Do you have a sense of which fraction of the grant evaluations involve some sort of estimation (namely a back-of-the-envelope-calculation)?
I don’t have a great sense of this. It’s down to the individual fund manager evaluating the grant to decide whether they should do these kinds of calculations. If I had to guess, I would say fund managers do explicit BOTECs on 5-20% of grants. Note that a fund manager is often assigned similar grants, so it may not make sense for a fund manager to repeat a BOTEC at the individual grant level (but they will analyse the grant using other methods).
What is the breakdown of funding and grants by cause area? I see most is going to AI risk, but it would be nice to have specific numbers.
I don’t have a good breakdown of this right now, but I am hoping to release so more information on the breakdown in future. I am also not sure what fraction of grants not related to AI or bio are accepted.
I’ve done BOTEC’s for a lot of classes of grants (independent researchers, various community-building interventions, websites, etc.), which informed a lot of my broad thinking about the relevant type of intervention, and then I mostly apply rough heuristics for individual grants.
Note that a fund manager is often assigned similar grants, so it may not make sense for a fund manager to repeat a BOTEC at the individual grant level (but they will analyse the grant using other methods).
This agrees with my experience. Speaking personally, I do (often implicit) head-to-head comparisons more often than BOTEC. I have a rough sense of what the “breakeven” grant is, so the algorithm I most often run is more-or-less “if this grant costs X times the breakeven grant, would it be better in expectation for there to be X•C grants similar to the breakeven grant, or C grants similar to this one?” (where C is chosen so that I’m dealing with whole numbers).
I don’t have a great sense of this. It’s down to the individual fund manager evaluating the grant to decide whether they should do these kinds of calculations. If I had to guess, I would say fund managers do explicit BOTECs on 5-20% of grants. Note that a fund manager is often assigned similar grants, so it may not make sense for a fund manager to repeat a BOTEC at the individual grant level (but they will analyse the grant using other methods).
I don’t have a good breakdown of this right now, but I am hoping to release so more information on the breakdown in future. I am also not sure what fraction of grants not related to AI or bio are accepted.
I’ve done BOTEC’s for a lot of classes of grants (independent researchers, various community-building interventions, websites, etc.), which informed a lot of my broad thinking about the relevant type of intervention, and then I mostly apply rough heuristics for individual grants.
This agrees with my experience. Speaking personally, I do (often implicit) head-to-head comparisons more often than BOTEC. I have a rough sense of what the “breakeven” grant is, so the algorithm I most often run is more-or-less “if this grant costs X times the breakeven grant, would it be better in expectation for there to be X•C grants similar to the breakeven grant, or C grants similar to this one?” (where C is chosen so that I’m dealing with whole numbers).