I agree that the full report gives a more rounded picture than my quick summary—but we’re pleased with the final conclusions, and the improvements EV has made
Rob Gledhill
Karma: 795
The Charity Commission has concluded its inquiry into Effective Ventures Foundation UK
I have made an edit to this post, saying that since this announcement, we have decided that we will use some of the proceeds on Effective Venture’s general costs. I consider EV to be a high-impact charity.
I’ve recently made an update to our Announcement on the future of Wytham Abbey, saying that since this announcement, we have decided that we will use some of the proceeds on Effective Venture’s general costs.
Patrick Gruban has joined the EV UK board
Announcement on the future of Wytham Abbey
Upcoming changes to the EV US and EV UK leadership teams
The Charity commission didn’t encourage us to offboard projects, and we aren’t off-boarding projects because of anything that we anticipate the Charity Commission might do.
Effective Ventures Foundation (UK and US) are hiring for a Chief of Staff and Program Manager to join their executive team
I’ve heard people express the idea that top of funnel community building is not worth the effort, as EA roles often get 100+ applicants.
I think this is misguided. Great applicants may get a job after only a few applications. Poor applicants may apply to many many jobs without getting a job. As a result you should expect poor applicants to be disproportionately well represented in the applicant pool—hence the pure number of applicants isn’t that informative. This point is weakened by recruitment systems being imperfect, but as long as you believe recruitment systems have some ability to select people, then I think this take holds.
I’m really only making a claim about a specific argument, not whether or not top of funnel community building is a good idea on the margin.
H/T Amarins for nudging me to post this
Rob Gledhill’s Quick takes
I think that’s the first time I’ve seen this written as clearly as here, and I don’t really like it or agree
Apologies, I think I should be clear that when I say “the messaging changed” I’m just describing what I believed happened, not that I think it was a good thing. I agree that some people aren’t interested in AIS, or aren’t the right fit, but can still make the world substantially better. I do however think that we should openly say “we think AIS is an important cause area” and should spend less time arguing why that isn’t a weird thing to think.
I also get the impression that you forget to mention the value of community for keeping strong values, and sticking to your plan
I agree that this is a value of community building, but it seems similarly relevant for explicitly longtermist community building and broad EA community building?
If these judgment calls are being made and underpin the work of CEA’s groups team, that seems very relevant for the EA movement.
I agree. We’re working on increasing transparency—expect to see more posts on this in the future
Do I interpret your comment correctly, that the CEA groups team does have an internal qualitative ranking, but you are not able to share it publicly?
I’m not 100% clear what you mean here, so I’ve taken a few guesses, and answered all of them
Do we have a qualitative ranking of the grants we’ve made: No. We are interested in making the “fund/don’t fund” decision—and as such a qualitative ranking within everyone we’ve funded doesn’t help us. We do have a list of the funding decisions we’ve made, and notes on the reasons why these decisions were made. These often involve qualitative judgements. We will sometimes look back at past decisions, to help us calibrate.
Do we have a qualitative ranking of common actions community members might take: No. We don’t have an X such that we could say “<job category> is worth X% of <job category>, holding ‘ability’ constant” for common EA jobs. Plausibly we should have something like this, but even this would need to be applied carefully—as different organisations are bottlenecked by different things.
Do you have heuristics that help you compare different community building outcomes: Yes. These are different between our programs, as it depends on how a program is attempting to help. E.g., in virtual programs admissions, we aren’t able to applicants on outcomes, as for many participants, it is one of their first interactions with EA. As I mentioned above, I want us to increase transparency on this.
I also want to emphasise that an important component in our grantmaking is creating healthy intellectual scenes.
Hey Miri,
Typically, unless someone is donating large amounts of money—we would interpret direct work as more valuable. But all of these things have a scale, and there is a qualitative part to the interpretation. With donations, this is especially obvious—where it is very measurably true that some people are able to donate much more than others. However there is also an element of this with careers, where some people are able to have a huge impact with their careers, and others have smaller impact (yet still large in absolute terms). Because there are a lot of sensitive, qualitative judgement calls—we can’t provide full reasoning transparency.
Hey Linda,
I’m head of CEA’s groups team. It is true that we care about career changes—and it is true that our funders care about career changes. However it is not true that this is the only thing that we care about. There are lots of other things we value, for example grant-recipients have started effective institutions, set up valuable partnerships, engaged with public sector and philanthropic bodies. This list is not exhaustive! We also care about the welcomingness of groups, and we care about groups not using “polarizing techniques”.
In terms of longtermist pressure—I have recently written a post about why we believe in a principles first approach, rather than an explicitly longtermist route.
Why EA Community building
Hi Dušan
I work with Ben, as head of groups at CEA. If I could answerHow important is to you pushing to open EA groups in countries where a lot of aid is going?
In general we’ve found it very difficult to “push” for opening an EA group. Running an impactful EA group requires a pretty high level of EA knowledge (alongside other skills) and trying to find an EA organizer, with that level of skill, in a country without an EA Group has historically proved difficult.
Instead we have prioritized having global platforms (e.g., Virtual Programs, EA Anywhere, and professional/affiliation based groups). Additionally when someone does wish to start a group we have support (e.g., resource centre, welcomer calls)
I’ve only been at CEA for a part of Max’s tenure—but it’s been a real privilege seeing you work. Absolutely incredible what you’ve achieved.
I agree with this statement entirely.
Go team!
Your guess that Zach’s post refers to both EV US and EV UK, whereas the charity commission only looked at EV UK is correct—and this explains the difference in amounts