Per the last solicitation, the Meta Fund (like the LTFF) has “rolling applications, with a window of about 3-4 months between responses.”
Could you add this link to the Meta Fund’s page? Apply to the EA Meta Fund
The application form notes “Applications are open continuously, but the deadline to be considered for our next distribution is on October 11th” so ideally it could be updated with the date of the next deadline.
Good point, thanks for raising it!
I think this cuts both ways. Having many EA organizations near a hub means there are lots of people associated with those locations, and therefore more potential recipients of CB grants. However, it also means that there are lots of EA jobs in that area (relatively speaking), making people less reliant on “official” CB grants. For example, the EA London group has had paid staff since well before the CBG program started, because it was a large enough group to fund its own staff.
I also wonder whether there’s a chicken-and-egg dynamic at play. If more funding were available to people outside of main hubs, would those hubs still attract so many people?
Sure, “networks matter a ton for getting VC funding.” But in the VC world, business plans also matter a ton. I think in EA funding decisions, networks are overweighted and “business plans” are underweighted.
Even before EA Grants launched its referral round, it had a “plan to move the evaluation processes even further in the direction of mostly evaluating the merits of the applicants themselves rather than their specific plans.” This shift doesn’t seem to have been motivated by a belief that this is a way to identify the best projects. Rather, it seems like the grantmakers’ vetting constraints played a large part of the motivation: “We are time and resource-constrained in how continuously we can monitor projects, so we need to make sure we have high confidence in grantees. And we do not think we can develop expertise in all possible projects, but we can develop expertise in evaluating the applicants.”
Also, while the VC industry has a large presence in the Bay, it’s more geographically dispersed than you might think. The Bay accounts for ~25% of global VC investment, and the top 20 metro areas account for ~64%. And global capital markets (which I’d guess are a better reference point for the EA community and its multiple causes than the tech-centric VC industry) are even more dispersed.
1. Running an excellent EA community is a social activity.
True, but “running an excellent EA community” is only one of the many types of work that have received CB funding. For instance, only 7% of the EA Grants funding classified as “EA Community” went to support group-related work. Most of the money went to fund philosophical or rationality work, which isn’t as inherently social.
2. There are some signficant downside risks in funding an EA community builder and network-based funding derisks this.
If an EA community builder does something bad, having been funded by CEA means that it now reflects on the community as a whole and not just on the specific people involved. This means that funders need to both protect against the downside risks as well as fund promising projects. Having someone you know and trust vouch for someone you don’t know is, per unit of time involved, one of the best ways I know of to figure out who is and isn’t like to accidentally cause harm.
An easier way to mitigate this type of risk is to avoid plans like “using EAGrants to place bets on risky, unusual, or controversial projects that seem plausibly very valuable in expectation.” Projects that seem risky on an ex-ante basis probably are, even if someone vouches for the person in charge. These projects might still be worth funding, but if they’re funded by non-CEA mechanisms it reduces the reputational risk you describe.
3. There aren’t good objective criteria for evaluating newer community builders.
Agree. But it’s easier to evaluate more established community builders. And even when those established community builders have positive track records, they don’t seem to be getting much funding.
For example, there are plans to run EAGx events at four locations next year that “have been prioritised as they have established and active EA populations”: US (East Coast), Australia, Europe, and Asia. The East Coast of the US and Australia each got one CBG grant for ~1% of total staffing, Asia got none, while Europe got most of the funding as described in OP.
Thanks for clarifying!
Thanks for providing these additional details. I’ve edited OP to reflect that your role was with CEA US, not CEA as a whole.
It’s also important because there has been very little investment in Bay-Area EA community building in the past few years, even though it is one of the biggest EA hubs, and I don’t want people to think this grant helped much with that.
Great point. I was surprised at how few resources went to CB efforts in the Bay Area relative to those in Oxbridge/London. Seems like adding a Bay Area based manager to the Meta Fund could help with this.
I’m less sure, however, whether geographic diversity is as useful as it normally would be given the advantages of concentrating people in places with significant extant EA infrastructure and networks that enable collaboration.
I agree there’s value to concentration, but I think a world where most dedicated and talented EAs feel compelled to move to London or the Bay is going too far in that direction. There are other locations that also have established infrastructure (albeit on a smaller scale), and have a comparative advantage for some types of work (e.g. policy work in Washington DC, finance earning to give in NYC, great powers conflict prevention in China, etc.)
Thank you very much!
For what it’s worth, I think of this analysis less as “investigative journalism”, and more as “independent vetting.” And in general, I’d like to see more resources available to support both grantmakers doing their own vetting, and independent analysts doing vetting from another perspective.
Thank you, Nicole, for compiling and sharing this writeup. It sounds like you inherited a program with a lot of significant problems, and have been working hard to rectify them. I agree with many of the points you raise, and this post is a welcome improvement in transparency around EA Grants.
However, I’d like to push back against the idea that there was a “Lack of clarification about the role EA Grants played in the funding ecosystem”. I’d argue that your predecessors clearly articulated a vision of EA Grants as a major funder in the ecosystem.
See, for instance, CEA’s 2017 Annual Report:
We are planning to run EA Grants throughout 2018, with an anticipated budget of around £2m… We plan to accept applications year-round with quick reviews and responses for urgent applications and quarterly reviews for less urgent applications.
And the former head of EA Grants commenting on that report:
My thinking in choosing £2m was that we would want to fund more projects than we had money to fund last year, but that we would have picked much of the low-hanging fruit, so there’d be less to fund. In any case, I’m not taking that number too seriously. We should fund all the projects worth funding and raise more money if we need it.
And CEA’s end of 2018 fundraising appeal (which solicited donations to fund EA Grants):
We also have a regranting budget of $3.7M for EA Grants and EA Community Building Grants, which we use to fund other organizations, projects, individuals, and groups.
Throughout 2018, CEA also repeatedly communicated that a large, open round of EA Grants would be starting soon, which turned out to be overly optimistic. (See updates in mid-February, April, and mid-August.)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure EA Grants has granted significantly less money than the public communications would suggest. Your writeup explains several reasons why that would be the case. But that doesn’t change the fact that CEA’s communications have likely led potential grantees and potential funders to overestimate how much funding was available for early stage projects. My strong intuition is that these dynamics have contributed to a funding shortage for this type of project, and that addressing this shortage should be a priority for the EA community.
I think Hauke is asking a critical question: “Would shutting down EA grants significantly reduce the overall quantity of meta funding in the community or would the freed up resources be routed into the Meta-fund?” Even if the money gets routed into the Meta Fund (and/or other funds), some of it will likely be granted to established organizations leaving less money for individuals and early stage projects.
I also wonder whether shuttering EA Grants now risks wasting the progress that’s been made in developing operational capacity (“CEA is now in a place where we are able to disburse EA Grants with correct bank information routinely within a month, sometimes quicker, putting us solidly within the norm of the grant making industry.”) Would EA Funds be able to leverage those improvements?
I hope this doesn’t come across as overly critical. I know EA Grants, and CEA as a whole, has changed leadership since most of these issues occurred. But to fix things going forward, I think it’s important to have an accurate understanding of how they worked in the past. With respect to EA Grants, the past has involved a lot of overpromising and underdelivering, which seems to be a recurring theme in feedback.
Thanks for this thoughtful reply Joan. I appreciate your willingness to engage with the issues I’ve raised.
I’ll respond separately to several of the specific points you made for easier threading.
I agree with your “Reasons for the current concentration of funding” directionally, but I’m somewhat skeptical about how much of the concentration they explain.
Some of the reasons you provide for concentration in London (founders effects, concentration of EA organizations) would also apply to the Bay, and some of your explanations for concentration in Europe-ex-London (long established groups, prevalence of elite schools) would also apply to the east coast of the US.
I think the application data you provided (thank you!) offers another explanation. The acceptance rates across regions are pretty similar. This suggests that high proportion of CBGs going to European groups relative to non-European groups is largely explained by a much larger number of European applicants. I think it’s very important to understand this application dynamic, and whether it’s driven by networks, publicity strategy around CBG, national groups being more likely to apply than regional/university groups, or something else.
In terms of funding allocation once we receive an application, below are the total number of CBG applications accepted vs. submitted by geography. UK − 80% acceptance, Rest of Europe − 60%, Bay − 50%, US excluding the Bay − 80%, Rest of the World − 65-70%*. (*One application we referred to another funder. This group received funding and is included in our total)
As the author notes, most of the Meta Fund team is based in London. On previous recruitment rounds, the Meta Fund has taken steps to seek Fund managers from a wider set of locations, and will continue to do so in the future. Of course, the decision to appoint Fund managers is contingent on finding suitable candidates, and the location was one of a number of factors under consideration.
The management team system has been in place for over a year, so I think it’s pretty problematic that the Meta Fund’s team remains so concentrated geographically. Could you explain some of the specific steps that have been (or will be) taken to find managers from a wider set of locations?
I’m not really clear on how the manager selection process actually works, and how much of a role CEA takes relative to the Chair and other managers. And while I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes, I’d be happy to set up a form where community members can nominate potential managers from a different location.
Thanks for engaging and providing this helpful info Alex!
Addressing the sourcing-through-networks point, I just went through our early stage grants in the last year quickly and it looks like the majority were people we met through our various funding processes as opposed to people we knew already. Late stage grants we did of course have connections to already but I think that’s to be expected, and these organisations are quite well known in any case.
Using Open Phil’s framework of categorizing grantmaking methods as people-based, process-based, or project-based, how would you classify the “various funding processes” meta fund managers use in their other grantmaking? To the extent managers are using people-based methods, I think that would exacerbate some of the concerns I’ve raised, while if they’re sourcing ideas through process or project based methods that would mitigate my concerns on the margins.
I agree that your list of “signals that we are making progress on this problem” would all be positive developments. And I recognize that since CEA is resetting some of its strategy, it’s a difficult time to make firm commitments, especially around short-term priorities.
However, there’s one near-term step that I think would be relatively easy and particularly high impact. I’d love to see CEA publish how much money it has regranted through EA Grants and CBG in 2018 and 2019, and a rough estimated range for how much it expects to grant through those programs in 2020. As I commented on the recent writeup on EA Grants, the public communication around these programs has indicated that they’d grant significantly more money than they appear to have granted in practice. For instance, CEA’s end of 2018 fundraising post referred to “a regranting budget of $3.7M for EA Grants and EA Community Building Grants, which we use to fund other organizations, projects, individuals, and groups” but the grants that have been announced from those programs don’t even come close to that figure.
I think it’s critical for the EA community to get a more accurate understanding of how much funding has been/will be available, so that other funders and potential grantees can make informed decisions. As SiebeRozendal writes: “I’m afraid there is a dynamic where CB-efforts have trouble finding non-CEA funding because alternative funders believe CEA has got all the good opportunities covered.”
If CEA will be granting large amounts next year, that’s great: I think past grantees have mostly been good projects to fund, and as I argued in OP I think there are plenty more good opportunities out there. If CEA will only be making small grants, or doesn’t really know how much it will grant (due to uncertainty around the future of EA Grants, for example) other donors can adjust their behavior accordingly. But for that to happen, they need to be informed about CEA’s plans.
Thank you Harri! As mentioned in the OP, I think a publicity strategy that promotes CBGs in more places and has longer (or rolling) application windows would help attract more applicants.
To understand the geographical distribution of applications better, I suggest asking some of the better established groups in places that didn’t see many applications why they didn’t apply. And it might be worth reviewing early communications with attendees/applicants to the European Group Retreat to see if they encouraged CBG applications, as this could explain why there were so many applications from Europe relative to everywhere else (though I take Joan’s point about the retreat itself happening after CBG applications closed).
Thanks for this background info Sam! Glad to hear that people from more places were considered in the last recruitment round. Were there any candidates from the US-excluding-Bay (which has more EAs than the UK, Bay Area, and Australia combined)? Did the candidates from the Bay who were approached give any reasons for why they couldn’t/wouldn’t take the position (e.g. is the volunteer nature of the role a limiting factor)?
I’ll email you some nominations (and FWIW, if the fund managers agree this is a priority it’d be great to also solicit nominations in higher profile places like the EA newsletter).
At present, we see Leaders Forum as an event focused on movement building and coordination. We focus on inviting people who play a role in trying to shape the overall direction of the EA movement (whatever cause area they focus on), rather than people who mostly focus on direct research within a particular cause area. As you’d imagine, this distinction can be somewhat fuzzy, but that’s the mindset with which CEA approaches invites (though other factors can play a role).
I really wish this had been included in the OP, in the section that discusses the weaknesses of the data. That section seems to frame the data as a more or less random subset of leaders of EA organizations (“These results shouldn’t be taken as an authoritative or consensus view of effective altruism as a whole. They don’t represent everyone in EA, or even every leader of an EA organization.”)
When I look at the list of organizations that were surveyed, it doesn’t look like the list of organizations most involved in movement building and coordination. It looks much more like a specific subset of that type of org: those focused on longtermism or x-risk (especially AI) and based in one of the main hubs (London accounts for ~50% of respondents, and the Bay accounts for ~30%).* Those that prioritize global poverty, and to a lesser extent animal welfare, seem notably missing. It’s possible the list of organizations that didn’t respond or weren’t named looks a lot different, but if that’s the case it seems worth calling attention to and possibly trying to rectify (e.g. did you email the survey to anyone or was it all done in person at the Leaders Forum?)
Some of the organizations I’d have expected to see included, even if the focus was movement building/coordination: GiveWell (strategy/growth staff, not pure research staff), LEAN, Charity Entrepreneurship, Vegan Outreach, Rethink Priorities, One for the World, Founders Pledge, etc. Most EAs would see these as EA organizations involved to some degree with movement building. But we’re not learning what they think, while we are apparently hearing from at least one org/person who “want to avoid being connected explicitly to the EA movement—for example, if almost all their work happens in non-EA circles, where EA might have a mixed reputation.”
I’m worried that people who read this report are likely to misinterpret the data being presented as more broadly representative than it actually is (e.g. the implications of respondents believing ~30% of EA resources should go to AI work over the next 5 years are radically different if those respondents disproportionally omit people who favor other causes). I have the same concerns about this survey was presented as Jacy Reese expressed about how the leaders survey from 2 years ago (which also captured a narrow set of opinions) was presented:
My main general thought here is just that we shouldn’t depend on so much from the reader. Most people, even most thoughtful EAs, won’t read in full and come up with all the qualifications on their own, so it’s important for article writers to include those themselves, and to include those upfront and center in their articles.
Lastly, I’ll note that there’s a certain irony in surveying only a narrow set of people, given that even among those respondents: “The most common theme in these answers [about problems in the EA community] seems to be the desire for EA to be more inclusive and welcoming. Respondents saw a lot of room for improvement on intellectual diversity, humility, and outreach, whether to distinct groups with different views or to the general population.” I suspect if a more diverse set of leaders had been surveyed, this theme would have been expressed even more strongly.
* GFI and Effective Giving both have London offices, but I’ve assumed their respondents were from other locations.
Thanks Aaron. Glad to hear the invitee list included a broader list of organizations, and that you’ll consider a more explicit discussion of potential selection bias effects going forward.
Thank you for taking the time to respond, Max. I appreciate your engagement, your explanation of how the invitation process worked this year, and your willingness to acknowledge that CEA may have historically been too aggressive in how it has pushed longtermism and how it has framed the results of past surveys.
In the future, I’d like CEA to take a more agnostic approach to cause prioritisation, trying to construct non-gameable mechanisms for making decisions about how much we talk about different causes.
Very glad to hear this. As you note, implementing this sort of thing in practice can be tricky. As CEA starts designing new mechanisms, I’d love to see you gather input (as early possible) from people who have expressed concern about CEA’s representativeness in the past (I’d be happy to offer opinions if you’d like). These also might be good people to serve as “external advisors” who generate suggestions for the invite list.
Good luck with the retreat! I look forward to seeing your strategy update once that’s written up.
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