I acknowledge that transparency is complex, that there are trade-offs and that it isn’t clear what the correct amount of transparency is. I also acknowledge that it is normal that regular grants are published with a delay. So I’m not making a general claim or demand that everything needs to be public (I even explicitly say that). What I say is that
a) I’m in favour of valuing transparency highly by default.
b) I feel in this specific case more communication would have helped
My intuition is that Open Phil overall is quite transparent. I was less sure about EVF, given that there are a relevant number of comments and posts on the forum criticising them for lack of transparency. But my data point is mostly this one where I feel more openness would have been helpful plus reading other people’s comments.
Given that, I think it’s especially weird to say EVF hasn’t said anything while linking to an explanation by the board member who was most involved.
I feel that characterisation is a bit uncharitable. I said
So far CEA/EVF hasn’t come out explaining their rationale in detail (albeit some of those involved in the decision have commented under an EA Forum Post asking about the decision and shared their perspectives)
At the time when Émile posted on Twitter, this was definitely true. And even today I find it fair to say that Owen’s response was not a detailed explanation by CEA/EVF (maybe you’re right and it’s Open Phil that should do the explaining, but that is not the main point). Owen’s comment was a response to a question / criticism by someone else, was a comment under a post by someone else and felt mostly like a personal account to me. And he doesn’t give much information on the assumptions involved, from his post it wasn’t even clear where the money came from. To be clear: I’m glad he posted his thoughts. But I think it’s also fair to say that this isn’t the kind of official announcement or detailed explanation targeted to convince someone who isn’t already mostly convinced that the decision was reasonable.
Hi Simon, I’m working on a follow-up to this post that uses individual-level data. Could you please give some detail on how you “sampled” k predictors? As in, did you have access to individual data and could actually do the sampling? I’m not entirely sure what the x-axis in your plot means and what the difference betwenn “>N predictors” and “k predictors” is. Thank you!