All of agdfoster's Comments + Replies
If someone felt we might have insights in the future that would be so valuable it makes sense to hold onto a 3-5% yearly return over inflation, why not tell them to instead fund achieving those insights, make them happen sooner?
High-impact, for simplicity, (they have a very large total number of grants) is set just as the rough status quo of groups on GiveWell, funded by Open Phil, ACE charities etc., FP manage their own list and we >90% are in agreement on what is in that list. None of the largest grants in the list are groups we feel conflicted about.
In an ideal world we would of course evaluate every group their pledgers have counterfactually funded but that's not really tractable. And we try to only use their quantitative outcomes as one of several signals as to how well they're doing (it's very tempting to fall into a rabbit hole of data analysis for a group with such clear and measurable first order outcomes)
FP aren't a straight forward advisory group, they have a pledge and a community, so the $19m is the total to high-impact charities within their pledger community. FP's research team have attempted to estimate which of those donations happened as a result of FP advisory / marketing work, which is hard, and as with any self-reporting, open to becoming a KPI that ends up drifting and becoming misreported. My current view of the FP individuals that did this estimate work though is that they have high intellectual honesty and thoroughness, that they are aware of their own misincentives and when I spot-checked a number of their figures in 2018-19 they were good estimates, perhaps even on the conservative side.
I agree with Denise. Although it's worth noting that our bar for a mentorship program worth funding does have to be quite high.
+1. A major factor is also that writing tastefully and responsibly about the things we are concerned about with an organisation would probably more than double or triple the size of all our write-ups. I'd expect the amount of time it took us to carefully think through those write-ups would be much higher than for the main writeup and we would be more likely to make mistakes which resulted in impact destruction.
Where a concern is necessarily part of the narrative for the decision or it feels like it's very important and can easily be shared with confidence, I think we have. But generally it's not necessary for the argument, and we stick to the default policy.
I wish forum authors would avoid framing their arguments as "us vs them". It makes me spend far more time engaging with the piece than I would have rationally chose to!
Thanks again for the valuable thought provocation anyway though :)
Hm, just found the appendix mentioned in 5.3 - so never mind! I think I'm persuaded that it's likely very valuable looking for opportunities.
Good to see some of these arguments making their way into EA analysis!
Given the number of economists, the number of countries and that there does seem to be relatively wide agreement behind some important economic policies: are there lists floating around of remaining low-hanging fruit for economic policy changes in certain countries?
I would have thought that there are just so many economists, think tanks etc., and people keen to make money/prestige off of advising governments on how to run their economy, that most those remaining low-hanging fruit policy changes are stuck where they are for some very-hard-to-change reason.
Yes that's right, thanks Julia and apologies for any confusion. I use the term differently to how the OP has used it. We are still looking at anything that falls outside of the remit of CBG but are unable to offer the level of vetting and direct support that we think is necessary to fund local groups well and so are funding that via CBG. We have still been looking at special projects by local groups that fall outside of the remit of CBG also.
Thanks for sharing this! I’m on the meta fund team and open to feedback.
First I want to quickly flag that we no longer do community building grants due to their complexity and instead intend to fund CEA CBG. Community building projects are very hard to properly evaluate, track and support and I applaud CEAs team for working so hard at this. However, at each round CBG sends us a proposal on what additional funding can achieve in terms of fulfilling existing commitments and new applications, to help inform our funding decision to them (if any).
Addres...
I am confused by this. I consider it a key responsibility of the meta fund to independently fund community building grants, and this is a major update downwards on the value of the meta fund for me.
I would strongly urge you to consider investing more into evaluating and vetting community-building grants. I don't think it's healthy for CEA to be the only funder in this space.
FP’s estimate for their $ per tonne was something like 0.1, with large error bars. It’s a policy intervention after all. How big an adjustment would each of your issues raise that by? Your “it’s still good” comment seems a bit throw away.
Would you, in total, adjust it by >100x I.e. estimating >$10 per tonne?
Nice one! There are a few strong options but would need more info to give a decent suggestion, hard to say just based on the above, drop me an email at [myusername] @gmail.com and probably happy to put you in touch with some people. I’d generally advise erring against discussing potential major donors on a public forum.
Thanks! Cool perspective. I’ll just make a quick comment on the neglectedness point:
Much of diminishing returns in an area come not from crowdedness or inefficient economies of scale but because the low hanging fruit are gone. Most EA top reccommended cause areas are so neglected that the majority of the work is still focused on basic/applied research and basic policy advocacy, strategy etc. Work that can have huge ripples, steering global markets and governments where they otherwise would have done nothing for potentially many years.
Another way of evaluat
...Thanks for the question. All the grantees except the EA survey have funding gaps greater than our grants. Honestly it's really hard to give an estimate for this quickly as we didn't review all of the options to the same level (as we knew we only had $X to grant). Of the smaller orgs that applied I think somewhere between $200k and $1m, but if we include the orgs with run-rates over $500k pa then this number gets much bigger.
I work with donors and feel I don’t have enough to say when ageing comes up. Fancy giving me a quick primer?
A few things I’m clearly confused on:
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why aging isn’t always discussed under the restriction of global population capacity, seems like we should have reached it by then (assuming no AGI). I realise this is everyone’s first intuitive response but seems like it should still be a key factor in any analysis.
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seems like under a full capacity assumption the impact either comes from an improved distribution of where people are at in life (less teenage d
Don’t know much about this but I thought you could estimate a ballpark for the total frequency by looking at craters on moons and mars.
Is it meaningful to say that some companies are growing exponentially when the markets they take part in are growing exponentially? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-two-millennia?time=1913..2015
After a quick Google, Microsoft was $500bn market cap in it's 2000 peak and now is about $1tn, but world GDP has almost doubled in that time also (60tn -> 110tn).
If you want to try a work strategy that involves long hours then a positive successful relationship may be harder to achieve.
Otherwise I’d advocate you don’t instrumentalise your non-work time for impact. I know it’s a cliche but do what you enjoy. Instrumentalising your free time seems to make people less relatable (probably an understatement), less trustworthy, more prone to depression, less robust to sudden changes etc
Having a strong base, whatever it is for you, is pretty important I think. When impact stuff is going badly you don’t want to feel like e
...As you suggest in the question I think an improvement would be: "impact of -org X- -trying- to influence governments vs direct work"
Some key considerations:
- Gov interventions' numbers in my experience generally have much better expected values in back of the envelope models and then often look much less good when you add a bunch of additional intuitive discount factors.
- Attribution is highly uncertain with policy interventions.
- This said, I expect many of the highest return per dollar funding opportunities to be in policy and research.
- What'
I’d guess the best argument is the obvious one:
- most the professional world and voting populace have a very negative view on psychedelics
- whilst the potential upsides might be sizeable, they likely don’t compare to the negative damage to EA that EA orgs publicly supporting such work would likely do.
- if done in secret that’s a) a secret (generally bad) and b) inevitably going to get out.
- and a fair number of non EAs are working on it anyway as it’s quite a popular idea in California. I’m guessing anyone super passionate about it could get funding and hire without having to be associated with EA at all.
most the professional world and voting populace have a very negative view on psychedelics
whilst the potential upsides might be sizeable, they likely don’t compare to the negative damage to EA that EA orgs publicly supporting such work would likely do.
I would push back against this somewhat. It's historically been the case that the general view of psychedelics is negative, but I think a case can be made that this is changing fairly quickly. Media coverage of psychedelics over the past ~5 years has been positive, e.g. The Guardian, The Wall Street Journ...
A common misconception is that if something is being talked about publicly there is probably funding available for it somewhere. But the number of weirdness dollars actually available in the wild for anything not passing muster with Ra can still be safely rounded to zero for most purposes. Even people who have had past success in more conventional areas often have trouble getting funding for weirder ideas, and if they do wind up spending a lot of time fundraising.
I think your reasoning here needs a lot of work. Few quick points:
- better to critic specific points rather than something broad like ‘all strategy of EA affiliated orgs’.
- generally, if it seems like a large number of really smart people in EA appear to be missing something, you should have a strong prior that you are the one missing something. Took me a long time to accept this. It’s not wrong to shine a light on things of course, but a touch more humility in your writing would go a long way.
- reasoning and evidence aren’t exclusive things, evidence is par
Really interesting read, a few thoughts below. Only skim read article so mostly responding to your prompts. I should also note I advise philanthropists for a living and so am inherently biased!
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I’ve found Open Phil’s reasoning to be rigorous and thorough, far more so than virtually all of their peers. I also have deep intellectual trust for, so far without exception, everyone I’ve met that works there.
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from a skim read the OPs arguments feel pretty zero sum. Perhaps the argument should instead be “should open Phil also fund non-GCBR bio work as well”.
From experience this gets more and more desirable both the wealthier a donor is and the longer the donor has been wealthy for.
I think the papers phrase “agency” is missing something though. It’s not a sensation of making decisions or being listened to that people are drawn to generally. I’d say it was more ‘proprietorship’ or ‘feeling ownership over the project’, feeling like a causally relevant component of the whole endeavour.
Agency is also, I find, quite patronising!
[Disclosure: In February 2019, I corresponded about the experience-sampling idea with Alex Foster of the EA Meta Fund. He said my points were "certainly quite compelling," but the correspondence fell off.
Please note that the content of my correspondence with Milan was exploratory but primarily from a position of skepticism. Whilst technically accurate I find this quote to be misleading and not very good form.
Arguably it was the philosophers that found the last few. Once the missing moral reasoning was shored up the cause area conclusion was pretty deductive.
A small gripe with the title - you don’t make any argument for this tech solving global poverty, just congestion in the wealthiest cities on earth. I know transportation has economic benefits elsewhere but your post makes no claims about this.
I want more posts about flying cars.
I’m still assuming the reliability requirement is too high. If a car stops working it rolls to a halt, a flying crashes into a residential area. Planes don’t do this, but they have costly constant checks. Maybe a fleet owner (non personal ownership) and lots of sensors for automated checks makes the reliability feasible.
Similarly security seems like a daunting challenge.
Noise I hadn’t thought of.
Do we even need them though, if a city goes full AV you can theoretically have very high speed regular cars and no junctions /
...I drafted but didn’t publish a post yesterday titled “where are all the ideas?”. Really glad to see a contribution of this type.
I regularly simplify my evaluations into pros and cons lists and find them surprisingly good. Open Phil’s format essentially boils down into description, pros, cons, risks.
Check out kialo. It allows really nice nested pro con lists built of claims and supporting claims +discussion around those claims. It’s not perfect but we use it for keeping track of logic for our early stage evals / for taking a step back on evals we have gotten too in the weeds with
Do you have an example of an Open Phil report that boils down to that format? This would be an update for me. I tried my best to randomly sample reports from their website (by randomly clicking around), and the three I ended up looking at didn't seem to follow that structure at all:
Seconded on title, enjoyed content but title felt click-baity and misleading, especially given 90% of readers will only read the title.
I’m so glad to see a post from people working in the industry in question - thank you for taking the time, making the post and contributing to the discussion, I strong upvoted.
Impact investing comes up a lot in donor advisory, so have a few points to add:
1 I generally still advise donors not to use their philanthropic, impact maximising, allocation for impact investing. I still do not have a very thorough way of explaining how I came to this conclusion and no existing materials I know of could be sent to a HNW.
2 most large donors only give a small portion
...I ran my first hiring process to hire someone for an EA role last year and was amazed how long it took me. I’ve hired around 20 times in the past and only spent a couple weeks and 20-40h per role. Last year I spent 8 months and hundreds of hours. I reflected afterwards on why and can list a few hypotheses:
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normally rely heavily on gut to build my shortlist. Did not feel comfortable doing this for this role as it felt like there were so many failure modes for a bad hire. Both ways that a hire could go badly and severity of impact for a hire going badly.
"ultimately I made offers to two candidates both of which I had had strong gut feelings about very early, which was rewarding but also highly frustrating." - I hope this comment doesn't come across as incredibly mean, but, are you getting that from notes made at the time? When I find myself thinking "this is what I thought we'd do all along", I start to suspect I've conveniently rewritten my memories of what I thought. Do you have a sense of how many candidates you had similar strong positive gut feelings about?
Thank you for a very helpful comment!
many candidates treated the process like a 2 way application the whole way through the process. This three off my intuitions and normally I would have dropped all candidates who weren’t signalling they were specifically very excited about my role. First call excluded.
I wonder whether this is just a result of people on both sides of the application process knowing each other in a social context.
If the candidate knows they will interact with people making the hiring decision in the future, they might not want them to feel bad about rejecting them. The peopl...
Found Bridgespan's 2018 report useful and interesting.
https://www.bridgespan.org/insights/library/impact-investing/what-is-impact-investing
[idea]: Invite-only Google Sheet List of considerations relevant to funding a group (one group per tab) and then columns of donor's weights for those considerations. I would find this really interesting.
Deal could be that you only get access if you're willing to share your weights!
For instance, like other big non-profits, EA orgs might want to hire institutional fundraisers to tap into larger grants from big foundations other than the usual suspects
I've looked into this a few times and it does seem like it will become a promising channel. In particular from the big donors that do very large checks (>$500k). At least one org I know is experimenting with hiring a full-time grant-writer. I currently think it won't work well for most EA orgs for some time to come.
Worth noting that most big foundations have large sr. manage...
Social protection system coverage (helping more people access government benefits); CC estimates that this is less than one-fifth as valuable as cash transfers
That is surprising, they've done a lot of work in and around India where welfare budget utilisation has been infamously poor until only quite recently and where the huge rural population seems to make it particularly hard to get welfare to the poorest who need it most.
I wonder how their economists account for the counterfactual of unused government funds, I've seen quite a few calcs where u...
Note: I have a feeling that 'policing tone' is an annoying meme for a forum and something more appropriate for moderators than for readers so I'll post this one and default to refraining from doing it again.
Quick few thoughts on the tone of this, feel free to ignore if it doesn't change your mind:
Most of these articles have been good but this one is certainly the worst out of all that I have seen (n=25 or so, from multiple writers) and I believe it has negative expected value.
This part, right at the top and at a few other points, I felt...
I understand disagreement about how harsh or gentle of a tone is appropriate here, but we must at least accept the clear expression of extreme rankings lest we lose the ability to share meaningful credences. We should not make it impossible or overly difficult to say that something is the worst, or that we are certain about that fact, because sometimes a thing really is the worst (SOMETHING must be! It's trivially true, assuming ordering!) and losing that information will bias us. If you ever find yourself writing from a similar position to mine, I&#x...
For whatever it's worth, I read "I found this one distasteful" as more aggressive than "This is the worst of the 25 articles, most of which were good". One article has to be the worst after all, and so that sentence alone might not even be a real criticism. I see the actual criticism in the next half-sentence "and believe it has negative expected value", which feels to me pretty non-aggressive.
Some part of the large potential upside of this fund, and the reason why some of the team are excited to put so much of their time into it, is that if we do a really good job it could grow and attract significant additional capital into the meta cause areas.
Whilst a relatively small cause area, in a more efficient market for non-profits, I would expect that the space was funded to the brim due to the outsized returns available within it. I see moving additional capital into this space as highly valuable and I think it's often a smaller, easier jump fo...
I echo thoughts here re helping yourself generally being the smart thing to do. I personally love that my current work relies so heavily on my mental wellbeing, it means I can't tempt myself with overly self-sacrificial narratives.
This said, I also LOVE that EA isn't about me/us. It's the tool for doing more good with our careers, and lots of the people involved in it make for great like-minded friends, but it isn't, and shouldn't be, our home, or crutch.
I don't think a community full of people who [make EA too much their everything] is as stable or as rob... (read more)