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.)
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.