There's a chart showing it was in the high 60s to mid 70s in previous years, except one year at 91% because that year had virtual acceptances.

That's not fraud, without more -- Vasco didn't suggest that anyone obtain loans that they did not intend to repay, or could not repay, in a no-doom world.

Every contract has an implied term that future obligations are void in the event of human extinction. There's no shame in not paying one's debts because extinction happened.

[highly speculative]

It seems plausible to me that the existence of higher degrees of random error could inflate a more error-tolerant evaluator's CEAs for funded grants as a class. Someone could probably quantify that intuition a whole lot better, but here's one thought experiment:

Suppose ResourceHeavy and QuickMover [which are not intended to be GiveWell and FP!] are evaluating a pool of 100 grant opportunities and have room to fund 16 of them. Each has a policy of selecting the grants that score highest on cost-effectiveness. ResourceHeavy spends a ton of resources and determines the precise cost-effectiveness of each grant opportunity. To keep the hypo simple, let's suppose that all 100 have a true cost effectiveness of 10.00-10.09 Units, and ResourceHeavy nails it on each candidate. QuickMover's results, in contrast, include a normally-distributed error with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 3.

In this hypothetical, QuickMover is the more efficient operator because the underlying opportunities were ~indistinguishable anyway. However, QuickMover will erroneously claim that its selected projects have a cost-effectiveness of ~13+ Units because it unknowingly selected the 16 projects with the highest positive error terms (i.e., those with an error of +1 SD or above). Moreover, the random distribution of error determined which grants got funded and which did not -- which is OK here since all candidates were ~indistinguishable but will be problematic in real-world situations.

While the hypo is unrealistic in some ways, it seems that given a significant error term, which grants clear a 10-Unit bar may be strongly influenced by random error, and that might undermine confidence in QuickMover's selections. Moreover, significant error could result in inflated CEAs on funded grants as a class (as opposed to all evaluated grants as a class) because the error is a in some ways a one-way rachet -- grants with significant negative error terms generally don't get funded.

I'm sure someone with better quant skills than I could emulate a grant pool with variable cost-effectiveness in addition to a variable error term. And maybe these kinds of issues, even if they exist outside of thought experiments, could be too small in practice to matter much?

simply make it easier to apply! 

The acceptance rate being 84% makes me think that most admittees could be admitted using a less time-consuming application process. Maybe there could be some criteria that would allow someone to submit an abbreviated application if done by an early deadline, and receive either an admission or a request to submit the full application by the final deadline?

(posting for agree/disagree-voting purposes)

I was surprised to hear that the acceptance rate was 84%. Based on the way people talked about admissions decisions on-Forum, I had assumed it was materially lower than that.

The all-completers are very likely not representative of the larger group of voters, but it's still interesting to see the trends there. I find it curious that a number of orgs that received lots of positive votes (and/or ranked higher than I would have expected in the IRV finish) also received lots of last-place votes among all-voters.

PauseAI US isn't surprising to me given that the comments suggest a wide range of opinions on its work, from pivotal to net negative. There were fewer votes in 34th to 38th place, which is a difference from some other orgs that got multiple last-place votes.

I'm guessing people who put Arthropoda and SWP last don't think invertebrate welfare should be a cause area, and that people who voted AMF last are really worried about the meat-eater problem. It was notable and surprising to me that 16 of the 52 voters who voted 34+ orgs had AMF in 34th place or worse.

For Vida Plena, I speculate that some voters had a negative opinion on VP's group psychotherapy intervention based on the StrongMinds/HLI-related discussions about the effect size of group psychotherapy in 2022 & 2023, and this caused them to rank VP below orgs on which they felt they had no real information or opinion. I'm not aware of any criticism of VP as an org, at least on the Forum. There are a lot of 34th to 38th place votes for Vida Plena as well (of 52 who voted at least 34 orgs, 32 had VP in one of these slots).

I don't know enough about ARMoR or Whylome to even speculate.

Not really -- I think the creation-date rule mostly addresses a somewhat different concern, that of ringers (people who are not really part of the Forum community but join for the primary purpose of voting). This would be -- to use an analogy from where I grew up -- the rough equivalent of people who didn't go to a particular church showing up to play for that church's softball team (this happened, by the way). 

My concern here is more that get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts may make the population that voted significantly unrepresentative of the Forum population as a whole. In contrast to ringers, those voters are not illegitimate or shady. However, the results would be slanted in favor of the organizations and cause areas that spent energy on GOTV efforts. So in a sense, I worry that if I defer too much to the results, I am in a sense deferring to organizational decisions on whether to conduct GOTV efforts rather than a representative / unbiased read of the broader community's opinion.

Time for the strategic voting to begin!

One observation is that RP has a strategic advantage here as a cross-cause org where voters may be unsure which cause area the marginal funding will benefit. This makes it a potentially attractive second-choice option when the top votegetter in a cause area is eliminated. Compare, for instance, its current significant lead in the top-3 with the top-5 results (with AMF and PauseAI present as the last orgs standing in global health and x-risk).

Rules are rules and should be followed, but I think the top-5 better represents the will of the electorate than the top-3. (There are also a non-trivial number of voters who did not indicate a preference in the top-3 but who did in the top-5 or at least top-8.)

I don't think that is surprising where only one's first-place vote among non-eliminated orgs counts. The screenshots below suggest that when Arthropoda is eliminated, about half of its votes go to SWP, with most of the rest going to WAI and RP. From public information, we don't know where SWP votes would go if it were eliminated, but it's plausible that many would go to Arthropoda if it were still in the race.

Moreover, at the time of Arthropoda's elimination, it was behind SWP 46-31, so while there's evidence of a clear rank ordering preference among the electorate I would not call it overwhelming.

I have been doing that, but from a UI/UX perspective people need to first intuit that there is a race between the three listed and the ~2 next in line and then click 2-3 times in succession. I think top-three only was the correct default UI/UX early, but at this stage in the process the choice between those pairwise comparisons is pretty important.

It's hard for me to assess how successful the current mechanism is, but I noticed that ~20-25% of people with votes for orgs that made the top 8 do not have a vote listed when we get down to the top 3. There are various possible reasons for that, but it does raise the possibility that nudging people toward the outcome-determinative elements of the ranking process would be helpful in the final days.