’d say CLTR), but I would still find it helpful to see if our perceptions match here. Feel free to send me a PM on that if that seemed better.
FWIW, I was also confused in a similar way by:
The CLTR grant
The Jakob Lohmar grant
Maybe the Giving Green grant
If someone had asked me beforehand which fund would evaluate CLTR for funding, I would’ve confidently said LTFF.
For the other two, I’d have been uncertain, because:
The Lohmar grant is for a project that’s not necessarily arguing for longtermism, but rather working out how longtermist we should be, when, how the implications of that differ from what we’d do for other reasons, etc.
But GPI and Hilary Greaves seem fairly sold on longtermism, and I expect this research to mostly push in more longtermism-y directions
And I’d find it surprising if the Infrastructure Fund funded something about how much to care about insects as compared to humans—that’s likewise not necessarily going to conclude that we should update towards more focus on animal welfare, but it still seems a better fit for the Animal Welfare Fund
Climate change isn’t necessarily strongly associated with longtermism within EA
I guess Giving Green could also be seen as aimed at bringing more people into EA by providing people who care about climate change with EA-related products and services they’d find interesting?
But this report doesn’t explicitly state that that’s why the EAIF is interested in this grant, and I doubt that that’s Giving Green’s own main theory of change
But this isn’t to say that any of those grants seem bad to me. I was just somewhat surprised they were funded by the EAIF rather than the LTFF (at least in the case of CLTR and Jakob Lohmar).
A big part of the reason was simply that CLTR and Jakob Lohmar happened to apply to the EAIF, not the LTFF. Referring grants takes time (not a lot, but I don’t think doing such referrals is a particularly good use of time if the grants are in scope for both funds). This is partly explained in the introduction of the grant report.
I recognise there is admin hassle. Although, as I note in my other comment, this becomes an issue if the EAIIF in effect becomes a top-up for another fund.
FWIW, it’s not just admin hassle but also mental attention for the fund chairs that’s IMO much better spent on improving their decisions. I think there are large returns from fund managers focusing fully on whether a grant is a good use of money or on how to make the grantees even more successful. I therefore think the costs of having to take into account (likely heterogeneous) donor preferences when evaluating specific grants are quite high, and so as long as a majority of assessed grants seems to be somewhat “in scope” it’s overall better if fund managers can keep their head free from scope concerns and other ‘meta’ issues.
I believe that we can do the most good by attracting donors who endorse the above. I’m aware this means that donors with different preferences may want to give elsewhere.
(Made some edits to the above comment to make it less disagreeable.)
I think of climate change (at least non-extreme climate change) as more of a global poverty/development issue, for what it’s worth.
In the introduction, we wrote the following. Perhaps you missed it? (Or perhaps you were interested in a per-grant explanation, or the explanation seemed insufficient to you?)
You are correct – sorry I missed that.
I agree with Michael above that a) seems is a legit administrative hassle but it seems like the kind of think I would be excited to see resolved when you have capacity to think about it. Maybe each fund could have some discretionary money from the other fund.
An explanation per grant would be super too as an where such a thing is possible!
(EDIT: PS. My reply to Ben above might be useful context too: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zAEC8BuLYdKmH54t7/ea-infrastructure-fund-may-2021-grant-recommendations?commentId=qHMosynpxRB8hjycp#sPabLWWyCjxWfrA6E)
I don’t suppose you would mind clarifying the logical structure here:
My intuitive reading of this (based on the commas, the ‘or’, and the absence of ‘and’) is:
i.e., satisfying any one of the three suffices. But I’m guessing that what you meant to write was
which would seem more sensible?
Yeah, the latter is what I meant to say, thanks for clarifying.
FWIW I had assumed the former was the case. Thank you for clarifying.
I had assumed the former as
it felt like the logical reading of the phrasing of the above
my read of the things funded in this round seemed to be that some of them don’t appear to be b OR c (unless b and c are interpreted very broadly).
I think that different funders have different tastes, and if you endorse their tastes you should consider giving to them. I don’t really see a case for splitting responsibilities like this. If Funder A thinks a grant is good, Funder B thinks it’s bad, but it’s nominally in Funder B’s purview, this just doesn’t seem like a strong arg against Funder A doing it if it seems like a good idea to them. What’s the argument here? Why should Funder A not give a grant that seems good to them?
I find this perspective (and its upvotes) pretty confusing, because:
I’m pretty confident that the majority of EA Funds donors choose which fund to donate to based far more on the cause area than the fund managers’ tastes
And I think this really makes sense; it’s a better idea to invest time in forming views about cause areas than in forming views about specifically the funding tastes of Buck, Michelle, Max, Ben, and Jonas, and then also the fund management teams for the other 3 funds.
The EA Funds pages also focus more on the cause area than on the fund managers.
E.g., “Why donate to this fund” doesn’t mention any specific fund managers.
The fund manager team regularly changes composition at least somewhat.
Some fund managers have not done any grantmaking before, at least publicly, so people won’t initially know their fund tastes.
In this particular case, I think all fund managers except Jonas haven’t done public grantmaking before.
I think a donation to an EA Fund is typically intended to delegate to some fund managers to do whatever is best in a given area, in line with the principles described on the EA Funds page. It is not typically intended to delegate to those fund managers to do whatever they think is best with that money, except if we assume that what they think is best will always be something that is in that area and is in line with those principles described (in which case it would still be problematic for them to donate in other ways).
Likewise, if you pay a contractor to do X and then instead they do Y, this may well be problematic even if they think doing Y is better and even if they might have good judgement. And especially so if their ad for their services focused on X rather than on their individual track record, tastes, or good judgement.
To be clear, this comment isn’t intended as sharp criticism of any choices the EAIF made this round. I also didn’t donate to the EAIF this round and lean quite longtermist myself, so I don’t personally have any sense of my donation being used a way I don’t like, or something like that. I’m just responding to your comment.
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Another way to put this is that if you don’t really see “a case for splitting responsibilities like this”, then I think that means you don’t see a case for the current set up of the EA Funds (at least as a place for you specifically to donate), and so you’re not the relevant target audience?
(I feel like this will sound rude or something in written text without tone—apologies in advance if it does sound that way; that’s not my intent.)
Yeah, that’s a good point, that donors who don’t look at the grants (or know the individuals on the team much) will be confused if they do things outside the purpose of the team (e.g. donations to GiveDirectly, or a random science grant that just sounds cool), that sounds right. But I guess all of these grants seem to me fairly within the purview of EA Infrastructure?
The one-line description of the fund says:
I expect that for all of these grants the grantmakers think that they’re orgs that either “use the principle of effective altruism” or help others do so.
I think I’d suggest instead that weeatquince name some specific grants and ask the fund managers the basic reason for why those grants seem to them like they help build EA Infrastructure (e.g. ask Michelle why CLTR seems to help things according to her) if that’s unclear to weeatquince.
Yeah, good point that these grants do seem to all fit that one-line description.
That said, I think that probably most or all grants from all 4 EA Funds would fit that description—I think that that one-line description should probably be changed to make it clearer what’s distinctive about the Infrastructure Fund. (I acknowledge I’ve now switched from kind-of disagreeing with you to kind-of disagreeing with that part of how the EAIF present themselves.)
I think the rest of the “Fund Scope” section helps clarify the distinctive scope:
Re-reading that, I now think Giving Green clearly does fit under EAIF’s scope (“Raise funds or otherwise support other highly-effective projects”). And it seems a bit clearer why the CLTR and Jakob Lohmar grants might fit, since I think they partly target the 1st, 3rd, and 4th of those things.
Though it still does seem to me like those two grants are probably better fits for LTFF.
And I also think “Conduct research into prioritizing [...] within different cause areas” seems like a better fit for the relevant cause area. E.g., research about TAI timelines or the number of shrimp there are in the world should pretty clearly be under the scope of the LTFF and AWF, respectively, rather than EAIF. (So that’s another place where I’ve accidentally slipped into providing feedback on that fund page rather than disagreeing with you specifically.)
But this line is what I am disagreeing with. I’m saying there’s a binary of “within scope” or not, and then otherwise it’s up to the fund to fund what they think is best according to their judgment about EA Infrastructure or the Long-Term Future or whatever. Do you think that the EAIF should be able to tell the LTFF to fund a project because the EAIF thinks it’s worthwhile for EA Infrastructure, instead of using the EAIF’s money? Alternatively, if the EAIF thinks something is worth money for EA Infrastructure reasons, if the grant is probably more naturally under the scope of “Long-Term Future”, do you think they shouldn’t fund the grantee even if LTFF isn’t going to either?
Ah, this is a good point, and I think I understand where you’re coming from better now. Your first comment made me think you were contesting the idea that the funds should each have a “scope” at all. But now I see it’s just that you think the scopes will sometimes overlap, and that in those cases the grant should be able to be evaluated and funded by any fund it’s within-scope for, without consideration of which fund it’s more centrally within scope for. Right?
I think that sounds right to me, and I think that that argument + re-reading that “Fund Scope” section have together made it so that I think that EAIF granting to CLTR and Jakob Lohmar just actually makes sense. I.e., I think I’ve now changed my mind and become less confused about those decisions.
Though I still think it would probably make sense for Fund A to refer an application to Fund B if the project seems more centrally in-scope for Fund B, and let Fund B evaluate it first. Then if Fund B declines, Fund A could do their own evaluation and (if they want) fund the project, though perhaps somewhat updating negatively based on the info that Fund B declined funding. (Maybe this is roughly how it already works. And also I haven’t thought about this until writing this comment, so maybe there are strong arguments against this approach.)
(Again, I feel I should state explicitly—to avoid anyone taking this as criticism of CLTR or Jakob—that the issue was never that I thought CLTR or Jakob just shouldn’t get funding; it was just about clarity over what the EAIF would do.)
In theory, I agree. In practice, this shuffling around of grants costs some time (both in terms of fund manager work time, and in terms of calendar time grantseekers spend waiting for a decision), and I prefer spending that time making a larger number of good grants rather than on minor allocation improvements.
(That seems reasonable—I’d have to have a clearer sense of relevant time costs etc. to form a better independent impression, but that general argument + the info that you believe this would overall not be worthwhile is sufficient to update me to that view.)
Yeah, I think you understand me better now.
And btw, I think if there are particular grants that seem not in scope from a fund, is seems totally reasonable to ask them for their reasoning and update pos/neg on them if the reasoning does/doesn’t check out. And it’s also generally good to question the reasoning of a grant that doesn’t make sense to you.
Tl;dr: I was to date judging the funds by the cause area rather than the fund managers tastes and this has left me a bit surprised. I think in future I will judge more based on the fund mangers tastes.
Thank you Ben – I agree with all of this
Maybe I was just confused by the fund scope.
The fund scope is broad and that is good. The webpage says the scope includes: “Raise funds or otherwise support other highly-effective projects” which basically means everything! And I do think it needs to be broad – for example to support EAs bringing EA ideas into new cause areas.
But maybe in my mind I had classed it as something like “EA meta” or as “everything that is EA aligned that would not be better covered by one of the other 3 funds” or similar. But maybe that was me reading too much into things and the scope is just “anything and everything that is EA aligned”.
It is not bad that it has a broader scope than I had realised, and maybe the fault is mine, but I guess my reaction to seeing the scope is different to what I realised is to take a step back and reconsider if my giving to date is going where I expect.
To date I have been judging the EAIF as the easy option when I am not sure where to give and have been judging the fund mostly by the cause area it gives too.
I think taking a step back will likely involve spending an hour or two going though all of the things given in recent fund rounds and thinking about how much I agree with each one then deciding if I think the EAIF is the best place for me to give, and if I think I can do better giving to one of the existing EA meta orgs that takes donations. (Probably I should have been doing this already so maybe a good nudge).
Does that make sense / answer your query?
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If the EAIF had a slightly more well defined narrower scope that could make givers slightly more confident in where their funds will go but has a cost in terms of admin time and flexibility for the Funds. So there is a trade-off.
My gut feel is that in the long run the trade-off is worth it but maybe feedback from other donors would say otherwise.