Program Associate at Open Philanthropy and chair of the Long-Term Future Fund. I spend half my time on AI and half my time on EA community-building. Any views I express on the forum are my own, not the views of my employer.
abergal
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Here are answers to some other common questions about the University Organizer Fellowship that I received in office hours:
If I apply and get rejected, is there a “freezing period” where I can’t apply again?We don’t have an official freezing period, but I think we generally won’t spend time reevaluating someone within 3 months of when they last applied, unless they give some indication on the application that something significant has changed in that time.
If you’re considering applying, I really encourage you to not to wait– I think for the vast majority of people considering applying, it won’t make a difference whether you apply now or a month from now.
Should I have prior experience doing group organizing or running EA projects before applying?
No – I care primarily about the criteria outlined here. Prior experience can be a plus, but it’s definitely not necessary, and it’s generally not the main factor in deciding whether or not to fund someone.
I’m not sure that I agree with the premise of the question – I don’t think EA is trying all that hard to build a mainstream following (and I’m not sure that it should).
Interpreting this as “who is responsible for evaluating whether the Century Fellowship is a good use of time and money”, the answer is: someone on our team will probably try and do a review of how the program is going after it’s been running for a while longer; we will probably share that evaluation with Holden, co-CEO of Open Phil, as well as possibly other advisors and relevant stakeholders. Holden approves longtermist Open Phil grants and broadly thinks about which grants are/aren’t the best uses of money.
Each application has a primary evaluator who is on our team (current evaluators: me, Bastian Stern, Eli Rose, Kasey Shibayama, and Claire Zabel). We also generally consult / rely heavily on assessments from references or advisors, e.g. other staff at Open Phil or organizations who we work closely with, especially for applicants hoping to do work in domains we have less expertise in.
When we were originally thinking about the fellowship, one of the cases for impact was making community building a more viable career (hence the emphasis in this post), but it’s definitely intended more broadly for people working on the long-term future. I’m pretty unsure how the fellowship will shake out in terms of community organizers vs researchers vs entrepreneurs long-term – we’ve funded a mix so far (including several people who I’m not sure how to categorize / are still unsure about what they want to do).
(The cop-out answer is “I would like the truth-seeking organizers to be more ambitious, and the ambitious organizers to be more truth-seeking”.)
If I had to choose one, I think I’d go with truth-seeking. It doesn’t feel very close to me, especially among existing university group effective altruism-related organizers (maybe Claire disagrees), largely because I think there’s already been a big recent push towards ambition there, so I think people are generally already thinking pretty ambitiously.I feel differently about e.g. rationality local group organizers, I wish they would be more ambitious.
i)
“Full-time-equivalent” is intended to mean “if you were working full-time, this is how much funding you would receive”. The fellowship is intended for people working significantly less than full-time, and most of our grants have been for 15 hours per week of organizer time or less. I definitely don’t expect undergraduates to be organizing for 40 hours per week.
I think our page doesn’t make this clear enough early on, thanks for flagging it– I’ll make some changes to try and make this clearer.
I think anyone who’s doing student organizing for more than 5 hours per semester should strongly consider applying. I’m sympathetic to people feeling weird about this, but want to emphasize that I think people should consider applying even if they would have volunteered to do the same activities, for two reasons:
I think giving people funding generally causes them to do higher-quality work.
I think receiving funding as an organizer makes it clearer to others that we value this work and that you don’t have to make huge sacrifices to do it, which makes it more likely that other people consider student organizing work.
We’re up for funding any number of organizers per group– in the case you described, I would encourage all the organizers to apply. (We also let group leaders ask for funding for organizers working less than 10 hours per week in their own applications. If two of the organizers were working 10 hours per week or less, it might be faster for one organizer to just include them on their application.)
ii)
(Let me know if I’m answering your question here, it’s possible I’ve misunderstood it.)
I think it’s ultimately up to the person on what they want to do– I think the fellowship will generally allow more freedom than funding for a specific project, come with more benefits (see our program page), and would probably pay a higher rate in terms of personal compensation than many other funding opportunities would. It also has a much higher bar for funding than I would generally apply for funding specific projects.
In the application form, we ask people if they would be interested in receiving a separate grant for their project or plans if they weren’t offered the Century Fellowship– we’ve funded many applicants who were below the bar for the fellowship itself that way. So if someone’s interested in both, I think it makes sense to just apply to the Century Fellowship, and we can also consider them for alternative funding.
For both programs, we don’t have an explicit referral system, but we do take into account what references have to say about the applicant (if the applicant provides references).
Hi Minh– sorry for the confusion! That footer was actually from an older version of the page that referenced eligible locations for the Centre for Effective Altruism’s city and national community building grant program; I’ve now deleted it.
I encourage organizers from any university to apply, including those in Singapore.
[AMA] Announcing Open Phil’s University Group Organizer and Century Fellowships
I think the LTFF will publish a payout report for grants through ~December in the next few weeks. As you suggest, we’ve been delayed because the number of grants we’re making has increased substantially so we’re pretty limited on grantmaker capacity right now (and writing the reports takes a somewhat substantial amount of time).
I like IanDavidMoss’s suggestion of having a simpler list rather than delaying (and maybe we could publish more detailed justifications later)-- I’ll strongly consider doing that for the payout report after this one.
Confusingly, the report called “May 2021” was for grants we made through March and early April of 2021, so this report includes most of April, May, June, and July.
I think we’re going to standardize now so that reports refer to the months they cover, rather than the month they’re released.
Long-Term Future Fund: July 2021 grant recommendations
I like this idea; I’ll think about it and discuss with others. I think I want grantees to be able to preserve as much privacy as they want (including not being listed in even really broad pseudo-anonymous classifications), but I’m guessing most would be happy to opt-in to something like this.
(We’ve done anonymous grant reports before but I think they were still more detailed than people would like.)
We got feedback from several people that they weren’t applying to the funds because they didn’t want to have a public report. There are lots of reasons that I sympathize with for not wanting a public report, especially as an individual (e.g. you’re worried about it affecting future job prospects, you’re asking for money for mental health support and don’t want that to be widely known, etc.). My vision (at least for the Long-Term Future Fund) is to become a good default funding source for individuals and new organizations, and I think that vision is compromised if some people don’t want to apply for publicity reasons.
Broadly, I think the benefits to funding more people outweigh the costs to transparency.
Public reports are now optional for EA Funds grantees
Another potential reason for optimism is that we’ll be able to use observations from early on in the training runs of systems (before models are very smart) to affect the pool of Saints / Sycophants / Schemers we end up with. I.e., we are effectively “raising” the adults we hire, so it could be that we’re able to detect if 8-year-olds are likely to become Sycophants / Schemers as adults and discontinue or modify their training accordingly.
Sorry this was unclear! From the post:
There is no deadline to apply; rather, we will leave this form open indefinitely until we decide that this program isn’t worth running, or that we’ve funded enough work in this space. If that happens, we will update this post noting that we plan to close the form at least a month ahead of time.
I will bold this so it’s more clear.
Changed, thanks for the suggestion!
There’s no set maximum; we expect to be limited by the number of applications that seem sufficiently promising, not the cost.
Hey, Sam – first, thanks for taking the time to write this post, and running it by us. I’m a big fan of public criticism, and I think people are often extra-wary of criticizing funders publicly, relative to other actors of the space.
Some clarifications on what we have and haven’t funded:
I want to make a distinction between “grants that work on policy research” and “grants that interact with policymakers”.
I think our bar for projects that involve the latter is much higher than for projects that are just doing the former.
I think we regularly fund “grants that work on policy research” – e.g., we’ve funded the Centre for Governance of AI, and regularly fund individuals who are doing PhDs or otherwise working on AI governance research.
I think we’ve funded a very small number of grants that involve interactions with policymakers – I can think of three such grants in the last year, two of which were for new projects. (In one case, the grantee has requested that we not report the grant publicly).
Responding to the rest of the post:
I think it’s roughly correct that I have a pretty high bar for funding projects that interact with policymakers, and I endorse this policy. (I don’t want to speak for the Long-Term Future Fund as a whole, because it acts more like a collection of fund managers than a single entity, but I suspect many others on the fund also have a high bar, and that my opinion in particular has had a big influence on our past decisions.)
Some other things in your post that I think are roughly true:
Previous experience in policy has been an important factor in my evaluations of these grants, and all else equal I think I am much more likely to fund applicants who are more senior (though I think the “20 years experience” bar is too high).
There have been cases where we haven’t funded projects (more broadly than in policy) because an individual has given us information about or impressions of them that led us to think the project would be riskier or less impactful than we initially believed, and we haven’t shared the identity or information with the applicant to preserve the privacy of the individual.
We have a higher bar for funding organizations than other projects, because they are more likely to stick around even if we decide they’re not worth funding in the future.
When evaluating the more borderline grants in this space, I often ask and rely heavily on the advice of others working in the policy space, weighted by how much I trust their judgment. I think this is basically a reasonable algorithm to follow, given that (a) they have a lot of context that I don’t, and (b) I think the downside risks of poorly-executed policy projects have spillover effects to other policy projects, which means that others in policy are genuine stakeholders in these decisions.
That being said, I think there’s a surprising amount of disagreement in what projects others in policy think are good, so I think the particular choice of advisors here makes a big difference.
I do think projects interacting with policymakers have substantial room for downside, including:
Pushing policies that are harmful
Making key issues partisan
Creating an impression (among policymakers or the broader world) that people who care about the long-term future are offputting, unrealistic, incompetent, or otherwise undesirable to work with
“Taking up the space” such that future actors who want to make long-term future-focused asks are encouraged or expected to work through or coordinate with the existing project
I suspect we also differ in our views of the upsides of some of this work– a lot of the projects we’ve rejected have wanted to do AI-focused policy work, and I tend to think that we don’t have very good concrete asks for policymakers in this space.