Thank you for posting this, Gavin. For the title, Facebook says he was born June 15, 1979.
I’m stunned and heavy with the loss of such a wonderful man.
ricoh_aficio
Karma: 208
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ricoh_aficio’s Quick takes
Many props for doing this. This is exactly the sort of careful critique I’d like to see more people generating.
Did you approach 80,000 Hours about your post before putting it up? If you didn’t, it seems quite plausible that they’d have integrated some of these changes after speaking with you directly. The benefits of approaching them first are that it appears less adversarial and (less certain) they are more likely to notice. However, I think there are also arguments for publishing publicly and independently, too.
Milan and I spoke about this, so I’m just commenting to let other readers know that I’m happy to be a resource on this, specifically if you’re looking at US programs. For context, I’m a Master’s student in Georgetown’s Security Studies Program, in their Technology and Security concentration, but have considered and think well of other programs, too.
New piece by John Halstead: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1qs/new_research_on_effective_climate_charities/
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For people looking to get into CBT, Spencer Greenberg and co. are developing an app to walk people through it: https://www.uplift.us/
We can do the same for trading talent. People thinking about working in another cause area can ask around whether there’s someone considering switching to a cause area preferred by them. However, trading places in this scenario brings major practical challenges, so it is likely not viable in most cases.
One difficulty with this is that it’s hard to go back on the trade if the other person decides to stop cooperating. If you’re doing a moral trade of say, being vegetarian in order to get someone to donate more to a poverty charity, you can just stop being vegetarian if the person stops donating. (You should want to do this so that the trades actually maintain validity as trades, rather than means of hijacking people into doing things that fulfill the other person’s values.) However, if Allison focuses on biorisk to get Bettina to do animal welfare work, either one is likely to end up with only weakly fungible career capital and therefore be unable to pivot back to their own priorities if the other pulls out. This is particularly bad if fungibility is asymmetrical—say, if one person cultivated operations experience that can be used many places, while the other built up deep domain knowledge in an area they don’t prioritize. It therefore seems important that people considering doing this kind of thing aim not only for having tradable priorities but also similar costs to withdrawing from the trade.
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Right, neither do I. My 25-hour estimate was how long it would take you to make one grant of ~£500,000, not a bunch of grants adding up to that amount. I assumed that if Open Phil had been distributing these funds it would have done so by giving greater amounts to far fewer recipients.
Something we can do to clarify?
Hm, we haven’t considered this in particular, although we are considering alternative funding models. If you think we should prioritize setting something like this up, can you make the case for this over our current scheme or more general certificates of impact?
are all the grants made to individuals only, or are some of them made to corporations (such as nonprofits)?
Some of them are going to nonprofits and other institutions, yes.
is there a way to see in which cases the grant is going to a corporation, and what the corporation is?
This wasn’t something we’d considered publishing, and I’m not sure what if any privacy concerns this could raise. If there’s a good case for doing so I’m happy to consider adding that information.
Do the receiving individuals have to treat the grants as personal income?
Unfortunately, in cases where we paid individuals directly they do have to treat them as personal income. We might have been able to avoid this in some cases by giving the money as scholarships, although as far as I’m aware this would have been a big hassle to set up. It’s on the table for future rounds if it seems worth the setup cost.
What if somebody is coordinating a project involving multiple people and splitting the money across different people? Do you directly pay each of the individuals involved, or does the person doing the coordination receive the totality of the money as personal income and then distribute parts to the other people and expense those?
In four of five cases the money went to an institution with whom the recipient will coordinate multi-person distribution. In the fifth case the money went directly to an individual who had yet to designate the other recipient, so we gave them the totality to distribute themselves.
Sloppy editing; thanks for the catch. It should actually be fixed now.
Yes, although what exactly that will entail is still being worked out.
There’s the weak form of evaluation—whether or not they completed the objectives they set out when applying—which we’re doing for both “is this an obviously bad project?” and legal compliance reasons. We’re also hoping to do Fermi estimates on the value produced as a result of projects, both changes in value in the world and of the recipient.
Since I’m not going to be in charge of this, though, this is more my recommendation for what to do than a plan.
Oops, yes they were. Fixed. Thanks!
Does anyone know if clawbacks and/or the voluntary return process apply to funds received from individuals formerly at FTX?