Note: this post was edited on January 21, 2025, to reflect that we are continuing funding for graduate student organizers for non-EA groups. Ignoring the distinction between undergraduate and non-undergraduate for these groups was an oversight in the original post.
Open Philanthropy’s GCR Capacity Building team is planning two substantial changes to our funding for university groups at the end of this year.
- After December 31, 2024, we will no longer be accepting applications for funding for effective altruism-focused groups through our University Group Organizer Fellowship program.
- This applies to both stipends for organizer time, and for other types of group expense funding (e.g. funding for posters, food for events, and group retreats).
- The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) will be taking on these applications instead, as they did before 2022; we encourage relevant groups to apply to their group support funding program (and to consider CEA’s other group support programs).
- We will continue to accept applications for other types of university groups, such as groups focused on AI safety.
- After December 31, 2024, we will no longer offer stipends to new applications for undergraduate student organizers through our University Group Organizer Fellowship program. We’ll continue offering stipends as normal for applications received before that date, which we generally expect to have a grant duration through the end of this academic year.
- This change applies to all types of university groups supported through our program, not just effective altruism-focused groups.
- We’ll continue funding for non-students working full-time on organizing (non-EA-focused) groups for students at universities.
- We'll also continue funding for graduate student organizers.
So, in summary: all EA group funding is moving to CEA. AI safety group funding is staying at Open Phil, but we're dropping stipends for part-time undergraduate student organizers (though still providing group expenses funding, stipends for graduate student organizers, and funding for people working on programming for university students full-time).
Why are we making these changes?
Passing EA group funding to CEA
The GCR Capacity Building (GCRCB) team at Open Philanthropy currently provides funding for a large number of EA student groups through its University Group Organizer Fellowship program.
As the GCRCB team’s portfolio grows (we’re now giving and plan to give in more areas than in mid-2022, when we first started this program), and as Open Philanthropy’s portfolio grows in general, we’re often interested in moving our small-grants programs elsewhere, when appropriate. This move reflects that university group funding is an especially energy-intensive area to do well, and aligns with Good Ventures’s general interest in focusing on a smaller set of strategies that consume a smaller amount of energy, as described in this post. (Though the relationship is indirect and reflective of a high-level shift towards consolidating our grantmaking, not reflective of a decision by Good Ventures. EA university group support is not an area Good Ventures is exiting.)
As a result, we’re now passing this program back to the Centre for Effective Altruism (who had also owned it pre-2022). This means that most forms of EA university group support are again consolidated in one place. CEA has been our grantee for many years and is a natural home for the EA university group portfolio, given its mission. CEA’s university groups team currently provides mentorship and resources for university groups through its Organiser Support Programme; it also hosts retreats for organizers. There’s strong synergy between this existing work and the work of providing financial support. Since OP’s GCRCB team doesn’t get these other touch points with group organizers, and in general we don’t spend all our time thinking about university groups, we don’t get these synergies — we have access to less textured info, are less “on the ground,” and don’t devote as much energy to this as CEA.
Overall, I think that while Open Philanthropy was an okay home for this program, I don’t think it’s set up to be an excellent home. I think CEA’s Groups team — headed by Jessica McCurdy (Head of Groups) and Joris Pijpers (University Groups Team Lead) have done great work on university group support in the past year, and I’m excited to see them take over this program.
Funding for AI safety groups remains at Open Phil
The vast majority of funding provided through our University Group Organizer Fellowship program, besides funding for EA groups, is for groups focused on AI safety. We are continuing this funding, except that as described above, we’re no longer providing stipends for undergraduate student organizers of AI safety (or other) groups.
Why end stipend funding for undergraduate student organizers?
We’ve been thinking for a while about what changes (if any) to make to our stipend funding for student organizers, and overall felt like the decision was a tough and non-obvious call.
- In survey work we’ve done of organizers we’ve funded, we’ve found that on average, stipend funding substantively increased organizers’ motivation, self-reported effectiveness, and hours spent on organizing work (and for some, made the difference between being able to organize and not organizing at all). The effect was not enormous, but it was substantive.
- On those same surveys, however, organizers have also indicated that stipends for students were frequently perceived mildly to moderately negatively on campuses (or that they were reluctant to discuss stipends with other students because of concerns about perception).
- Overall, attitudes towards stipend funding among student organizers we’ve surveyed have been mixed.
We also noted that, among university groups in other fields, undergraduates receiving stipends for part-time organizing work was fairly unusual.
Overall, after weighing all of this evidence, we thought that the right move was to stick to funding group expenses and drop the stipends for individual undergraduate organizers. One frame I used to think about this was that of “spending weirdness points wisely.” That is, it would be nice for student organizers, who are discussing often-unconventional ideas within effective altruism or AI safety, to not also have to discuss (or feel that they need to defend) stipends. See the relevant section of this post, which talks about defending spending decisions becoming a large part of initial conversations the author had about EA. This post was written in an era where there was much more EA-associated “free spending” than there is now, but I think some of the same basic dynamics apply to this case. Note that arguments change depending on the type of spending: we’re happy to continue providing funding for group expenses (retreats, food for events, sometimes office/event spaces, etc.) even though this is unusual at some universities, because I think the cost/benefit looks better for those types of spending.
As I previously noted, however, this was a difficult decision — since we do think the stipends provide meaningful value — and we didn’t think the correct answer was obvious. Other funders may see things differently.
Edit, added January 21, 2025: We’re remaining open to funding graduate student organizers. Paying grad students for their time is less unconventional than for undergraduates, and I also think their opportunity cost is higher on average.
The impact of university organizing
To be clear, neither of these changes reflect any change in our thinking on the value of student groups.
Data we’ve collected historically, as well as more recent impact evaluation work, suggests to us that student groups are often very impactful ways for students who are excited about effective altruism and altruistically impactful careers to create energy about those things on campus. This organizing really moves the needle in terms of graduates moving into jobs with altruistic impact.
I think everyone involved has something to feel proud of — the students doing this work (often fitting it into a very busy schedule), and the professionals (e.g. CEA Groups Team, Kairos) supporting them.
I think it's a mistake to decide to make less cost-effective grants, out of a desire to be seen as more frugal (or to make that decision on behalf of group organizers to make them appear more frugal). At the end of the day making less cost-effective grants means you waste more money!
I feel like on a deeper level, organizers now have an even harder job explaining things. The reason for why organizers get the level of support they are getting no longer has a straightforward answer ("because it's cost-effective") but a much more convoluted answer ("yes, it would make sense to pay organizers based on the principles this club is about, but we decided to compromise on that because people kept saying it was weird, which to be clear, generally we think is not a good reason for not engaging in an effective interventions, indeed most effective interventions are weird and kind of low-status, but in this case that's different").
More broadly, I think the "weirdness points" metaphor has caused large mistakes in how people handle their own reputation. Controlling your own reputation intentionally while compromising on your core principles generally makes your reputation worse and makes you seem more shady. People respect others having consistent principles, it's one of the core drivers of positive reputation.
My best guess is this decision will overall be more costly from a long-run respect and reputation perspective, though I expect it to reveal itself in different ways than the costs of paying group organizers, of course.
This is circular. The principle is only compromised if (OP believes) the change decreases EV — but obviously OP doesn't believe that; OP is acting in accordance with the do-what-you-believe-maximizes-EV-after-accounting-for-second-order-effects principle.
Maybe you think people should put zero weight on avoiding looking weird/slimy (beyond what you actually are) to low-context observers (e.g. college students learning about the EA club). You haven't argued that here. (And if that's true then OP made a normal mistake; it's not compromising principles.)
Just flagging this for context of readers, I think Habryka's position/reading makes more sense if you view it in the context of an ongoing Cold War between Good Ventures and Lightcone.[1]
Some evidence on the GV side:
To Habryka's credit, it's much easier to see what the 'Lightcone Ecosystem' thinks of OpenPhil!
I was nervous about writing this because I don't want to start a massive flame war, but I think it's helpful for the EA Community to be aware that two powerful forces in it/adjacent to it[2] are essentially in a period of conflict. When you see comments from either side that seem to be more aggressive/hostile than you otherwise might think warranted, this may make the behaviour make more sense.
Note: I don't personally know any of the people involved, and live half a world away, so expect it to be very inaccurate. Still, this 'frame' has helped me to try to grasp what I see as behaviours and attitudes which otherwise seem hard to explain to me, as an outsider to the 'EA/LW in the Bay' scene.
To my understanding, the Lightcone position on EA is that it 'should be disavowed and dismantled' but there's no denying the Lightcone is closer to EA than ~most all other organisations in some sense
I agree that things tend to get tricky and loopy around these kinds of reputation-considerations, but I think at least the approach I see you arguing for here is proving too much, and has a risk of collapsing into meaninglessness.
I think in the limit, if you treat all speech acts this way, you just end up having no grounding for communication. "Yes, it might be the case that the real principles of EA are X, but if I tell you instead they are X', then you will take better actions, so I am just going to claim they are X', as long as both X and X' include cost-effectiveness".
In this case, it seems like the very people that the club is trying to explain the concepts of EA to, are also the people that OP is worried about alienating by paying the organizers. In this case what is going on is that the goodness of the reputation-protecting choice is directly premised on the irrationality and ignorance of the very people you are trying to attract/inform/help. Explaining that isn't impossible but it does seem like a particularly bad way to start of a relationship, and so I expect consequences-wise to be bad.
"Yes, we would actually be paying people, but we expected you wouldn't understand the principles of cost-effectiveness and so be alienated if you heard about it, despite us getting you to understand them being the very thing this club is trying to do", is IMO a bad way to start off a relationship.
I also separately think that optimizing heavily for the perception of low-context observers in a way that does not reveal a set of underlying robust principles, is bad. I don't think you should put "zero" weight on that (and nothing in my comment implied that), but I do think it's something that many people put far too much weight on (going into detail of which wasn't the point of my comment, but on which I have written plenty about in many other comments).
There is also another related point in my comment, which is that "cost-effectiveness" is of course a very close sister concept to "wasting money". I think in many ways, thinking about cost-effectiveness is where you end up if you think carefully about how you can avoid wasting money, and is in some ways a more grown-up version of various frugality concerns.
When you increase the total cost of your operations (by, for example, reducing the cost-effectiveness of your university organizers, forcing you to spend more money somewhere else to do the same amount of good) in order to appear more frugal, I think you are almost always engaging in something that has at least the hint of deception.
Yes, you might ultimately be more cost-effective by getting people to not quite realize what happened, but when people are angry at me or others for not being frugal enough, I think it's rarely appropriate to ultimately spend more to appease them, even if doing so would ultimately then save me enough money to make it worth it. While this isn't happening as directly here as it was with other similar situations, like whether the Wytham Abbey purchase was not frugal enough, I think the same dynamics and arguments apply.
I think if someone tries to think seriously and carefully through what it would mean to be properly frugal, I don't think they would endorse you sacrificing the effectiveness of your operations causing you to ultimately spend more to achieve the same amount of good. And if they learned that you did, and they think carefully about what this implies about your frugality, they would end up more angry, not less. That, I think, is a dynamic worth avoiding.
I think it's fair enough to caution against purely performative frugality. But I'm not sure the OP even justifies the suggestion that the organizers actually are more cost effective (they concluded the difference between paid and unpaid organizers' individual contributions were "substantive, not enormous"; there's a difference between paid people doing more work than volunteers and it being more cost effective to pay...). That's even more the case if you take into account that the primary role of an effective university organizer is attracting more people (or "low context observers") to become more altruistic and this instance of the "weirdness" argument is essentially that paying students undercut the group's ability to appeal to people on altruistic grounds, even if individual paid staff put in more effort. And they were unusually well paid by campus standards for tasks almost every other student society use volunteers for.[1] And that there's no evidence that the other ways CEA proposes spending the money instead are less effective.
one area we might agree is that I'm not sure if OpenPhil considered alternatives like making stipends needs-based or just a bit lower and more focused as a pragmatic alternative to just cancelling them altogether.
Note that the currently quoted pay for part-time organizers is somewhat lower than the linked comment, which quoted a then-current version of the OP website.
Current version reads:
Part-time/student organizers
Undergraduates organizing part-time typically receive a stipend that generally equates to $21-27/hr in the US and £15-19/hr in the UK. Non-undergraduates organizing part-time typically receive a stipend that generally equates to $25-32/hr in the US and £18-23/hr in the UK.
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/open-philanthropy-university-organizer-fellowship/
I agree that this is an inference. I currently think the OP thinks that in the absence of frugality concerns this would be among the most cost-effective uses of money by Open Phil's standards, but I might be wrong.
University group funding was historically considered extremely cost-effective when I talked to OP staff (beating out most other grants by a substantial margin). Possibly there was a big update here on cost-effectiveness excluding frugality-reputation concerns, but currently think there hasn't been (but like, would update if someone from OP said otherwise, and then I would be interested in talking about that).
They do specifically say that they consider other types of university funding to have greater cost-benefit (and I don't think it makes sense to exclude reputation concerns from cost-benefit analysis, particularly when reputation boost is a large part of the benefit being paid for in the first place). Presumably not paying stipends would leave more to go around. I agree that more detail would be welcome.
I agree that all-things-considered they say that, but I am objecting to "one of the things to consider", and so IMO it makes sense to bracket that consideration when evaluating my claims here.