Tee

Un­der­in­vest­ment at the top: what I dis­cov­ered coach­ing a dozen EA leaders

RC For­ward—Canada’s Effec­tive Giv­ing Ex­per­i­ment: Re­sults & Plans for 2019

• Tee 11 May 2022 10:10 UTC

  43 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Sam Bankman-Fried’s comment on: Some clar­ifi­ca­tions on the Fu­ture Fund’s ap­proach to grantmaking

  Thanks to Sam and Nick for getting to this. I think it’s very cool that you two are taking the time to engage. In light of the high esteem that I regard both of you and the value of your time, I’ll try to close the loop of this interaction by leaving you with one main idea.
  
  I was pointing at something different than what I think was addressed. To distill what I was saying: >> Were FTX to encounter a strong case for non-negligible harms/​externalities to community health that could result from the grant making process, what would your response to that evidence be? <<
  
  The response would likely depend on a hard-to-answer question about how FTX conceives of its responsibilities within the community given that it is now the largest funder by far.
  
  Personally, I was hoping for a response more along the lines of “Oh, we hadn’t thought about it that way. Can you tell us more? How do you think we get more information about how this could be important?”
  
  I was grateful for Nick’s thoughtful answer about what’s happening over there. I think we all hear what you’re saying about chosen priorities, complexity of project, and bandwidth issues. Also the future is hard to predict. I get all that and can feel how authentically you feel proud about how hard the team has been working and the great work that’s been done already. I’m sure that’s an amazing place to be.
  
  My question marks are around how you conceive of responsibility and choose to take responsibility moving forward in light of new information about the reality on the ground. Given the resources at your disposal, I’d be inclined to view your answer within the lens of prioritization of options, rather than simply making the best of constraints.
  
  As the largest funder in the space by far, it’s a choice to be open to discovering and uncovering risk and harms that they didn’t account for previously. It’s a choice to devote time and resources to investigate them. It’s a choice to think through how context shifts and your relationship to responsibility evolves. It’s a choice to not do all those things.
  
  A few things that seem hard waive away:
  
  1) 1600 −1650 (?) rejected applications from the largest and most exciting new funder with no feedback could be disruptive to community health
  
  Live example: Established organization(s) got rejected and/​or far less than asked for with no feedback. Stakeholders asked the project leaders “What does it mean that you got rejected/​less than you asked for from FTX? What does that say about the impact potential of your project, quality of your project, fitness to lead it, etc.” This can cause great instability. Did FTX foresee this? Probably not, for understandable reasons. Is this the effect that FTX wants to have? Probably not. Is it FTX’s responsibility to address this? Uncertain.
  
  2) Opaque reasoning for where large amounts of money goes and why could be disruptive to community health
  
  3) (less certain regarding your M&E plans) Little visibility on M&E given to applicants puts them in a place of not only not knowing what is good, but also how they know they’re doing well. Also potentially disruptive
  
  In regards to the approach moving forward for FTX, I wouldn’t be surprised if more reflection among the staff yielded more than ‘we’re trying hard + it’s complex + bandwidth issues so what do you want us to do?’ My hope with this comment is to nudge internal discussions to be more expansive and reflective. Maybe you can let me know if that happened or not. Insofar as I delivered this in a way that hopefully didn’t feel like an attack, if you feel including me in a discussion would be helpful, I’d love to be a part of it.
  
  And finally, I’m not sure where the ‘we couldn’t possibly give feedback on 1700 applications’ response came from. I mentioned feedback, but there’s innumerable ways to construct a feedback apparatus that isn’t (what seemed to be assumed) the same level of care and complexity for each application. A quick example – ‘stratified feedback’ – FTX considers who the applicant is and gives varying levels of feedback depth depending on who they are. This could be important for established EA entities (as I mentioned above), where for various reasons, you think leaving them completely in the dark would be actively harmful for a subnetwork of stakeholders. My ideal version of this would also include promising individuals who you don’t want to discourage, but for whatever reason their application wasn’t successful.
  
  Thanks for taking the time. I hope this is received well.
  
  
  
  

  What links here?

  • Tee's comment on Some clar­ifi­ca­tions on the Fu­ture Fund’s ap­proach to grantmaking by Nick_Beckstead (12 May 2022 11:46 UTC; 7 points)

• Tee 10 May 2022 11:50 UTC

  40 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Some clar­ifi­ca­tions on the Fu­ture Fund’s ap­proach to grantmaking

  Thanks for writing this up, Nick. It seems like a pretty good first step in communicating about what I imagine is a hugely complex project to deploy that much funding in a responsible manner. Something for FTX to consider within the context of community health and the responsibilities that you can choose to acknowledge as a major funding player:
  
  – How could a grant making process have significant effects on community health? What responsibilities would be virtuous for a major funding player to acknowledge and address? –
  
  I’ve picked up on lots of (concerning) widespread psychological fallout from people, especially project leaders, struggling to make sense of decision-making surrounding all this money pouring into EA (primarily from FTX). I wouldn’t want to dichotomize this discussion by weighing it against the good that can be done with the increased funding, but there’s value in offering constructive thoughts on how things could be done better.

  What seems to have happened at FTX is some mixture of deputizing several individuals as funders + an application process (from what I’ve been hearing) that offers zero feedback. For those involved over there, is this roughly correct?

  If indeed there are no other plans to handle the fundamentals of grantmaking beyond deployment of funds, fundamentals that I believe dramatically affect community health, unless I someone can persuade me otherwise, I’d predict a lot more disoriented and short-circuited (key) EAs, especially because many people on this community orient themselves in the world of legible and explicit.

  In particular, people are having trouble getting a sense of how merit is supposed to work in this space. One of the core things I try to get them to consider, which is more pronounced perhaps now more than ever, is that merit is only one of many currencies upon which your social standing and evaluation of your project rests. This is hard for people to look at.

  I hope FTX plans to take more responsibility for community health by following up with investment in legible M&E and application feedback. Echoing what I said a month ago about funders in general: https://​​bit.ly/​​3N1q3To

  “Funders could do more to prioritize fostering relationships – greater familiarity with project leaders reduces inefficiencies of all sorts, including performative and preparation overhead, miscommunication, missed opportunities, etc.

  In my opinion, this should also apply to unsuccessful projects. A common theme that I’ve seen from funders, partly due to bandwidth issues though not entirely, is aversion to giving constructive feedback to unsuccessful projects that nonetheless endure within the community. Given my firsthand experience with many clients who are fairly averse to interpersonal conflict, it wouldn’t surprise me if aversion to conflict + public relations considerations + legal issues (and other things) precluded funders from giving constructive feedback to failed applications. Funders would likely need to hold the belief that this feedback would meaningfully improve these projects prospects, and therefore the community overall, in order to put in the requisite effort to get through these blocks to this type of action. They’d also likely need to feel reassured that the feedback wouldn’t be excessively damaging reputationally (for both themselves and others), destabilize the community, or the integrity of community norms.

  ...

  EA leaders are often at least partially in the dark regarding expectations from funders. This could be the case for many reasons, but a common reasons among leaders included the following:

  • Reputational fears – Reticence to reach out due to some (un)justifiable fear of reputational harm

  • Value system clash/​lack of familiarity – not wanting to waste the time of funders, usually due to lack of familiarity and fears of how they would be received, but also sometimes a principled decision about not wanting to bother important decision-makers

  • Not having considered reaching out to funders regarding expectations at a meaningful enough grain of detail

  • (Likely not always misplaced) concerns about arbitrariness of the evaluation process

  • Preparation overhead – not being ‘ready’ in various ways. In some cases, My outside view of the situation led me to believe that quite a bit of preparational overhead and perfunctory correspondence could be avoided if funders made it clearer that they care less about certain aspects of performative presentation ”

  What links here?

  • Tee's comment on EA and the cur­rent fund­ing situation by William_MacAskill (11 May 2022 10:20 UTC; 12 points)

Coach­ing match­mak­ing is now open: in­vest in com­mu­nity well­ness by in­vest­ing in yourself

Coach­ing Train­ing Pro­gram Launch: build and up­skill your prac­tice with Tee Bar­nett Coach­ing Train­ing (TBCT)

• Tee 29 Jun 2020 9:40 UTC

  29 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA could benefit from a gen­eral-pur­pose non­profit en­tity that offers donor-ad­vised funds and fis­cal sponsorship

  Hey Brendon, in 2020 Rethink Charity pivoted to provide fiscal sponsorships to select value-aligned projects in EA and adjacent communities. As many might know, we helped kickstart Rethink Priorities with a more in-house FS arrangement. We’ve just completed our first external FS arrangement with Dao Foods. For you or anyone who has seen this post, please do let me know if you know of any projects who could use this service!

.im­pact is now Re­think Charity

• Tee 4 Dec 2019 23:43 UTC

  28 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: EA Lead­ers Fo­rum: Sur­vey on EA pri­ori­ties (data and anal­y­sis)

  FYI Rethink Charity and associated projects were also not invited, including Rethink Priorities and LEAN. We were also invited to forums in previous years

Please Take the 2018 Effec­tive Altru­ism Sur­vey!

• Tee 13 May 2022 14:16 UTC

  21 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Kirsten’s comment on: Some clar­ifi­ca­tions on the Fu­ture Fund’s ap­proach to grantmaking

  I’ve got a similar feeling to Khorton. Happy to have been pre-empted there.
  
  It could be helpful to consider what it is that legibility in the grant application process (for which post-application feedback is only one sort) is meant to achieve. Depending on the grant maker’s aims, this can non-exhaustively include developing and nurturing talent, helping future applicants self-select, orienting projects on whether they are doing a good job, being a beacon and marketing instrument, clarifying and staking out an epistemic position, serving an orientation function for the community etc.
  
  And depending on the basket of things the grant maker is trying to achieve, different pieces of legibility affect ‘efficiency’ in the process. For example, case studies and transparent reasoning about accepted and rejected projects, published evaluations, criteria for projects to consider before applying, hazard disclaimers, risk profile declarations, published work on the grant makers theory of change, etc. can give grant makers ‘published’ content to invoke during the post-application process that allows for the scaling of feedback. (e.g. our website states that we don’t invest in projects that rapidly accelerate ‘x’). There are other forms of pro-active communication and stratifying applicant journeys that would make things even more efficient.
  
  FTX did what they did, and there is definitely a strong case for why they did it that way. In moving forward , I’d be curious to see if they acknowledge and make adjustments in light of the fact that different forms and degrees of legibility can affect the community.
  
  
  

• Tee 11 May 2022 18:00 UTC

  20 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: Some clar­ifi­ca­tions on the Fu­ture Fund’s ap­proach to grantmaking

  an opportunity cost to providing feedback
  
  huge mistake for Future Fund to provide substantial feedback except in rare cases.

  Yep, I’d imagine what makes sense is between ‘highly involved and coordinated attempt to provide feedback at scale’ and ‘zero’. I think it’s tempting to look away from how harmful ‘zero’ can be at scale
  
  > That could change in future if their other streams of successful applicants dry up and improving the projects of people who were previously rejected becomes the best way to find new things they want to fund.

  
  Agreed – this seems like a way to pick up easy wins and should be a good go-to for grant makers to circle back. However, banking on this as handling the concerns that were raised doesn’t account for all the things that come with unqualified rejection and people deciding to do other things, leave EA, incur critical stakeholder instability etc. as a result.
  
  In other words, for the consequentialist-driven among us, I don’t think that community health is a nice-to-have if we’re serious about having a community of highly effective people working urgently on hard/​complex things

• Tee 14 Mar 2018 16:38 UTC

  19 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA Sur­vey: Sex­ual Harass­ment Ques­tions—Feed­back Requested

  I interested Tee Barnett and Peter Hurford in adding sexual violence questions to the survey. Therefore sexual violence definitions need to be created.

  Thanks for your dedication to this issue. I’m compelled to point out that that briefly speaking about a particular issue in an informal manner should not be seen as an endorsement on behalf of myself or Rethink Charity.

• Tee 10 May 2022 12:38 UTC

  16 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Tee’s comment on: Some clar­ifi­ca­tions on the Fu­ture Fund’s ap­proach to grantmaking

  Also not trying to lay this all at FTX’s doorstep. Hoping that raising this will fold into some of the discussions about community effects behind closed doors over there

• Tee 14 Mar 2022 11:31 UTC

  16 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Co­or­di­na­tion within EA: com­mu­nity & ecosystems

  Very grateful for this post. Personalizing to contextualize, it’s amazing to see Vaidehi, Christina, Jack (and others I apologize for not remembering/​knowing about) for consistently advocating for things that I gave up pursuing after hitting brick walls for years in the community starting in 2015. It takes courage (and almost certainly, tact) that I didn’t have at the time when I was running multiple projects in this space. Maybe someday I’ll say more about that if people would be interested
  
  On the ‘coaching for co-founders of organizations’, Training For Good is exploring this area with their coaching trials (which I’m a part of), and in general this is something I feel well-positioned to tackle and I’m currently looking for support in being able to do so. I’ve recently finished trialing my coaching with more than a dozen EA leaders over the last few months. I feel the results are quite good, but I’m debating whether to post them publicly for privacy reasons. People who may be interested viewing the results can DM me! Keen to chat with anyone who wants to talk about supporting EA leadership

• Tee 26 Jul 2019 19:46 UTC

  16 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Re­think Grants: an eval­u­a­tion of Dona­tional’s Cor­po­rate Am­bas­sador Program

  Thank you to those who had a look at this report. Our team put a lot into this as you might imagine. I’ve been anticipating some commentary in this evaluation along the lines of “this is far too complex/​quantitative for a $40,000 grant recommendation.” We’d agree. We gesture at this in the “The future of Rethink Grants” section at the end of the Executive Summary.

  This could have perhaps been communicated better, but my hope is that readers will come to interpret this report, and the methods employed therein, as additional tools to consider when evaluating grants. There may be occasions where evaluators might find it useful to boost their repertoire by using these methods (or something similar) to potentially make better decisions. Project leads may also get some mileage out of how much we’ve put on display here.

  There are certain instances where key reasoning (see Team Strength section), or quick deferral to experts, or even a simple back-of-the-envelope (BOTEC) calculation will suffice. But as with charity evaluation, we might agree, there are circumstances where intuition and BOTECs are not enough. An example from this report that Derek mentions, the VOI calculation and CEE lead us to a more nuanced conclusion that funding decent-sized pilot was very much worth doing in our opinion, rather than fully funding it from the outset or passing over this opportunity. Our conclusions from just a BOTEC might have been different.

  I think we have good reason to believe that the level of rigor displayed in this evaluation is warranted at times. And when those situations arise, we hope others will reach for this report if they’ve found it useful.

  What links here?

  • Tee's comment on Re­think Grants: an eval­u­a­tion of Dona­tional’s Cor­po­rate Am­bas­sador Program by Derek (29 Jul 2019 19:02 UTC; 7 points)

EA Sur­vey 2017 Series: Com­mu­nity De­mo­graph­ics & Beliefs

SHIC Work­shop Ex­per­i­ment and Re­vised Im­pact Strat­egy 2018

• Tee 20 Dec 2018 16:26 UTC

  14 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA Meta Fund AMA: 20th Dec 2018

  Will things like Donation Data trends play into the committees decision-making?

  (e.g. CEA received ~4x the donations of any other charity due to an individual donor, yet they received a sizable grant from this group. I realize that this fact doesn’t automatically disqualify them as a valuable donation target.)

  Manifold reasons for full disclosure—I contract for CEA, run a meta org that is a candidate for funding from the fund, have received funding from some individual members of the committee, biased toward resourcing valuable smaller projects etc.

• Tee 19 Dec 2018 16:53 UTC

  14 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: An­i­mal Welfare Fund AMA

  Hey Jamie, I don’t have a directed question on AWF per say, but I deeply appreciate this level of transparency and hope it exerts pressure to raise the water level on grant making transparency more broadly