The LTFF is happy to renew grants so long as the applicant has been making strong progress and we believe working independently continues to be the best option for them. Examples of renewals in this round include Robert Miles, who we first funded in April 2019, and Joe Collman, who we funded in November 2019. In particular, we'd be happy to be the #1 funding source of a new EA org for several years (subject to the budget constraints Oliver mentions in his reply).

Many of the grants we make to individuals are for career transitions, such as someone retraining from one research field to another, or for one-off projects. So I would expect most grants to not be renewals. That said, the bar for renewals does tend to be higher. This is because we pursue a hits-based giving approach, so are willing to fund projects that are likely not to work out -- but of course will not want to renew the grant if it is clearly not working.

I think being a risk-tolerant funder is particularly valuable since most employers are, quite rightly, risk-averse. Firing people tends to be harmful to morale; internships or probation periods can help, but take a lot of supervisory time. This means people who might be... (read more)

Yeah, I am also pretty worried about this. I don't think we've figured out a great solution to this yet. 

I think we don't really have sufficient capacity to evaluate organizations on an ongoing basis and provide good accountability. Like, if a new organization were to be funded by us and then grow to a budget of $1M a year, I don't feel like we have the capacity to evaluate their output and impact sufficiently well to justify giving them $1M each year (or even just $500k). 

Our current evaluation process routes feels pretty good for smaller projects, and granting to established organizations that have other active evaluators looking into them that we can talk to, but doesn't feel very well-suited to larger organizations that don't have existing evaluations done on them (there is a lot of due diligence work to be done on that I think requires higher staff capacity than we have). 

I also think the general process of the LTFF specializing into more something like venture funding, with other funders stepping in for more established organizations feels pretty good to me. I do think the current process has a lot of unnecessary uncertainty and risk in it, and I would like to ... (read more)

Regardless of whatever happens, I've benefited greatly from all the effort you've put in your public writing on the fund Oliver. 

$1B is a lot. It also gets really hard if I don't get to distribute it to other grantmakers. Here are some really random guesses. Please don't hold me to this, I have thought about this topic some, but not under these specific constraints, so some of my ideas will probably be dumb.

My guess is I would identify the top 20 people who seem to be doing the best work around long-term-future stuff, and give each of at least $10M, which would allow each of them to reliably build an exoskeleton around them and increase their output. 

My guess is that I would then invest a good chunk more into scaling up LessWrong and the EA Forum, and make it so that I could distribute funds to researchers working primarily on those forums (while building a system for peer evaluation to keep researchers accountable). My guess is this could consume another $100M over the next 10 years or so. 

I expect it would take me at least a decade to distribute that much money. I would definitely continue taking in applications for organizations and projects from people and kind of just straightforwardly scale up LTFF spending of the same type, which I think could take another $40M over the next decade.

I think I... (read more)

The cop-out answer of course is to say we'd grow the fund team or, if that isn't an option, we'd all start working full-time on the LTFF and spend a lot more time thinking about it.

If there's some eccentric billionaire who will only give away their money right now to whatever I personally recommend, then off the top of my head:

1. For any long-termist org who (a) I'd usually want to fund at a small scale; and (b) whose leadership's judgement I'd trust, I'd give them as much money as they can plausibly make use of in the next 10 years. I expect that even organisations that are not usually considered funding constrained could probably produce 10-20% extra impact if they invested twice as much in their staff (let them rent really close to the office, pay for PAs or other assistants to save time, etc).

   I also think there can be value in having an endowment: it lets the organisation make longer-term plans, can raise the organisation's prestige, and some things (like creating a professorship) often require endowments.

   However, I do think there are some cases it can be negative: some organisations benefit a lot from the accountability of donors, and being too well-funded can attract the wron

As part of CEA's due diligence process, all grantees must submit progress reports documenting how they've spent their money. If a grantee applies for renewal, we'll perform a detailed evaluation of their past work. Additionally, we informally look back at past grants, focusing on grants that were controversial at the time, or seem to have been particularly good or bad.

I’d like us to be more systematic in our grant evaluation, and this is something we're discussing. One problem is that many of the grants we make are quite small: so it just isn't cost-effective for us to evaluate all our grants in detail. Because of this, any more detailed evaluation we perform would have to be on a subset of grants.

I view there being two main benefits of evaluation: 1) improving future grant decisions; 2) holding the fund accountable. Point 1) would suggest choosing grants we expect to be particularly informative: for example, those where fund managers disagreed internally, or those which we were particularly excited about and would like to replicate. Point 2) would suggest focusing on grants that were controversial amongst donors, or where there were potential conflicts of interest.

It's important t... (read more)

Speaking just for myself on why I tend to prefer the smaller individual grants: 

Currently when I look at the funding landscape, it seems that without the LTFF there would be a pretty big hole in available funding for projects to get off the ground and for individuals to explore interesting new projects or enter new domains. Open Phil very rarely makes grants smaller than ~$300k, and even many donors don't really like giving to individuals and early-stage organizations because they often lack established charity status, which makes their donations non-tax-deductable. 

CEA has set up infrastructure to allow tax-deductible grants to individuals and organizations without charity status, and the fund itself seems well-suited to evaluate organizations by individuals, since we all have pretty wide networks and can pretty quickly gather good references on individuals that are working on projects that don't yet have an established track record. 

I think in a world without Open Phil or the Survival and Flourishing Fund, much more of our funding would go to established organizations. 

Separately, I also think that I personally view a lot of the intellectual work to be done on... (read more)

I largely agree with Habryka's comments above.

In terms of the contrast with the AWF in particular, I think the funding opportunities in the long-termist vs animal welfare spaces look quite different. One big difference is that interest in long-termist causes has exploded in the last decade. As a result, there's a lot of talent interested in the area, but there's limited organisational and mentorship capacity to absorb this talent. By contrast, the animal welfare space is more mature, so there's less need to strike out in an independent direction. While I'm not sure on this, there might also be a cultural factor -- if you're trying to perform advocacy, it seems useful to have an organisation brand behind you (even if it's just a one-person org). This seems much less important if you want to do research.

Tangentially, I see a lot of people debating whether EA is talent constrained, funding constrained, vetting constrained, etc. My view is that for most orgs, at least in the AI safety space, they can only grow by a relatively small (10-30%) rate per year while still providing adequate mentorship. This is talent constrained in the sense that having a larger applicant pool will help the ... (read more)

Historically I think the LTFF's biggest issue has been insufficiently clear messaging, especially for new donors. For example, we received feedback from numerous donors in our recent survey that they were disappointed we weren't funding interventions on climate change. We've received similar feedback from donors surprised by the number of AI-related grants we make. Regardless of whether or not the fund should change the balance of cause areas we fund, it's important that donors have clear expectations regarding how their money will be used.

We've edited the fund page to make our focus areas more explicit, and EA Funds also added Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund for donors who want to focus on that area (and Jonas emailed donors who made this complaint, encouraging to switch their donations to the climate change fund). I hope this will help clarify things, but we'll have to be attentive to donor feedback both via things like this AMA and our donor survey, so that we can proactively correct any misconceptions.

Another issue I think we have is that we currently lack the capacity to be more proactively engaged with our grantees. I'd like us to do this for around 10% of our grant appli... (read more)

This is an important question. It seems like there's an implicit assumption here that highest impact path for the fund to take is to make grants which the inside view of the fund managers think is highest impact, regardless of if we can explain the grant. This is a reasonable position -- and thank you for your confidence! -- however I think the fund being legible does have some significant advantages:

1. Accountability generally seems to improve organisations functioning. It'd be surprising if the LTFF was a complete exception to this, and legibility seems necessary for accountability.
2. There's asymmetric information between us and donors, so less legibility will tend to mean less donations (and I think this is reasonable). So, there's a tradeoff between greater counterfactual impact from scale, v.s. greater impact per $ moved.
3. There's may be community building value in having a fund that is attractive to people without deep context or trust in the fund managers.

I'm not sure what the right balance of legibility vs inside view is for the LTFF. One possibility would be to split into a more inside view / trust-based fund, and a more legible and "safer" fund. Then donors can choose what... (read more)

As mentioned in the original post, I’m not a Fund manager, but I sometimes advise the LTFF as part of my role as Head of EA Funds, and I’ve also been thinking about the longer-term strategy for EA Funds as a whole.

Some thoughts on this question:

• LTFF strategy: There is no official 3-10 year vision or strategy for the LTFF yet, but I hope we will get there sometime soon. My own best guess for the LTFF’s vision (which I haven’t yet discussed with the LTFF) is: ‘Thoughtful people have the resources they need to successfully implement highly impactful projects to improve the long-term future.’ My best guess for the LTFF’s mission/strategy is ‘make judgment-driven grants to individuals and small organizations and proactively seed new longtermist projects.’ A plausible goal could be to allocate $15 million per year to effective longtermist projects by 2025 (where ‘effective’ means something like ‘significantly better than Open Phil’s last dollar, similar to the current quality of grants’).
• Grantmaking capacity: To get there, we need 1) more grantmaking capacity (especially for active grantmaking), 2) more ideas that would be impactful if implemented well, and 3) more people capable of impl

Of course there's lots of things we would not want to (or cannot) fund, so I'll focus on things which I would not want to fund, but which someone reading this might have been interested in supporting or applying for.

1. Organisations or individuals seeking influence, unless they have a clear plan for how to use that influence to improve the long-term future, or I have an exceptionally high level of trust in them

   This comes up surprisingly often. A lot of think-tanks and academic centers fall into this trap by default. A major way in which non-profits sustain themselves is by dealing in prestige: universities selling naming rights being a canonical example. It's also pretty easy to justify to oneself: of course you have to make this one sacrifice of your principles, so you can do more good later, etc.

   I'm torn on this because gaining leverage can be a good strategy, and indeed it seems hard to see how we'll solve some major problems without individuals or organisations pursuing this. So I wouldn't necessarily discourage people from pursuing this path, though you might want to think hard about whether you'll be able to avoid value drift. But there's a big information asymmetry as a dono

A related question: are there categories of things you'd be excited to fund, but haven't received any applications for so far?

Filtering for obvious misfits, I think the majority reason is that I don't think the project proposal will be sufficiently valuable for the long-term future, even if executed well. The minority reason is that there isn't strong enough evidence that the project will be executed well.

Sorry if this is an unsatisfying answer-- I think our applications are different enough that it’s hard to think of common reasons for rejection that are more granular. Also, often the bottom line is "this seems like it could be good, but isn't as good as other things we want to fund". Here are some more concrete kinds of reasons that I think have come up at least more than once:

• Project seems good for the medium-term future, but not for the long-term future
• Applicant wants to learn the answer to X, but X doesn't seem like an important question to me
• Applicant wants to learn about X via doing Y, but I think Y is not a promising approach for learning about X
• Applicant proposes a solution to some problem, but I think the real bottleneck in the problem lies elsewhere
• Applicant wants to write something for a particular audience, but I don’t think that writing will be received well by that audience
• Project would be

From an internal perspective I'd view the fund as being fairly close to risk-neutral. We hear around twice as many complaints that we're too risk-tolerant than too risk-averse, although of course the people who reach out to us may not be representative of our donors as a whole.

We do explicitly try to be conservative around things with a chance of significant negative impact to avoid the unilateralist's curse. I'd estimate this affects less than 10% of our grant decisions, although the proportion is higher in some areas, such as community building, biosecurity and policy.

It's worth noting that, unless I see a clear case for a grant, I tend to predict a low expected value -- not just a high-risk opportunity. This is because I think most projects aren't going to positively influence the long-term future -- otherwise the biggest risks to our civilization would already be taken care of. Based on that prior, it takes significant evidence to update me in favour of a grant having substantial positive expected value. This produces similar decisions to risk-aversion with a more optimistic prior.

Unfortunately, it's hard to test this prior: we'd need to see how good the grants we didn't make w... (read more)

Some things I think could actively cause harm:

• Projects that accelerate technological development of risky technologies without corresponding greater speedup of safety technologies
• Projects that result in a team covering a space or taking on some coordination role that is worse than the next person who could have come along
• Projects that engage with policymakers in an uncareful way, making them less willing to engage with longtermism in the future, or causing them to make bad decisions that are hard to reverse
• Movement-building projects that give a bad first impression of longtermists
• Projects that risk attracting a lot of controversy or bad press
• Projects with ‘poisoning the well’ effects where if it’s executed poorly the first time, someone trying it again will have a harder time-- e.g., if a large-scale project doing EA outreach to highschoolers went poorly, I think a subsequent project would have a much harder time getting buy-in from parents.

More broadly, I think as Adam notes above that the movement grows as a function of its initial composition. I think that even if the LTFF had infinite money, this pushes against funding every project where we expect the EV of the object-level wo... (read more)