Ideas for Improving Funding for Individual EAs, EA Projects, and New EA Organizations

Nice post, Brendon!

I've been of the view for the last couple of years that it'd be useful to have more dedicated effort put toward funding EA projects.

I have a factual contributions that should help to flesh out your strategic picture here:

1. BERI, in addition to EA Grants are funding some small-scale projects. In the first instance, one might want to bootstrap a project like this through BERI, given that they already have some funding available and are a major innovator in the EA support space right now.
2. OpenPhil does already do some regranting.
3. EA Ventures attempted, over the course of some months, to do this a few years ago, which you can read at least a bit about here: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/fo/announcing_effective_altruism_ventures/. I think it failed for a range of reasons including inadequate projects, but it would be worth looking into this further.

Notwithstanding these factors, I still think this idea is worth exploring. As you suggest, I might start off by creating a grant application system. But I think the most important aspects are probably not the system itself as the quality of evaluators and the volume of funders. So it might be best to try to bootstrap it from an existing organization or funder, and to initially accept applications via a low-tech system, such as Google Doc proposals. I'd also emphasise that one good aspect of the status quo is that bad ideas mostly go unfunded at present, especially ones whose low-quality could damage the reputation of EA and its associated research fields, or ones that could inspire hamrful activity. There are more potentially harmful projects within the EA world than in entrepreneurship in general, and so these projects might be overlooked from people taking an entrepreneurial or open-source stance, and this is worth guarding against.

One meta-remark is that I generally like the conversations that are prompted by shared Google Docs, and I think that this generates, on average, more extensive and fine-grained feedback than a Forum Post would typically receive. So if you put out a "nonprofit business plan" for this idea, then I figure a Google Doc (+/- links from the Forum and relevant Facebook groups) would be a great format. Moreover, I'd be happy to provide further feedback on this idea in the future.

I’m grateful that someone wrote this post. :-)

Personally, I find your proposal of fusing three models promising. It does sound difficult to get right in terms of both technical web development and setting up the processes that actually enable users to use the grant website as it was set out to be used. It would probably require a lot of iterative testing as well as in-person meetings with stakeholders (i.e. this looks like a 3-year project).

I’d be happy to dedicate 5 hours per week for the next 3 months to contribute to working it out further with key decision makers in the community. Feel free to PM me on Facebook if you’d like to discuss it further.

Here are some further thoughts on why the EA Grants structure has severe limitations

My impression is that CEA staff have thoughtfully tried to streamline a traditional grant making approach (by, for example, keeping the application form short, deferring to organisations that have expertise in certain areas, and promising to respond in X weeks) but that they’re running up against the limitations of such a centralised system:

1) not enough evaluators specialised in certain causes and strategies who have the time to assess track records and dig into documents

2) a lack of iterated feedback between possible donors and project leaders (you answer many questions and then only hear about how CEA has interpreted your answers and what they think of you 2 months later)

Last year, I was particularly critical about that little useful feedback was shared with applicants after they were denied with a standard email. It’s valuable to know why your funding request is denied – whether it is because CEA staff lack domain expertise or because of some inherent flaws to your approach that you should be aware of.

But applicants ended up having to take the initiative themselves to email CEA questions because CEA staff never got around to emailing some brief reasoning for their decisions to the majority of the 700ish applicants that applied. On CEA’s side there was also the risk of legal liability – that someone upset by their decision could sue them if a CEA staff member shared rough notes they made that could easily be misinterpreted. So if you’re lucky you receive some general remarks and can then schedule a Skype call to discuss those further.

Further, you might discover then that a few CEA staff members have rather vague models of why a particular class of funding opportunities should not be accepted (e.g. one CEA staff member was particularly hesitant about funding EA groups last year because it would make coordinating things like outreach [edit] and having credible projects branded as EA more difficult).

Finally, this becomes particularly troublesome when outside donors lean too heavily on CEA’s accept/deny decision (which I think happened at least once with EA Netherlands, the charity I’m working at). You basically have to explain to all future EA donors that you come into contact with why your promising start-up wasn’t judged to be impactful enough to fund by one of the most respected EA organisations.

I’d be interested in someone from the EA Grants team sharing their perspective on all this.

One key challenge I see is something like 'grant-making talent constraint'. The skills needed to make good grants (e.g. good judgement, domain knowledge, maybe tacit knowledge, maybe relevant network, possibly commissioning/governance/operations skill) are not commonplace, and hard to explicitly 'train' outside i) having a lot of money of your own to practise with, or ii) working in a relevant field (so people might approach you for advice). (Open Philanthropy's recent hiring round might provide another route, but places were limited and extraordinarily competitive).

Yet the talents needed to end up at (i) or (ii) are somewhat different, as are the skills to acquire: neither (e.g.) having a lot of money and being interested in AI safety, nor being an AI safety researcher oneself, guarantee making good AI safety grants; time one spends doing either of these things is time one cannot dedicate to gaining grant-making experience.

Dividing this labour (as the suggestions in the OP point towards) seem the way to go. Yet this can only get you so far if 'grantmaking talent' is not only limited among people with the opportunity to make grants, but limited across the EA population in general. Further, good grant-makers will gravitate to the largest pools of funding (reasonably enough, as this is where their contribution has the greatest leverage). This predictably leads to gaps in the funding ecosystem where 'good projects from the point of view of the universe' and 'good projects from the point of view of the big funders' subtly differ: I'm not sure I agree with the suggestions in the OP (i.e. upskilling people, new orgs), but I find Carl Shulman's remarks here persuasive.

All of your ideas listed are already being worked on by some people. I talked just yesterday to someone who is intending to implement #1 soon, #3 will likely be achieved by handling EA Grants differently in the future, and there are already a couple of people working on #2, though there is further room for improvement.

Minor point:

Rather than have CEA team members work part time on giving grants throughout the year and then switch back to their main area of work

They are currently hiring for a full-time EA Grants Evaluator.

Hey Brendon,

I love your enthusiasm and creativity as well as a great job for putting it into words and out there! :) Writing a post like this and gaining feedback from the community seems to me to be a great first step for actually making progress on an important topic like this.

I have thought about ideas like this myself quite a lot as well and as someone experiencing funding constraints/difficulties myself I see it is a worthwhile cause to pursue (I might be biased, though ;) ).

I was also in the tech-talk and I would love to be kept in the loop on this as well as contribute where it makes sense. Maybe it makes sense to use on of the slack channels for more in-depth discussions or let's set up a special interest group call around the topic! It may also make sense to start something like a git project and use the wiki features to integrate all the valuable ideas and feedback that start pouring in this thread. Short-term it might make sense to create a project plan and look for funding to make this happen in a sustainable way. I imagine Open Phil or EA Grants may actually be interested in something like this.

I have experience in web development as well as scientific approaches to solution development (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_science_(methodology)). Moreover, I am working on the topic of knowledge management/integration in the context of communities which would likely be an important part of actually making this work.

Minor point:

...funding “new organizations” and improving the efficacy of “existing individuals” in EA gets minimal funding. In particular, the only active program I can think of that is improving the effectiveness of existing EAs is Lynette Bye’s recently launched EA Coaching project. It could be worth exploring these two neglected funding areas further.

Also CFAR?

Beyond the cognitive bias debugging material from CFAR, I can't see any obvious substantial comparative advantages that the EA community has for improving the efficacy of existing individuals. In other words, it seems to me that the main ways the EA community can increase an individual's impact is via (a) the onboarding process / introducing them to the research ("new individuals") (b) helping them to find a good fit on a team with other EA-aligned individuals / introducing them to the community ("existing organisations", "new organisations"). If you want to just generally become more effective as an individual, read a productivity bestseller, attend a reputable leadership course, find an older mentor in your field, see a shrink etc. Sometimes I think EAs forget that we're not the best at everything ;-)

I've only skimmed this so far, but lots of good ideas, very timely (I was almost waiting for someone to post something like this with all the similar discussion that's been happening recently, and I'm thinking mostly in conversation), and you've gone up in my estimations. Thank you. Upvoted.

However, I also want to say that I still think of you as being wildly overconfident in general. This is partly based on previous interactions with you, partly based on a fellow EA with a great deal more investment experience than me being initially excited by Antigravity Investments and then thinking there wasn't much of substance there when he dug a bit deeper, partly because of the time you spent with Leverage Research (who I've also found to be generally wildly overconfident).

There's probably not much more I feel I can say at this point, even psuedoanonymised, and I apologise to everyone for that (and also for not expressing concern to a large group of people when I saw that Antigravity had appeared to have taken over the EA Peer Funding Facebook group). Take this as it is: A vague, unsubstantiated claim from an anonymous-for-now member of the community.

But if people do start considering supporting Brendon to have control of such a grantmaking entity - distributed or otherwise - I'd encourage you to DM me and I'll think about what further details I'm able to give. I'd also encourage more people at that point to give their impressions of Brendon's level of epistemic humility (e.g. perhaps it has dramatically improved in recent years). He is no doubt an impressive, altruistic individual, but I personally would feel uncomfortable having him decide who gets to be an EA grantmaker.