Note: I was previously CEO of CEA, but stepped down from that role about 9 months ago.
I've long been confused about the reputation Leverage has in the EA community. After hearing lots of conflicting reports, both extremely positive and negative, I decided to investigate a little myself. As a result, I've had multiple conversations with Geoff, and attended a training weekend run by Paradigm. I can understand why many people get a poor impression, and question the validity of their early stage research. I think that in the past, Leverage has done a poor job...
I don't think that Leverage, Paradigm or related projects are good use of EA time or money
Found this surprising given the positive valence of the rest of the comment. Could you expand a little on why you don't think Leverage et al. are a good use of time/money?
I know it's outside the scope of this writeup, but just wanted to say that I found this really helpful, and I'm looking forward to seeing an evaluation of MIRIs other research.
I'd also be really excited to see more posts about which research pathways you think are most promising in general, and how you compare work on field building, strategy and policy approaches and technical research.
Another thing I should have mentioned - if you're in a similar position, and are not planning to donate within the next 3 months, but are very likely to do so in the future, you can indicate your support for the project by filling out our feedback form and telling us roughly how much you'd be interested in donating and how you would allocate your donation between the 4 funds. A couple of you have done so already. We plan to take these 'pledged donations' into account when reviewing whether to continue the project.
Thanks for raising this point. We intend to reassess at 3 months, as we think it is prudent to reassess early, rather than risk wasting a year of staff time. We should expect to have some evidence either way, even if it is not definitive, and hope to learn much more if we extend the trial.
We were also concerned that it might be difficult to raise sufficient funds to really test if this idea is worthwhile given that the vast majority of giving, even within the EA-sphere, occurs towards the end of the calendar year. One successful outcome for this project wo...
We plan to send quarterly updates to all EA Funds donors detailing the total size of the fund and details of any grants made in the period. We will also publish grant reports on the EA Funds website and will keep an updated grant history on the fund description page, much in the same manner as Open Phil. We plan to publish a more detailed review of the project in 3 months, at which time we will reassess, and possibly make significant changes to the current iteration of the funds.
While the EA Giving Group DAF (EAGG) will continue to run, we suspect that ma...
Hi AGB, you are correct on both counts - the linked budget is for CEA UK only, and the $3.1M figure is enough to allow us to end 2017 with at least 12 months of reserves.
The reason that we’re raising more than the total projected spend for 2017 is that we are hoping to build up our reserves to ensure we do not need to fundraise mid-year. We aim to maintain a minimum of 12 months of reserves, in line with recommended best practices for non-profits. Prior to the start of this fundraiser, we had planned let our reserves fall far below this limit towards the ...
Great post - identifying experts and, in particular, comparing expertise between similar candidates is exceptionally difficult, using even a rough model seems likely to greatly improve our ability to undertake this task.
While it seems possible to make some progress on the problem of independently assessing expertise, I want to stress that we should still expect to fail if we proceed to do so entirely independently, without consulting a domain expert - Great! - now we have a simpler problem - how do we identify the best domain expert who can help us build ...
I think their approach is highly speculative, even if you were to agree with their overall plan. I think Leverage has contributed to EA in the past, and I expect them to continue doing so, but this alone isn't enough to make them a better donation target than orgs like CEA or 80K.
I'm glad they exist, and hope they continue to exist, I just don't think Leverage or Paradigm are the most effective things I could be doing with my money or time. I feel similarly about CFAR. Supporting movement building and long-termism is already meta enough for me.
Interesting. I don't usually conflate "good use" with "most effective use."
Seems like "not a good use" means something like "this project shouldn't be associated with EA."
Whereas "not the most effective use" means something like "this project isn't my best-guess about how to do good, but it's okay to be associated with EA."
Perhaps this is just semantics, but I'm genuinely not sure which sense you intend.