All of Rebecca Kagan's Comments + Replies

(I was previously a fund manager on the LTFF)

Agree with a lot of what Asya said here, and very appreciative of her taking the time to write it up. 

One complimentary point I want to emphasize: I think hiring a full-time chair is great, and that LTFF / EA Funds should in general be more willing to hire fund managers who have more time and less expertise. In my experience fund managers have very little time for the work (they’re both in part-time roles, and often extremely busy people), and little support (there’s relatively little training / infrastruct... (read more)

Hey Chana — good question! Answered above.

Who’s responsible if there’s a really big error? Good question -- it depends in part on the type of issue. 

• Project Leads: The project leads (e.g. Luke Freeman) continue to be responsible for running their projects (Giving What We Can). If there’s a programmatic, strategic, or tactical error within a specific project, that reflects on the project lead. They’re still the ones in charge of their projects; the Interim CEO appointments don’t change that. 
• Interim CEOs: The Interim CEOs are responsible for a different set of issues than projec

"the uncertainty of what the people would do" -->

Both groups were being funded for open-ended plans (in one case, a career transition, in the other "exploring EA field-building"), rather than a specific venture, hence the uncertainty.

"If you don't want someone to do something" -->

This isn't the case -- if the funders hadn't wanted the recipients to move forward, they wouldn't have given funding. In that case, the funder offered to support a different plan than the one that was originally pitched, namely instead of a venture, a career transition.

Hey Michael! I don’t know if more money would have changed their decisions, but I want to clarify that the funding panel wasn’t funding constrained (we actually had more than $300k set aside for this), and funders didn’t make the decision with that as a limitation.

The cases aren’t actually that similar — in one, the funding panel gave a low amount to discourage the individual from pursuing the idea and support a career transition, in the other they gave the individuals more than requested — but in both cases the uncertainty of what the people would do was the key cause in giving a relatively small amount of money, not being funding constrained.