I think this is a complicated question—it’s always been the case that individual OP staff had to submit grants to an overall review process and were not totally unilateral decision makers. As I said in my post above, they (and I) will now face somewhat more constraints. I think staff would differ in terms of how costly they would assess the new constraints as being. But it’s true this was a GV rather than OP decision; it wasn’t a place where GV was deferring to OP to weigh the costs and benefits.
Alexander_Berger
Karma: 1,896
Open Phil is hiring a leader for all our Global Catastrophic Risks work
Announcing the Lead Exposure Action Fund
Just flagging that I think “OP [is] open to funding XYZ areas if a new funder appears who wants to partner with them to do so” accurately describes the status quo. In the post above we (twice!) invited outreach from other funders interested in the some of these spaces, and we’re planning to do a lot more work to try to find other funders for some of this work in the coming months.
No, the farm animal welfare budget is not changing, and some of the substreams GV are exiting (or not entering) are on the AI side. So any funding from substratgies that GV is no longer funding within FAW would be reallocated to other strategies within FAW (and as Dustin notes below, hopefully the strategies that GV will no longer fund can be taken forward by others).
[Linkpost] An update from Good Ventures
Open Philanthropy: Our Progress in 2023 and Plans for 2024
FWIW I think I’m an example of Type 1 (literally, in Lorenzo’s data) and I also agree that abstractly more of Type 2 would be helpful (but I think there are various tradeoffs and difficulties that make it not straightforwardly clear what to do about it).
Verstergaard has a reply on their website FWIW, can’t vouch for it/just passing along: https://vestergaard.com/blogs/vestergaard-position-bloomberg-article-malaria-bed-nets-papua-new-guinea/
Exciting news! I worked closely with Zach at Open Phil before he left to be interim CEO of EV US, and was sad to lose him, but I was happy for EV at the time, and I’m excited now for what Zach will be able to do at the helm of CEA.
Suggestions for Individual Donors from Open Philanthropy Staff – 2023
Our planned allocation to GiveWell’s recommendations for the next few years
Great to hear about finding such a good fit, thanks for sharing!
Hi Dustin :)
FWIW I also don’t particularly understand the normative appeal of democratizing funding within the EA community. It seems to me like the common normative basis for democracy would tend to argue for democratizing control of resources in a much broader way, rather than within the self-selected EA community. I think epistemic/efficiency arguments for empowering more decision-makers within EA are generally more persuasive, but wouldn’t necessarily look like “democracy” per se and might look more like more regranting, forecasting tournaments, etc.
Announcing the awardees for Open Philanthropy’s $150M Regranting Challenge
Just wanted to say that I thought this post was very interesting and I was grateful to read it.
Just wanted to comment to say I thought this was very well done, nice work! I agree with Charles that replication work like this seems valuable and under-supplied.
I enjoyed the book and recommend it to others!
In case of of interest to EA forum folks, I wrote a long tweet thread with more substance on what I learned from it and remaining questions I have here: https://twitter.com/albrgr/status/1559570635390562305
Thanks MHR. I agree that one shouldn’t need to insist on statistical significance, but if GiveWell thinks that the actual expected effect is ~12% of the MK result, then I think if you’re updating on a similarly-to-MK-powered trial, you’re almost to the point of updating on a coinflip because of how underpowered you are to detect the expected effect.
I agree it would be useful to do this in a more formal bayesian framework which accurately characterizes the GW priors. It wouldn’t surprise me if one of the conclusions was that I’m misinterpreting GiveWell’s current views, or that it’s hard to articulate a formal prior that gets you from the MK results to GiveWell’s current views.
FWIW I certainly agree with “non-trivial”; “huge” is a judgment call IMO. We’ll see!