Program Associate at Open Philanthropy and chair of the Long-Term Future Fund. I spend half my time on AI and half my time on EA community-building. Any views I express on the forum are my own, not the views of my employer.
We’re currently planning on keeping it open at least for the next month, and we’ll provide at least a month of warning if we close it down.
Sorry about the delay on this answer. I do think it’s important that organizers genuinely care about the objectives of their group (which I think can be different from being altruistic, especially for non-effective altruism groups). I think you’re right that that’s worth listing in the must-have criteria, and I’ve added it now.
I assume the main reason this criteria wouldn’t be true is if someone wanted to do organizing work just for the money, which I think we should be trying hard to select against.
“even if the upside of them working out could really be quite valuable” is the part I disagree with most in your comment. (Again, speaking just for myself), I don’t think any of the projects I remember us rejecting seemed like they had a huge amount of upside; my overall calculus was something like “this doesn’t seem like it has big upside (because the policy asks don’t seem all that good), and also has some downside (because of person/project-specific factors)”. It would be nice if we did quantified risk analysis for all of our grant applications, but ultimately we have limited time, and I think it makes sense to focus attention on cases where it does seem like the upside is unusually high.
On potential risk factors:
Caveating a lot of the above: as I said before, my views on specific grants have been informed heavily by others I’ve consulted, rather than coming purely from some inside view.
FWIW, I think this kind of questioning is fairly Habryka-specific and not really standard for our policy applicants; I think in many cases I wouldn’t expect that it would lead to productive discussions (and in fact could be counterproductive, in that it might put off potential allies who we might want to work with later).
I make the calls on who is the primary evaluator for which grants; as Habryka said, I think he is probably most skeptical of policy work among people on the LTFF, and hasn’t been the primary evaluator for almost any (maybe none?) of the policy-related grants we’ve had. In your case, I thought it was unusually likely that a discussion between you and Habryka would be productive and helpful for my evaluation of the grant (though I was interested primarily in different but related questions, not “whether policy work as a whole is competitive with other grants”), because I generally expect people more embedded in the community (and in the case above, you (Sam) in particular, which I really appreciate), to be more open to pretty frank discussions about the effectiveness of particular plans, lines of work, etc.
Rebecca Kagan is currently working as a fund manager for us (sorry for the not-up-to-date webpage).
Hey, Sam – first, thanks for taking the time to write this post, and running it by us. I’m a big fan of public criticism, and I think people are often extra-wary of criticizing funders publicly, relative to other actors of the space.
Some clarifications on what we have and haven’t funded:
Responding to the rest of the post:
Here are answers to some other common questions about the University Organizer Fellowship that I received in office hours:
If I apply and get rejected, is there a “freezing period” where I can’t apply again?
We don’t have an official freezing period, but I think we generally won’t spend time reevaluating someone within 3 months of when they last applied, unless they give some indication on the application that something significant has changed in that time.
If you’re considering applying, I really encourage you to not to wait– I think for the vast majority of people considering applying, it won’t make a difference whether you apply now or a month from now.
Should I have prior experience doing group organizing or running EA projects before applying?
No – I care primarily about the criteria outlined here. Prior experience can be a plus, but it’s definitely not necessary, and it’s generally not the main factor in deciding whether or not to fund someone.
I’m not sure that I agree with the premise of the question – I don’t think EA is trying all that hard to build a mainstream following (and I’m not sure that it should).
I'm commenting here to say that while I don't plan to participate in public discussion of the FTX situation imminently (for similar reasons to the ones Holden gives above, though I don't totally agree with some of Holden's explanations here, and personally put more weight on some considerations here than others), I am planning to do so within the next several months. I'm sorry for how frustrating that is, though I endorse my choice.