The Long-Term Future Fund (LTFF) is one of the EA Funds. Between Friday Dec 4th and Monday Dec 7th, we'll be available to answer any questions you have about the fund – we look forward to hearing from all of you!
The LTFF aims to positively influence the long-term trajectory of civilization by making grants that address global catastrophic risks, especially potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence and pandemics. In addition, we seek to promote, implement, and advocate for longtermist ideas, and to otherwise increase the likelihood that future generations will flourish.
Grant recommendations are made by a team of volunteer Fund Managers: Matt Wage, Helen Toner, Oliver Habryka, Adam Gleave and Asya Bergal. We are also fortunate to be advised by Nick Beckstead and Nicole Ross. You can read our bios here. Jonas Vollmer, who is heading EA Funds, also provides occasional advice to the Fund.
You can read about how we choose grants here. Our previous grant decisions and rationale are described in our payout reports. We'd welcome discussion and questions regarding our grant decisions, but to keep discussion in one place, please post comments related to our most recent grant round in this post.
Please ask any questions you like about the fund, including but not limited to:
- Our grant evaluation process.
- Areas we are excited about funding.
- Coordination between donors.
- Our future plans.
- Any uncertainties or complaints you have about the fund. (You can also e-mail us at ealongtermfuture[at]gmail[dot]com for anything that should remain confidential.)
We'd also welcome more free-form discussion, such as:
- What should the goals of the fund be?
- What is the comparative advantage of the fund compared to other donors?
- Why would you/would you not donate to the fund?
- What, if any, goals should the fund have other than making high-impact grants? Examples could include: legibility to donors; holding grantees accountable; setting incentives; identifying and training grant-making talent.
- How would you like the fund to communicate with donors?
We look forward to hearing your questions and ideas!
I'd be interested in better understanding the trade-off between independent vs established researchers. Relative to other donors we fund a lot of independent research. My hunch here is that most independent researchers are less productive than if they were working at organisations -- although, of course, for many of them that's not an option (geographical constraints, organisational capacity, etc). This makes me place a bit of a higher bar for funding independent research. Some other fund managers disagree with me and think independent researchers tend to be more productive, e.g. due to bad incentives in academic and industry labs.
I expect distillation style work to be particularly useful. I expect there's already relevant research here: e.g. case studies of the most impressive breakthroughs, studies looking at different incentives in academic funding, etc. There probably won't be a definitive answer, so it'd also be important that I trust the judgement of the people involved, or have a variety of people with different priors going in coming to similar conclusions.
While larger donors can suffer from diminishing returns, there are sometimes also increasing returns to scale. One important thing larger donors can do that isn't really possible at the LTFF's scale is to found new academic fields. More clarity into how to achieve this and have the field go in a useful direction would be great.
It's still mysterious to me how academic fields actually come into being. Equally importantly, what predicts whether they have good epistemics, whether they have influence, etc? Clearly part of this is the domain of study (it's easier to get rigorous results in category theory than economics; it's easier to get policymakers to care about economics than category theory). But I suspect it's also pretty dependent on the culture created by early founders and the impressions outsiders form of the field. Some evidence for this is that some very closely related fields can end up going in very different directions: e.g. machine learning and statistics.
A key difference between the LTFF and some other funders is we receive donations on a rolling basis, and I expect these donations to continue to increase over time. By contrast, many major donors have an endowment to spend down. So for them it's a really important question to know how to time those donations: how much should they give now, v.s. donate later? Whereas I think for us the case for just donating every $ we receive seems pretty strong (except for keeping enough of a buffer to even out short-term fluctuations in application quality and donation revenue).