Denise_Melchin
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EA Meta Fund: we are open to applications
My main worry about donor lottery reports is somewhat different. Usually, people seem to assign some extra credibility to a donor’s reasoning if the donation/s is/are large. This seems reasonable to me, since donors who donate large sums often have a lot more experience with making donation decisions. But donor lottery winners have much less expertise than the average person who makes large donations (and only just as much as those long-term large donors had when they made a large donation for the first time).
In sum my concern is that people will trust donor lottery winner’s evaluations of donation targets more than they should.
Hello Alex,
We are interested in funding new projects (see also Alex Foster’s response above).
I am also concerned about the difficulty of promising new projects to be discovered. Personally, I am happy to invest some time into evaluating new projects. This is why we have a grant consideration form you can fill out to be considered for receiving a grant. That said, we are time capacity constrained and would not be able to handle 100 applications per month in our current setup.
I have personally considered putting out proposals like you are suggesting, but am concerned about the time investment. First I would like to see how much interest we can gather in different ways.
To be clear, I meant asking for a reference before an offer is actually made, at the stage when offers are being decided (so that applicants who don’t receive offers one way or the other don’t ‘use up’ their references).
I would strongly advise against making reference checks even earlier in the process. In your particular case, I think it would have been better for both the applicants and the referees if you had done the reference check even later—only after deciding to make an offer (conditional on the references being alright).
Request for references early in the process have put me off applying for specific roles and would again. I’m not sure whether I have unusual preferences but I would be surprised if I did. References put a burden on the referees which I am only willing to impose in exceptional circumstances, and that only for a very limited number of times.
I’m not confident how the referees actually feel about giving references. When I had to give references, I found it mildly inconvenient and would certainly been unhappy if I had to do it numerous times (with either a call or an email).
But for imposing costs on the applicants, it is not important how the referees actually feel about giving references—what matters is how applicants think they feel about it.
If you ask for references early, you might put off a fraction of your applicant pool you don’t want to put off.
I don’t think unsuccessful applications at organizations that are distantly related to the content you’re criticizing constitute a conflict of interest.
If everybody listed their unsuccessful applications at the start of every EA Forum post, it would take up a lot of reader attention.
The problem here is that people in the EA movement overtly associate being EA not with ‘doing high-impact things’ but with ‘do EA-approved work, ideally at an EA org’.
It is not obvious to me how this is fixable. It doesn’t help that recommendations change frequently, so that entering paths that were ‘EA-approved’ once aren’t any longer. As Greg said, people won’t want to risk that. It’s unfortunate that we punish people for following previous recommendations. This also doesn’t exactly incentivize people to follow current recommendations and leads to EAs being flakey, which is bad for long-term impact.
I think one thing that would be good for people is to have a better professional & do-gooding network outside of EA. If you are considering entering a profession, you can find dedicated people there and coordinate. You can also find other do-gooding communities. In both cases you can bring the moral motivations and the empirical standards to other aligned people.
Oh I agree people will often learn useful things during application processes. I just think the opportunity cost can be very high, especially when processes take months and people have to wait to figure out whether they got into their top options. I also think those costs are especially high in the top applicants—they have to invest the most and might learn the most useful things, but they also lose the most due to higher opportunity costs.
And as you said, people who get filtered out early lose less time and other resources on application processes. But they might still feel negatively about it, especially given the messaging. Maybe their equally rejected friends feel just as bad, which in the future could dissuade other friends who might be potential top hires to even try.
Personally, I still think it would be very useful to find more talented people and for more people to consider applying to these roles; we just need to bear in mind that these roles require a very unusual skill-set, so people should always have a good back-up plan.
I’m curious what your model of the % value increase in the top hire is when you, say, double current hiring pools. It needs to be high enough to offset the burnt value from people’s investments in those application processes. This is not only expensive for individual applicants in the moment, but also carries the long term risk of demotivating people—and thereby having a counterfactually smaller hiring pool in future years.
EA seems to be already at the point where lots of applicants are frustrated and might value drift, thereby dropping out of the hiring pool. I am not keen on making this situation worse. It might cause permanent harm.
Do you agree there’s a trade-off here? If so, I’m not sure whether our disagreement comes from different assessments of value increases in the top hire or burnt value in the hiring pool.
I had written the same comment, but then deleted it once I found out that it wasn’t quite as true as I thought it was. In Nick’s writeup the grants come from different funds according to their purpose. (I had previously thought the most recent round of grants granted money to the exact same organisations.)
Echoing David, I’m somewhat sceptical of the responses to “what skills and experience they think the community as a whole will need in the future”. Does the answer refer to high impact opportunities in general in the world or only the ones who are mostly located at EA organisations?
I’m also not sure about the relevance to individual EA’s career decisions. I think implying it might be relevant might be outright dangerous if this answer is built on the needs of jobs that are mostly located at EA organisations. From what I understand, EA organisations have had a sharp increase in not only the number, but also the quality of applications in recent times. That’s great! But pretty unfortunate for people who took the arguments about ‘talent constraints’ seriously and focused their efforts on finding a job in the EA Community. They are now finding out that they may have little prospects, even if they are very talented and competent.
There’s no shortage of high impact opportunities outside EA organisations. But the EA Community lacks the knowledge to identify them and resources to direct its talent there.
There are only a few dozen roles at EA orgs each year, nevermind roles that are a good fit for individual EA’s skillset. Even if we only look at the most talented people, there are more capable people the EA Community isn’t able to allocate among its own organizations. And this will only get worse—the EA Community is growing faster than jobs at EA orgs.
If we don’t have the knowledge and connections to allocate all our talent right now, that’s unfortunate, but not necessarily a big problem if this is something that is communicated. What is a big problem is to accidentally mislead people into thinking it’s best to focus their career efforts mostly on EA orgs, instead of viewing them as a small sliver in a vast option space.
Cool study! I wish there were more people who went out and just tested assumptions like this. One high level question:
People in the EA community are very concerned about existential risk, but what is the perception among the general public? Answering this question is highly important if you are trying to reduce existential risk.
Why is this question highly important for reducing extinction risks? This doesn’t strike me as obvious. What kind of practical implications does it have if the general public either assigns existential risks either a very high or very low probability?
You could make an argument that this could inform recruiting/funding efforts. Presumably you can do more recruiting and receive more funding for reducing existential risks if there are more people who are concerned about extinction risks.
But I would assume the percentage of people who consider reducing existential risks to be very important to be much more relevant for recruiting and funding than the opinion of the ‘general public’.
Though the opinion of those groups has a good chance of being positively correlated, this particular argument doesn’t convince me that the opinion of the general public matters that much.
Some parts of this sound very similar to me, down to ‘left-wing youth political organisation who likes to sing socialist songs’ (want to PM me which one it was?).
I have noticed before how much more common activist backgrounds are in German EAs vs. Anglo-Saxon EAs. When I talked about it with other people, the main explanation we could come up with was different base rates of sociopolitical activism in the different countries, but I’ve never checked the numbers on that.
What you’re saying is correct if you’re assuming that so far zero resources have been spent on x-risk reduction and global poverty. (Though that isn’t quite right either: You can’t compute an output elasticity if you have to divide by 0.)
But you are supposed to compare the ideal output elasticity ratio with how resources are being spent currently, those ratios are supposed to be equal locally. So using your example, if there were currently more than 1mil times as many resources spent on x-risk than global poverty, global poverty should be prioritised.
When I was running the numbers, my impression was that global wellbeing increases had a much bigger output elasticity than x-risk reduction. I found it a bit tricky to find numbers for global (not just EA) x-risk reduction efforts, so I’m not confident and also not confident how large the gap in resource spending is. 80k quotes $500 billion per year for resources spent on global wellbeing increases.
I address the points you mention in my response to Carl.
It also doesn’t solve issues like Sam Bankman-Fried mentioned where according to some argument one cause area is 44 orders of magnitude more impactful, because even if the two causes are multiplicative, if I understand correctly this would imply a resource allocation of 1:10^44, which is effectively the same as going all in on the large cause area.
I don’t think this is understanding the issue correctly, but it’s hard to say since I am a bit confused what you mean by ‘more impactful’ in the context of multiplying variables. Could you give an example?
Great comment, thank you. I actually agree with you. Perhaps I should have focussed less on discussing the cause-level and more the interventions level, but I think it is still good to encourage more careful thinking on a cause-wide level even if it won’t affect the actual outcome of the decision-making. I think people rarely think about e.g. reducing extinction risks benefiting AMF donations as you describe it.
Let’s hope people will be careful to consider multiplicative effects if we can affect the distribution between key variables.
Do you have private access to the Good Judgement data? I’ve been thinking before about how it would be good to get superforecasters to answer such questions but didn’t know of a way to access the results of previous questions.
(Though there is the question of how much superforecasters’ previous track record on short-term questions translates to success on longer-term questions.)
When causes multiply
What are the benefits of this suggestion?
Hi Jameson,
I’m a fund manager for the EA Meta Fund. Your assessment in your post is incorrect—we are also open to individual grant applications, though applications for the February distribution have now closed. I’d expect them to open again in a couple of months.
I’m curious how you got the impression that we aren’t open to applications. It’s important to us that we are able to reach all interested individuals so any insight into where we may have failed to communicate that is useful to us.