Some clarifications on the Future Fund's approach to grantmaking

FWIW:

1) agree with everything Nick said
2) I am really proud of what the team has done on net, although obviously nothing's perfect!
3) We really do love feedback!  If you have some on a specific grant we made you can submit here, or feel free to separately ping me/Nick/etc. :)

Do you think it was a mistake to put "FTX" in the "FTX Future Fund" so prominently? My thinking is that you likely want the goodness of EA and philanthropy to make people feel more positively about FTX, which seems fine to me, but in doing so you also run a risk of if FTX has any big scandal or other issue it could cause blowback on EA, whether merited or not.

I understand the Future Fund has tried to distance itself from effective altruism somewhat, though I'm skeptical this has worked in practice.

To be clear, I do like FTX personally, am very grateful for what the FTX Future Fund does, and could see reasons why putting FTX in the name is also a positive.

Note that it may be hard to give criticism (even if anonymous) about FTX's grantmaking because a lot of FTX's grantmaking is (currently) not disclosed. This is definitely understandable and likely avoids certain important downsides, but it also does amplify other downsides (e.g., public misunderstanding of FTX's goals and outputs) - I'm not sure how to navigate that trade-off, but it is important to acknowledge that it exists!

Just a quick thank you to the FTX team for working so hard at such a difficult task!

Thanks for writing this up, Nick. It seems like a pretty good first step in communicating about what I imagine is a hugely complex project to deploy that much funding in a responsible manner. Something for FTX to consider within the context of community health and the responsibilities that you can choose to acknowledge as a major funding player: 

– How could a grant making process have significant effects on community health? What responsibilities would be virtuous for a major funding player to acknowledge and address? – 

I've picked up on lots of (concerning) widespread psychological fallout from people, especially project leaders, struggling to make sense of decision-making surrounding all this money pouring into EA (primarily from FTX). I wouldn't want to dichotomize this discussion by weighing it against the good that can be done with the increased funding, but there's value in offering constructive thoughts on how things could be done better.

What seems to have happened at FTX is some mixture of deputizing several individuals as funders + an application process (from what I've been hearing) that offers zero feedback. For those involved over there, is this roughly correct?

If indeed there are no other plans to handle the fundamentals of grantmaking beyond deployment of funds, fundamentals that I believe dramatically affect community health, unless I someone can persuade me otherwise, I'd predict a lot more disoriented and short-circuited (key) EAs, especially because many people on this community orient themselves in the world of legible and explicit.

In particular, people are having trouble getting a sense of how merit is supposed to work in this space. One of the core things I try to get them to consider, which is more pronounced perhaps now more than ever, is that merit is only one of many currencies upon which your social standing and evaluation of your project rests. This is hard for people to look at.

I hope FTX plans to take more responsibility for community health by following up with investment in legible M&E and application feedback. Echoing what I said a month ago about funders in general: https://bit.ly/3N1q3To

"Funders could do more to prioritize fostering relationships – greater familiarity with project leaders reduces inefficiencies of all sorts, including performative and preparation overhead, miscommunication, missed opportunities, etc.

In my opinion, this should also apply to unsuccessful projects. A common theme that I’ve seen from funders, partly due to bandwidth issues though not entirely, is aversion to giving constructive feedback to unsuccessful projects that nonetheless endure within the community. Given my firsthand experience with many clients who are fairly averse to interpersonal conflict, it wouldn’t surprise me if aversion to conflict + public relations considerations + legal issues (and other things) precluded funders from giving constructive feedback to failed applications. Funders would likely need to hold the belief that this feedback would meaningfully improve these projects prospects, and therefore the community overall, in order to put in the requisite effort to get through these blocks to this type of action. They’d also likely need to feel reassured that the feedback wouldn’t be excessively damaging reputationally (for both themselves and others), destabilize the community, or the integrity of community norms.

...

EA leaders are often at least partially in the dark regarding expectations from funders. This could be the case for many reasons, but a common reasons among leaders included the following:

• Reputational fears – Reticence to reach out due to some (un)justifiable fear of reputational harm

• Value system clash/lack of familiarity – not wanting to waste the time of funders, usually due to lack of familiarity and fears of how they would be received, but also sometimes a principled decision about not wanting to bother important decision-makers

• Not having considered reaching out to funders regarding expectations at a meaningful enough grain of detail

• (Likely not always misplaced) concerns about arbitrariness of the evaluation process

• Preparation overhead – not being ‘ready’ in various ways. In some cases, My outside view of the situation led me to believe that quite a bit of preparational overhead and perfunctory correspondence could be avoided if funders made it clearer that they care less about certain aspects of performative presentation "

My understanding is that people were mostly speculating on the EAF about the rejection rate and distribution of $ per grantee. What might have caused the propagation of "free-spending" EA stories:

• the selection bias at EAG(X) conferences where there was a high % of  grantees.
• the fact that FTX did not (afaik) release their rejection rate publicly
• other grants made by other orgs happening concurrently (eg. CEA)

I found this sentence in Will's recent post "For example, Future Fund is trying to scale up its giving rapidly, but in the recent open call it rejected over 95% of applications" useful to shed light on the rejection rate situation.

Since your take-away is about undercommunication, please consider the tremendous value you could create by revising the "no feedback on rejected proposals" approach.

Rational case: You clearly create a lot of useful insight on projects in the review process you described here, and are in a superb position to guide applicants to value creation. You may identify weaknesses, red flags, strengths, alternative opportunities which the applicant might not realise. With a relatively small investment on your side you could share constructive feedback with rejected people, in turn creating a lot of downstream value at a low actual cost. A case can be made it would be rational to hire an additional full-time person (doesn't have to be an EA superstar) whose only job is to extract constructive feedback from the insights generated throughout the process.

Human, community-building case: You did say no feedback will be given, so one doesn't expect one. Even so,  when one receives a response and finds that it really contains nothing they can use to improve or simply disagree with, it does very strongly, and unnecessarily, contribute to the feeling of resentment mentioned in Will MacAskill's recent post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cfdnJ3sDbCSkShiSZ/ea-and-the-current-funding-situation

I appreciate these clarifications! Thanks, Nick! 

Soliciting feedback on mistakes seems like a good idea. 

I would also be excited to see a progress update if that isn't super costly to produce. Though I might be more happy with granters prioritizing funding good projects over telling everybody what they're doing than the average EA forum reader.

Do you (FTX grantmakers) do or reference a BOTEC for each grant? Would you publish BOTECs you make or comments on the BOTECs you reference?

Without this, it seems like EAs would often need to guess and reconstruct your reasoning or make their own models in order to critique a grant, which is much more costly for individuals to do, is much less likely to happen at all, and risks strawmanning or low quality critiques. I think this also gets at the heart of two concerns with "free-spending" EA: we don't know what impact the EA community is buying with some of our spending, and we don't have clear arguments to point to to justify particular possibly suspicious expenses to others.

Thanks for writing this – really appreciate it 😀 

Thanks Nick, interesting thoughts, great to see this discussion, and appreciated. Is there a timeline for when the initial (21 March deadline) applications will all be decided? As you say, it takes as long as it takes, but has some implications for prioritising tasks (eg  deciding whether to commit to less impactful, less-scalable work being offered, and the opportunity costs of this). Is there a list of successful applications? 

As an applicant who was among those that were rejected, there are a couple of points that I wanted to add:

1. The fundamentals of this grant program are awesome - I can't stress this enough: a grant program  of this size that is low red tape, rewards ambition, tolerates failure, and gives a quick decision is amazing. As you're processing critical feedback, please don't lose sight of the fact that the fundamentals of this program are awesome.
2. One of biggest impacts of this program might be how it influences other grant makers - I totally understand that you want to have a large impact with the money you're giving out, but I think your biggest positive impact could end up coming from inspiring other large grant makers. So many grant programs put up huge barriers to the exact types of people that are most likely to have a large impact. In the same way you were inspired by Fast Grants, if this program inspires others to streamline their application processes that will be a huge win.
3. This was your first attempt at this - Your team is moving quickly with bold experiments. Of course there will be lessons learned and course corrections, but your ambition combined with your humble posture and request for feedback is commendable.
4.  Fairness and prudence are important, but so is emotional toll on the evaluators  - It would be a major disappointment if your processes, while fair and thorough, turned out to be stressful and miserable for those evaluating the applications. In order for these calls to be sustainable, it's important that those doing the work actually enjoy it instead of dreading it. It would be a shame if this wasn't repeated because of how stressful it was for your team. This program is important! And it's important to consider the human side of the process. In an ideal world this would be a fun process for both the applicants and the evaluators rather than a stressful one.

This was a really important experiment, and I hope it was rewarding for your team.

Thanks for this post. The additional details about FTX’s process, especially with regards to mitigating downside risks, is extremely reassuring to me.

Small thing: the form has a typo you might want to correct:
 

My two cents about why people may be concerned about the decision-making process without having concrete details:
For instance, the initially advertised decision timeline of 2 weeks. While I appreciate the fast pace and the benefits that come with it, a complex system of review and decision-making is almost impossible to achieve at that timeline, especially given the interest in the program. 

Moreover, that deadline was not met for all projects which is both good because clearly more time was needed and also bad because applicants' expectations were not met and they needed to potentially change their plans for the projects because of the dealy. Additionally, it signals FTX's poor understanding of either its capacity or the complexity of the grant-making process. Lack of either doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.

Team,

If this has been already answered, please let me know.  I am interested in connecting to understand the next generation of requests.  As I continue to read about the current process and some of the comments, I am leading to believe that if there is a next round, we would like to have some input from a wholesale strategic approach.  We found out about the FTX Fund after it closed and when I went to meet others in the segment that we work on what they submitted, everyone had about the same thing.... meaning that FTX Fund could be a coordinating agency to bring multiple people thinking the same thing together.  I can only assume you are doing this now, but we would love to participate in a more standardized approach.  How do we connect with you to about this and discuss further?