Long-Term Future Fund: Ask Us Anything!

The LTFF is happy to renew grants so long as the applicant has been making strong progress and we believe working independently continues to be the best option for them. Examples of renewals in this round include Robert Miles, who we first funded in April 2019, and Joe Collman, who we funded in November 2019. In particular, we'd be happy to be the #1 funding source of a new EA org for several years (subject to the budget constraints Oliver mentions in his reply).

Many of the grants we make to individuals are for career transitions, such as someone retraining from one research field to another, or for one-off projects. So I would expect most grants to not be renewals. That said, the bar for renewals does tend to be higher. This is because we pursue a hits-based giving approach, so are willing to fund projects that are likely not to work out -- but of course will not want to renew the grant if it is clearly not working.

I think being a risk-tolerant funder is particularly valuable since most employers are, quite rightly, risk-averse. Firing people tends to be harmful to morale; internships or probation periods can help, but take a lot of supervisory time. This means people who might be a great hire but are high-variance often don't get hired. Funding them for a period of time to do independent work can derisk the grantee, since they'll have a more substantial portfolio to show.

The level of excitement about long-term independent work varies between fund managers. I tend to think it's hard for people to do great work independently. I'm still open to funding it, but I want to see a compelling case that there's not an organisation that would be a good home for the applicant. Some other fund managers are more concerned by perverse incentives in established organisations (especially academia), so are more willing to fund independent research.

I'd be interested to hear thoughts on how we could better support our grantees here. We do sometimes forward applications on to other funders (with the applicants permission), but don't have any systematic program to secure further funding (beyond applying for renewals). We could try something like "demo days" popular in the VC world, but I'm not sure there's a large enough ecosystem of potential funders for this to be worth it.

Yeah, I am also pretty worried about this. I don't think we've figured out a great solution to this yet. 

I think we don't really have sufficient capacity to evaluate organizations on an ongoing basis and provide good accountability. Like, if a new organization were to be funded by us and then grow to a budget of $1M a year, I don't feel like we have the capacity to evaluate their output and impact sufficiently well to justify giving them $1M each year (or even just $500k). 

Our current evaluation process routes feels pretty good for smaller projects, and granting to established organizations that have other active evaluators looking into them that we can talk to, but doesn't feel very well-suited to larger organizations that don't have existing evaluations done on them (there is a lot of due diligence work to be done on that I think requires higher staff capacity than we have). 

I also think the general process of the LTFF specializing into more something like venture funding, with other funders stepping in for more established organizations feels pretty good to me. I do think the current process has a lot of unnecessary uncertainty and risk in it, and I would like to work on that. So one thing I've been trying to get better at is predicting which projects could get long-term funding from other funders, and to try to help projects get to a place where they can receive long-term funding from more than just the LTFF.

Capital wise, I also think that we don't really have the funding to support organizations over longer periods of time. I.e. supporting 3 organizations at $500k a year would take up almost all of our budget, and I think it's not worth trading that off against the other smaller grants we've historically been making. But it is one of the most promising ways I would want to use additional funds we could get.

Just to add a comment with regards to sustainable funding for independent researchers. There haven't previously been many options available for this, however, there are a growing number of virtual research institutes through which affiliated researchers can apply to academic funding agencies. The virtual institute can then administer the grant for a researcher (usually for much lower overheads than a traditional institution), while they effectively still do independent work. The Ronin Institute administers funding from US granters, and I am a Board member at IGDORE which can receive funding from some European granters. That said, it may still be quite difficult for individuals to secure academic funding without having some traditional academic credentials (PhD, publications, etc.). 

Regardless of whatever happens, I've benefited greatly from all the effort you've put in your public writing on the fund Oliver. 

$1B is a lot. It also gets really hard if I don't get to distribute it to other grantmakers. Here are some really random guesses. Please don't hold me to this, I have thought about this topic some, but not under these specific constraints, so some of my ideas will probably be dumb.

My guess is I would identify the top 20 people who seem to be doing the best work around long-term-future stuff, and give each of at least $10M, which would allow each of them to reliably build an exoskeleton around them and increase their output. 

My guess is that I would then invest a good chunk more into scaling up LessWrong and the EA Forum, and make it so that I could distribute funds to researchers working primarily on those forums (while building a system for peer evaluation to keep researchers accountable). My guess is this could consume another $100M over the next 10 years or so. 

I expect it would take me at least a decade to distribute that much money. I would definitely continue taking in applications for organizations and projects from people and kind of just straightforwardly scale up LTFF spending of the same type, which I think could take another $40M over the next decade.

I think I would spend a substantial amount of money on prizes for people who seem to have done obviously really good things for the world. Giving $10M to scihub seems worth it. Maybe giving $5M to Daniel Ellsberg as a prize for his lifetime achievements. There are probably more people in this reference class of people who seem to me to have done heroic things, but haven't even been remotely well enough rewarded (like, it seems obvious that I would have wanted Einstein to die having at least a few millions in the bank, so righting wrongs of that reference class seems valuable, though Einstein did at least get a Nobel prize). My guess is one could spend another $100M this way.

It seems pretty plausible that one should consider buying a large newspaper with that money and optimizing it for actual careful analysis without the need for ads. This seems pretty hard though, but also, I really don't like the modern news landscape, and it doesn't take that much money to even run a large newspaper like the Washington Post, so I think this is pretty doable. But I do think it has the potential to take a good chunk of the $1B, so I am pretty unsure whether I would do it, even if you were to force me to make a call right now (for reference, the Washington Post was acquired for $250M).

I would of course just pay my fair share of all the existing good organizations that exist and currently get funded by Open Phil. My guess is that would take about $100M over the next decade.

I would probably keep a substantial chunk in reserve for worlds where some kind of quick pivotal action is needed that requires a lot of funds. Like, I don't know, a bunch of people pooling money for a list minute acquisition of Deepmind or something to prevent an acute AI risk threat.

If I had the money right now I would probably pay someone to run a $100K-$1M study of the effects of Vitamin D on COVID. It's really embarrassing that we don't have more data on that yet, even though it has such a large effect.

Maybe I would try to do something crazy like try to get permission to establish a new city in some U.S. state that I would try to make into a semi-libertarian utopia and get all the good people to move there? But like, that sure doesn't seem like it would straightforwardly work out. Also, seems like it would cost substantially more money than $1B.

The cop-out answer of course is to say we'd grow the fund team or, if that isn't an option, we'd all start working full-time on the LTFF and spend a lot more time thinking about it.

If there's some eccentric billionaire who will only give away their money right now to whatever I personally recommend, then off the top of my head:

1. For any long-termist org who (a) I'd usually want to fund at a small scale; and (b) whose leadership's judgement I'd trust, I'd give them as much money as they can plausibly make use of in the next 10 years. I expect that even organisations that are not usually considered funding constrained could probably produce 10-20% extra impact if they invested twice as much in their staff (let them rent really close to the office, pay for PAs or other assistants to save time, etc).

   I also think there can be value in having an endowment: it lets the organisation make longer-term plans, can raise the organisation's prestige, and some things (like creating a professorship) often require endowments.

   However, I do think there are some cases it can be negative: some organisations benefit a lot from the accountability of donors, and being too well-funded can attract the wrong people, like with the resource curse. So I'd be selective here, but more in terms of "do I trust the board and leadership to a blank cheque" than "at a detailed level, do I think this org is doing the most valuable work?"

2. I'd also be tempted to throw a lot of money at interventions that seem shovel-ready and robustly positive, even if they wouldn't normally be something I'd be excited about. For example, I'd feel reasonably good about funding the CES for $10-20m, and probably similar sized grants to Nuclear Threat Initiative, etc.

3. This is more speculative, but I'd be tempted to try and become the go-to angel investor or VC fund for AI startups. I think I'm in a reasonably good position for this now, being an AI researcher and also having a finance background, and having a billion dollars would help out here.

   The goal wouldn't be to make money (which is good since most VC's don't seem to do that well!) But being an early investor gives a lot of leverage over a company's direction. Industry is a huge player in fundamental AI research, and in particular I would 85% predict the first transformative AI is developed by an industry lab, not academia. Having a board seat and early insight into a start-up that is about to develop the first transformative AI seems hugely valuable. Of course, there's no guarantee I'd manage this -- perhaps I miss that startup, or a national lab or pre-existing industrial lab (Google/Facebook/Huawei/etc) develops the technologies first. But start-ups are responsible for a big fraction of disruptive technology, so it's a reasonable bet.

As part of CEA's due diligence process, all grantees must submit progress reports documenting how they've spent their money. If a grantee applies for renewal, we'll perform a detailed evaluation of their past work. Additionally, we informally look back at past grants, focusing on grants that were controversial at the time, or seem to have been particularly good or bad.

I’d like us to be more systematic in our grant evaluation, and this is something we're discussing. One problem is that many of the grants we make are quite small: so it just isn't cost-effective for us to evaluate all our grants in detail. Because of this, any more detailed evaluation we perform would have to be on a subset of grants.

I view there being two main benefits of evaluation: 1) improving future grant decisions; 2) holding the fund accountable. Point 1) would suggest choosing grants we expect to be particularly informative: for example, those where fund managers disagreed internally, or those which we were particularly excited about and would like to replicate. Point 2) would suggest focusing on grants that were controversial amongst donors, or where there were potential conflicts of interest.

It's important to note that other things help with these points, too. For 1) improving our grant making process, we are working on sharing best-practices between the different EA Funds. For 2) we are seeking to increase transparency about our internal processes, such as in this doc (which we will soon add as an FAQ entry). Since evaluation is time consuming in the short-term we are likely to only evaluate a small percentage of our grants, though we may scale this up as fund capacity grows.

Speaking just for myself on why I tend to prefer the smaller individual grants: 

Currently when I look at the funding landscape, it seems that without the LTFF there would be a pretty big hole in available funding for projects to get off the ground and for individuals to explore interesting new projects or enter new domains. Open Phil very rarely makes grants smaller than ~$300k, and even many donors don't really like giving to individuals and early-stage organizations because they often lack established charity status, which makes their donations non-tax-deductable. 

CEA has set up infrastructure to allow tax-deductible grants to individuals and organizations without charity status, and the fund itself seems well-suited to evaluate organizations by individuals, since we all have pretty wide networks and can pretty quickly gather good references on individuals that are working on projects that don't yet have an established track record. 

I think in a world without Open Phil or the Survival and Flourishing Fund, much more of our funding would go to established organizations. 

Separately, I also think that I personally view a lot of the intellectual work to be done on the Long Term Future to be quite compatible with independent researchers asking for grants for just them, or maybe small teams around them. This feels kind of similar to how academic funding is often distributed, and I think makes sense for domains where a lot of people should explore a lot of different directions and we have set up infrastructure so that researchers and distillers can make contributions without necessarily needing a whole organization around them (which I think the EA Forum enables pretty well). 

In addition to both of those points, I also think evaluating organizations requires a somewhat different skillset than evaluating individuals and small team projects, and we are currently better at the second than the first (though I think we would reskill if we thought it was more likely that more organizational grants would become more important again). 

I largely agree with Habryka's comments above.

In terms of the contrast with the AWF in particular, I think the funding opportunities in the long-termist vs animal welfare spaces look quite different. One big difference is that interest in long-termist causes has exploded in the last decade. As a result, there's a lot of talent interested in the area, but there's limited organisational and mentorship capacity to absorb this talent. By contrast, the animal welfare space is more mature, so there's less need to strike out in an independent direction. While I'm not sure on this, there might also be a cultural factor -- if you're trying to perform advocacy, it seems useful to have an organisation brand behind you (even if it's just a one-person org). This seems much less important if you want to do research.

Tangentially, I see a lot of people debating whether EA is talent constrained, funding constrained, vetting constrained, etc. My view is that for most orgs, at least in the AI safety space, they can only grow by a relatively small (10-30%) rate per year while still providing adequate mentorship. This is talent constrained in the sense that having a larger applicant pool will help the orgs select even better people. But adding more talent won't necessarily increase the number of hires.

While 10-30% is a relatively small growth rate, if it is sustained then I expect it to eventually outstrip growth in the longtermist talent pipeline: my median guess would be sometime in the next 3-7 years. I see the LTFF's grants to individuals in part trying to bridge the gap while orgs scale up, giving talented people space to continue to develop, and perhaps even found an org. So I'd expect our proportion of individual grants to decline eventually. This is a personal take, though, and I think others on the fund are more excited about independent research on a more long-term basis.

I agree with Habryka and Adam.

Regarding the LTFF (Long-Term Future Fund) / AWF (Animal Welfare Fund) comparison in particular, I'd add the following:

• The global longtermist community is much smaller than the global animal rights community, which means that the animal welfare space has a lot more existing organizations and people trying to start organizations that can be funded.
• Longtermist cause areas typically involve a lot more research, which often implies funding individual researchers, whereas animal welfare work is typically more implementation-oriented.

(I’m not a Fund manager, but I’ve previously served as an advisor to the fund and now run EA Funds, which involves advising EA Funds.)

In addition to what Adam mentions, two further points come to mind:

1. I personally think some of the April 2019 grants weren’t good, and I thought that some (but not all) of the critiques the LTFF received from the community were correct. (I can’t get more specific here – I don’t want to make negative public statements about specific grants, as this might have negative consequences for grant recipients.) The LTFF has since implemented many improvements that I think will prevent such mistakes from occurring again.

2. I think we could have communicated better around conflicts of interest. I know of some 2019 grants donors perceived to be subject to a conflict of interest, but there actually wasn’t a conflict of interest, or it was dealt with appropriately. (I also can recall one case where I think a conflict of interest may not have been dealt with well, but our improved policies and practices will prevent a similar potential issue from occurring again.) I think we’re now dealing appropriately with COIs (not in the sense that we refrain from any grants with a potential COI, but that we have appropriate safeguards in place that prevent the COI from impairing the decision). I would like to publish an updated policy once I get to it.

Historically I think the LTFF's biggest issue has been insufficiently clear messaging, especially for new donors. For example, we received feedback from numerous donors in our recent survey that they were disappointed we weren't funding interventions on climate change. We've received similar feedback from donors surprised by the number of AI-related grants we make. Regardless of whether or not the fund should change the balance of cause areas we fund, it's important that donors have clear expectations regarding how their money will be used.

We've edited the fund page to make our focus areas more explicit, and EA Funds also added Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund for donors who want to focus on that area (and Jonas emailed donors who made this complaint, encouraging to switch their donations to the climate change fund). I hope this will help clarify things, but we'll have to be attentive to donor feedback both via things like this AMA and our donor survey, so that we can proactively correct any misconceptions.

Another issue I think we have is that we currently lack the capacity to be more proactively engaged with our grantees. I'd like us to do this for around 10% of our grant applications, particularly those where we are a large proportion of an organisation's budget. In these cases it's particularly important that we hold the organisation accountable, and provide strategic advice. In around a third of these cases, we've chosen not to make the grant because we feel unexcited about the organisation's current direction, even though we think it could be a good donation opportunity for a more proactive philanthropist. We're looking to grow our capacity, so we can hopefully pursue more active philanthropy in the future.

This is an important question. It seems like there's an implicit assumption here that highest impact path for the fund to take is to make grants which the inside view of the fund managers think is highest impact, regardless of if we can explain the grant. This is a reasonable position -- and thank you for your confidence! -- however I think the fund being legible does have some significant advantages:

1. Accountability generally seems to improve organisations functioning. It'd be surprising if the LTFF was a complete exception to this, and legibility seems necessary for accountability.
2. There's asymmetric information between us and donors, so less legibility will tend to mean less donations (and I think this is reasonable). So, there's a tradeoff between greater counterfactual impact from scale, v.s. greater impact per $ moved.
3. There's may be community building value in having a fund that is attractive to people without deep context or trust in the fund managers.

I'm not sure what the right balance of legibility vs inside view is for the LTFF. One possibility would be to split into a more inside view / trust-based fund, and a more legible and "safer" fund. Then donors can choose what kind of worldview they want to buy into.

That said, personally I don't feel like I make any significantly different votes for LTFF money v.s. my own donations. The main difference would be that I am much more cautious about conflicts of interest with LTFF money than my personal money, but I don't think I'd want to change that. However, I do think I tend to have a more conservative taste in grants than some others in the long-termist community.

One thing to flag is that we do occasionally (with applicant's permission) make recommendations to private donors rather than providing funding directly from the LTFF. This is often for logistical reasons, if something is tricky for CEA to fund, but it's also an option if a grant requires a lot of context to understand (which we can provide to an individual highly engaged donor, but not in a brief public write-up). I think this further decreases the number of grant decisions that are influenced by any legibility considerations.

I do indeed think there has been a pressure towards lower risk grants, am not very happy about it, and think it reduced the expected value of the fund by a lot. I am reasonably optimistic about that changing again in the future, but it's one of the reasons why I've become somewhat less engaged with the fund. In particular Alex Zhu leaving the fund was I think a really great loss on this dimension.

I think you, Adam, and Oli covered a lot of the relevant points.

I'd add that the LTFF's decision-making is based on the average score vote from the different fund managers, which would allow for grants to go through in scenarios where one person is very excited, and others aren't very unexcited or against the grant. I.e., the mechanism allows an excited minority to make a grant that wouldn't be approved by the majority of the committee.  Overall, the mechanism strikes me as near-optimal. (Perhaps we should lower the threshold for making grants a bit further.)

I do think the LTFF might be slightly too risk-averse, and splitting the LTFF into a "legible longtermist fund" and a "judgment-driven longtermist fund" to remove pressure from donors towards the legible version seems a good idea and is tentatively on the roadmap.

Really good question! 

We currently have ~$315K in the fund balance.* My personal median guess is that we could use $2M over the next year while maintaining this year's bar for funding. This would be:

• $1.7M more than our current balance
• $500K more per year than we’ve spent in previous years
• $800K more than the total amount of donations received in 2020 so far
• $400K more than a naive guess for what the total amount of donations received will be in all of 2020. (That is, if we wanted a year of donations to pay for a year of funding, we would need  $400K more in donations next year than what we got this year.)

Reasoning below:

Generally, we fund anything above a certain bar, without accounting explicitly for the amount of money we have. According to this policy, for the last two years, the fund has given out ~$1.5M per year, or ~$500K per grant round, and has not accumulated a significant buffer. 

This round had an unusually large number of high-quality applicants. We spent $500K, but we pushed two large grant decisions to our next payout round, and several of our applicants happened to receive money from another source just before we communicated our funding decision. This makes me think that if this increase in high-quality applicants persists, it would be reasonable to have $600K - $700K per grant round, for a total of ~$2M over the next year.

My personal guess is that the increase in high-quality applications will persist, and I’m somewhat hopeful that we will get even more high-quality applications, via a combination of outreach and potentially some active grantmaking.  This makes me think that $2M over the next year would be reasonable for not going below the ROI on the last marginal dollar of the grants we made this year, though I’m not certain. (Of the two other fund managers who have made quantitative guesses on this so far, one fund manager also had $2M as their median guess, while another thought slightly above $1.5M was more likely.)

I also think there’s a reasonable case for having slightly more than our median guess available in the fund. This would both act as a buffer in case we end up with more grants above our current bar than expected, and would let us proactively encourage potential grantees to apply for funding without being worried that we’ll run out of money.

If we got much more money than applications that meet our current bar, we would let donors know. I think we would also consider lowering our bar for funding, though this would only happen after checking in with the largest donors.

* This is less than the amount displayed in our fund page, which is still being updated with our latest payouts.

As mentioned in the original post, I’m not a Fund manager, but I sometimes advise the LTFF as part of my role as Head of EA Funds, and I’ve also been thinking about the longer-term strategy for EA Funds as a whole.

Some thoughts on this question:

• LTFF strategy: There is no official 3-10 year vision or strategy for the LTFF yet, but I hope we will get there sometime soon. My own best guess for the LTFF’s vision (which I haven’t yet discussed with the LTFF) is: ‘Thoughtful people have the resources they need to successfully implement highly impactful projects to improve the long-term future.’ My best guess for the LTFF’s mission/strategy is ‘make judgment-driven grants to individuals and small organizations and proactively seed new longtermist projects.’ A plausible goal could be to allocate $15 million per year to effective longtermist projects by 2025 (where ‘effective’ means something like ‘significantly better than Open Phil’s last dollar, similar to the current quality of grants’).
• Grantmaking capacity: To get there, we need 1) more grantmaking capacity (especially for active grantmaking), 2) more ideas that would be impactful if implemented well, and 3) more people capable of implementing these ideas. EA Funds can primarily improve the first factor, and I think this is the main limiting factor right now (though this could change within a few months). I am currently implementing the first iteration of a fund manager appointment process, where we invite potential grantmakers to apply as Fund managers, and are also considering hiring a full-time grantmaking grant specialist. Hopefully, this will allow the LTFF to increase the number of grants it can evaluate, and its active grantmaking capacity in particular.
• Types of grants: Areas in which I expect the LTFF to be able to substantially expand its current grantmaking include academic teaching buy-outs, scholarships and top-up funding for poorly paid academics, research assistants for academics, and proactively seeding new longtermist organizations and research projects (active grantmaking).
• Structural changes: I think having multiple fund managers on a committee rather than a single decision-maker leads to improved diversity of networks and opinions, and increased robustness in decision-making. Increasing the number of committee members on a single committee leads to disproportionately larger coordination overhead, so the way to scale this might be to create multiple committees. I also think a committee model would benefit from having one or more full-time staff who can dedicate their full attention to EA Funds or the LTFF and collaborate with a committee of part-time/volunteer grantmakers, so I may want to look into hiring for such positions.
• Legible longtermist fund: Donating to the LTFF currently requires a lot of trust in the Fund managers because many of the grants are speculative and hard to understand for people less involved in EA. While I think the current LTFF grants are plausibly the most effective use of longtermist funding, there is significant donor demand for a more legible longtermist donation option (i.e., one that isn’t subject to massive information asymmetry and thus doesn’t rely on trust as much). This may speak in favor of setting up a second, more ‘mainstream’ long-term future fund. That fund might give to most longtermist institutes and would have a lot of fungibility with Open Phil’s funding, but seems likely a better way to introduce interested donors to longtermism.
• Perhaps EA Funds shouldn’t focus on grantmaking as much: At a higher level, I’m not sure whether EA Funds’ strategy should be to build a grantmaking organization, or to become the #1 website on the internet for giving effectively, or something else. Regarding the LTFF and longtermism in particular, Open Phil has expanded its activities, Survival And Flourishing (SAF) has launched, and other donors and grantmakers (such as Longview Philanthropy) continue to be active in the area to some degree, which means that effective projects may get funded even if the LTFF doesn’t expand its grantmaking. It’s pretty plausible to me that EA Funds should pursue a strategy that’s less focused on grantmaking than what I wrote in the above paragraphs, which would mean that I might not dedicate as much attention to expanding the LTFF in the ways suggested above. I’m still thinking about this; the decision will likely depend on external feedback and experiments (e.g., how quickly we can make successful active grants).

If anyone has any feedback, thoughts, or questions about the above, I’d be interested in hearing from you (here or via PM).

I’d overall like to see more work that has a solid longtermist justification but isn't as close to existing longtermist work. It seems like the LTFF might be well-placed to encourage this, since we provide funding outside of established orgs. This round, we received many applications from people who weren’t very engaged with the existing longtermist community. While these didn’t end up meeting our bar, some of the projects were fairly novel and good enough to make me excited about funding people like this in general.

There are also lots of particular less-established directions where I’d personally be interested in seeing more work, e.g.:

• Work on structured transparency tools for detecting risks from rogue actors
• Work on information security’s effect on AI development
• Work on the offense - defense balance in a world with many advanced AI systems
• Work on the likelihood and moral value of extraterrestrial life
• Work on increasing institutional competence, particularly around existential risk mitigation
• Work on effectively spreading longtermist values outside of traditional movement-building

These are largely a reflection of what I happen to have been thinking about recently and definitely not my fully-endorsed answer to this question-- I’d like to spend time talking to others and coming to more stable conclusions about specific work the LTFF should encourage more of.

These are very much a personal take, I'm not sure if others on the fund would agree.

1. Buying extra time for people already doing great work. A lot of high-impact careers pay pretty badly: many academic roles (especially outside the US), some non-profit and think-tank work, etc. There's certainly diminishing returns to money, and I don't want the long-termist community to engage in zero-sum consumption of Veblen goods. But there's also plenty of things that are solid investments in your productivity, like having a comfortable home office, a modern computer, ordering takeaway or having cleaners, enough runway to not have financial insecurity, etc.

   Financial needs also vary a fair bit from person to person. I know some people who are productive and happy living off Soylent and working on a laptop on their bed, whereas I'd quickly burn out doing that. Others might have higher needs than me, e.g. if they have financial dependents.

   As a general rule, if I'd be happy to fund someone for $Y/year if they were doing this work by themselves, and they're getting paid $X/year by their employer to do this work, I think I should be happy to pay the difference $(Y-X)/year provided the applicant has a good plan for what to do with the money. If you think you might benefit from more money, I'd encourage you to apply. Even if you don't think you'll get it: a lot of people underestimate how much their time is worth.

2. Biosecurity. At the margins I'm about equally excited by biosecurity as I am about mitigating AI risks, largely because biosecurity currently seems much more neglected from a long-termist perspective. Yet the fund makes many more grants in the AI risk space.

   We have received a reasonable number of biosecurity applications in recent rounds (though we still receive substantially more for AI), but our acceptance rate has been relatively low. I'd be particularly excited about seeing applications with a relatively clear path to impact. Many of our applications have been for generally trying to raise awareness, and I think getting the details right is really crucial here: targeting the right community, having enough context and experience to understand what that community would benefit from hearing, etc.

At least for me the answer is yes, I think the arguments for the hinge of history are pretty compelling, and I have not seen any compelling counterarguments. I think the comments on Will's post (which is the only post I know arguing against the hinge of history hypothesis) are basically correct and remove almost all basis I can see for Will's arguments. See also Buck's post on the same topic.

I think this century is likely to be extremely influential, but there's likely important direct work to do at many parts of this century.  Both patient philanthropy projects we funded have relevance to that timescale-- I'd like to know about how best to allocate longtermist resources between direct work, investment, and movement-building over the coming years, and I'm interested in how philanthropic institutions might change.

I also think it's worth spending some resources thinking about scenarios where this century isn't extremely influential.

Whether we are at the "hinge of history" is a gradual question; different moments in history have different degrees of influentialness. I personally think the current moment is likely very influential, such that I want to spend a significant fraction of the resources we have now, and I think on the current margin we should probably be spending more. I think this could change over the coming years, though.

Of course there's lots of things we would not want to (or cannot) fund, so I'll focus on things which I would not want to fund, but which someone reading this might have been interested in supporting or applying for.

1. Organisations or individuals seeking influence, unless they have a clear plan for how to use that influence to improve the long-term future, or I have an exceptionally high level of trust in them

   This comes up surprisingly often. A lot of think-tanks and academic centers fall into this trap by default. A major way in which non-profits sustain themselves is by dealing in prestige: universities selling naming rights being a canonical example. It's also pretty easy to justify to oneself: of course you have to make this one sacrifice of your principles, so you can do more good later, etc.

   I'm torn on this because gaining leverage can be a good strategy, and indeed it seems hard to see how we'll solve some major problems without individuals or organisations pursuing this. So I wouldn't necessarily discourage people from pursuing this path, though you might want to think hard about whether you'll be able to avoid value drift. But there's a big information asymmetry as a donor: if someone is seeking support for something that isn't directly useful now, with the promise of doing something useful later, it's hard to know if they'll follow through on that.

2. Movement building that increases quantity but reduces quality or diversity. The initial composition of a community has a big effect on its long-term composition: people tend to recruit people like themselves. The long-termist community is still relatively small, so we can have a substantial effect on the current (and therefore long-term) composition now.

   So when I look for whether to fund a movement building intervention, I don't just ask if it'll attract enough good people to be worth the cost, but also whether the intervention is sufficiently targeted. This is a bit counterintuitive, and certainly in the past (e.g. when I was running student groups) I tended to assume that bigger was always better.

   That said, the details really matter here. For example, AI risk is already in the public conscience, but most people have only been exposed to terrible low-quality articles about it. So I like Robert Miles YouTube channel since it's a vastly better explanation of AI risk than most people will have come across. I still think most of the value will come from a small percentage of people who seriously engage with it, but I expect it to be positive or at least neutral for the vast majority of viewers.

Like Adam, I’ll focus on things that someone reading this might be interested in supporting or applying for. I want to emphasize that this is my personal take, not representing the whole fund, and I would be sad if this response stopped anyone from applying -- there’s a lot of healthy disagreement within the fund, and we fund lots of things where at least one person thinks it’s below our bar. I also think a well-justified application could definitely change my mind.

1. Improving science or technology, unless there’s a strong case that the improvement would differentially benefit existential risk mitigation (or some other aspect of our long-term trajectory). As Ben Todd explains here, I think this is unlikely to be as highly-leveraged for improving the long-term future as trajectory changing efforts. I don’t think there’s a strong case that generally speeding up economic growth is an effective existential risk intervention.
2. Climate change mitigation. From the evidence I’ve seen, I think climate change is unlikely to be either directly existentially threatening or a particularly highly-leveraged existential risk factor. (It’s also not very neglected.) But I could be excited about funding research work that changed my mind about this.
3. Most self-improvement / community-member-improvement type work, e.g. “I want to create materials to help longtermists think better about their personal problems.” I’m not universally unexcited about funding this, and there are people who I think do good work like this, but my overall prior is that proposals here won’t be very good.
   
   I am also unexcited about the things Adam wrote.

(I drafted this comment earlier and feel like it's largely redundant by now, but I thought I might as well post it.)

I agree with what Adam and Asya said. I think many of those points can be summarized as ‘there isn’t a compelling theory of change for this project to result in improvements in the long-term future.’ 

Many applicants have great credentials, impressive connections, and a track record of getting things done, but their ideas and plans seem optimized for some goal other than improving the long-term future, and it would be a suspicious convergence if they were excellent for the long-term future as well. (If grantseekers don’t try to make the case for this in their application, I try to find out myself if this is the case, and the answer is usually ‘no.’) 

We’ve received applications from policy projects, experienced professionals, and professors (including one with tens of thousands of citations), but ended up declining largely for this reason. It’s worth noting that these applications aren’t bad – often, they’re excellent – but they’re only tangentially related to what the LTFF is trying to achieve.

A related question: are there categories of things you'd be excited to fund, but haven't received any applications for so far?

I've already covered in this answer areas where we don't make many grants but I would be excited about us making more grants. So in this answer I'll focus on areas where we already commonly make grants, but would still like to scale this up further.

I'm generally excited to fund researchers when they have a good track record, are focusing on important problems and when the research problem is likely to slip through the cracks of other funders or research groups. For example, distillation style research, or work that is speculative or doesn't neatly fit into an existing discipline.

Another category which is a bit harder to define are grants where we have a comparative advantage at evaluating. This could be that one of the fund managers happens to already be an expert in the area and has a lot of context. Or maybe the application is time-sensitive and we're just about to start evaluating a grant round. In these cases the counterfactual impact is higher: these grants are less likely to be made by other donors.

The LTFF chooses grants to make from our open application rounds. Because of this, our grant composition depends a lot on the composition of applications we receive. Although we may of course apply a different bar to applications in different areas, the proportion of grants we make certainly doesn't represent what we think is the ideal split of total EA funding between cause-areas.

In particular, I tend to see more variance in our scores between applications in the same cause-area than I do between cause-areas. This is likely because most of our applications are for speculative or early-stage projects. Given this, if you're reading this and are interested in applying to the LTFF but haven't seen us fund projects in your area before -- don't let that put you off. We're open to funding things in a very broad range of areas provided there's a compelling long-termist case.

Because cause prioritization isn't actually that decision relevant for most of our applications, I haven't thought especially deeply about it. In general, I'd say the fund is comparably excited about marginal work in reducing long-term risks from AI, biosafety, and general longtermist macrostrategy and capacity building. I don't currently see promising interventions in climate change, which already attracts significant funding from other sources, although we'd be open to funding something that seemed neglected, especially if it focused on mitigating or predicting extreme risks.

One area where there's active debate is the degree to which we should support general governance improvements. For example, we made a $50,000 grant to the Center for Election Science (CES) in our September 2020 round. CES has significantly more room for funding, so the main thing holding us back was uncertainty regarding the long-termist case for impact compared to more targeted interventions.

Filtering for obvious misfits, I think the majority reason is that I don't think the project proposal will be sufficiently valuable for the long-term future, even if executed well. The minority reason is that there isn't strong enough evidence that the project will be executed well.

Sorry if this is an unsatisfying answer-- I think our applications are different enough that it’s hard to think of common reasons for rejection that are more granular. Also, often the bottom line is "this seems like it could be good, but isn't as good as other things we want to fund". Here are some more concrete kinds of reasons that I think have come up at least more than once:

• Project seems good for the medium-term future, but not for the long-term future
• Applicant wants to learn the answer to X, but X doesn't seem like an important question to me
• Applicant wants to learn about X via doing Y, but I think Y is not a promising approach for learning about X
• Applicant proposes a solution to some problem, but I think the real bottleneck in the problem lies elsewhere
• Applicant wants to write something for a particular audience, but I don’t think that writing will be received well by that audience
• Project would be good if executed exceptionally well, but applicant doesn't have a track record in this area, and there are no references that I trust to be calibrated to vouch for their ability
• Applicant wants to do research on some topic, but their previous research on similar topics doesn't seem very good
• Applicant wants money to do movement-building, but several people have reported negative interactions with them

Most common is definitely that something doesn't really seem very relevant to the long-term future (concrete example: "Please fund this local charity that helps people recycle more"). This is probably driven by people applying with the same project to lots of different grant opportunities, at least that's how the applications often read. 

I would have to think a bit more about patterns that apply to the applications that pass the initial filter (i.e. are promising enough to be worth a deeper investigation).

Yes, I think we're definitely limited by our application pool, and it's something I'd like to change.

I'm pretty excited about the possibility of getting more applications. We've started advertising the fund more, and in the latest round we got the highest number of applications we rated as good (score >= 2.0, where 2.5 is the funding threshold). This is about 20-50% more than the long-term trend, though it's a bit hard to interpret (our scores are not directly comparable across time). Unfortunately the percentage of good applications also dropped this round, so we do need to avoid too indiscriminate outreach to avoid too high a review burden.

I'm most excited about more active grant-making. For example, we could post proposals we'd like to see people work on, or reach out to people in particular areas to encourage them to apply for funding. Currently we're bottlenecked on fund manager time, but we're working on scaling that.

I'd be hesitant about funding individuals or organisations that haven't applied -- our application process is lightweight, so if someone chooses not to apply even after we prompt them, that seems like a bad sign. A possible exception would be larger organisations that already make the information we need available for assessment. Right now I'm not excited about funding more large organisations, since I think the marginal impact there is lower, but if the LTFF had a lot more money to distribute then I'd want to scale up our organisation grants.

Good question! Relatedly, are there common characteristics among people/organizations who you think would make promising applicants but often don't apply? Put another way, who would you encourage to apply who likely hasn't considered applying?

From an internal perspective I'd view the fund as being fairly close to risk-neutral. We hear around twice as many complaints that we're too risk-tolerant than too risk-averse, although of course the people who reach out to us may not be representative of our donors as a whole.

We do explicitly try to be conservative around things with a chance of significant negative impact to avoid the unilateralist's curse. I'd estimate this affects less than 10% of our grant decisions, although the proportion is higher in some areas, such as community building, biosecurity and policy.

It's worth noting that, unless I see a clear case for a grant, I tend to predict a low expected value -- not just a high-risk opportunity. This is because I think most projects aren't going to positively influence the long-term future -- otherwise the biggest risks to our civilization would already be taken care of. Based on that prior, it takes significant evidence to update me in favour of a grant having substantial positive expected value. This produces similar decisions to risk-aversion with a more optimistic prior.

Unfortunately, it's hard to test this prior: we'd need to see how good the grants we didn't make would have been. I'm not aware of any grants we passed on that turned out to be really good. But I haven't evaluated this systematically, and we'd only know about those which someone else chose to fund.

An important case where donors may be better off making donations themselves rather than donating via us is when they have more information than we do about some promising donation opportunities. In particular, you likely hear disproportionately about grants we rejected from people already in your network. You may be in a much better position to evaluate these than we are, especially if the impact of the grant hinges on the individual's abilities, or requires a lot of context to understand.

It's unfortunate that individual donors can't directly make grants to individuals in a tax efficient manner. You could consider donating to a donor lottery -- these will allow you to donate the same amount of money (in expectation) in a tax efficient manner. While grants can only be made within CEA's charitable objects, this should cover the majority of things donors would want to support, and in any case the LTFF also faces this restriction. (Jonas also mentioned to me that EA Funds is considering offering Donor-Advised Funds that could grant to individuals as long as there’s a clear charitable benefit. If implemented, this would also allow donors to provide tax-deductible support to individuals.)

Some things I think could actively cause harm:

• Projects that accelerate technological development of risky technologies without corresponding greater speedup of safety technologies
• Projects that result in a team covering a space or taking on some coordination role that is worse than the next person who could have come along
• Projects that engage with policymakers in an uncareful way, making them less willing to engage with longtermism in the future, or causing them to make bad decisions that are hard to reverse
• Movement-building projects that give a bad first impression of longtermists
• Projects that risk attracting a lot of controversy or bad press
• Projects with ‘poisoning the well’ effects where if it’s executed poorly the first time, someone trying it again will have a harder time-- e.g., if a large-scale project doing EA outreach to highschoolers went poorly, I think a subsequent project would have a much harder time getting buy-in from parents.

More broadly, I think as Adam notes above that the movement grows as a function of its initial composition. I think that even if the LTFF had infinite money, this pushes against funding every project where we expect the EV of the object-level work to be positive-- if we want the community to attract people who do high-quality work, we should fund primarily high-quality work. Since the LTFF does not have infinite money, I don’t think this has much of an effect on my funding decisions, but I’d have to think about it more explicitly if we end up with much more money than our current funding bar requires. (There are also other obvious reasons not to fund all positive-EV things, e.g. if we expected to be able to use the money better in the future.)

I think it would be good to have scalable interventions for impact. A few thoughts on this:

• At the org-level, there’s a bottleneck in mentorship and organizational capacity, and loosening it would allow us to take on more inexperienced people. I don’t know of a good way to fix this other than funding really good people to create orgs and become mentors. I think existing orgs are very aware of this bottleneck and working on it, so I’m optimistic that this will get much better over time.
• Personally, I’m interested in experimenting with trying to execute specific high-value projects by actively advertising them and not providing significant mentorship (provided there aren’t negative externalities to the project not being executed well). I’m currently discussing this with the fund.
• Overall, I think we will always be somewhat bottlenecked by having really competent people who want to work on longtermist projects, and I would be excited for people to think of scalable interventions for this in particular. I don’t have any great ideas here off the top of my head.

There will likely be a more elaborate reply, but these two links could be useful.

Some related questions with slightly different framings: 

• What types/lines of research do you expect would be particularly useful for informing the LTFF's funding decisions?
• Do you have thoughts on what types/lines of research would be particularly useful for informing other funders'  funding decisions in the longtermism space?
• Do you have thoughts on how the answers to those two questions might differ?

Edit: I really like Adam's answer

There are a lot of things I’m uncertain about, but I should say that I expect most research aimed at resolving these uncertainties not to provide strong enough evidence to change my funding decisions (though some research definitely could!) I do think weaker evidence could change my decisions if we had a larger number of high-quality applications to choose from. On the current margin, I’d be more excited about research aimed at identifying new interventions that could be promising.

Here's a small sample of the things that feel particularly relevant to grants I've considered recently. I'm not sure if I would say these are the most crucial:

• What sources of existential risk are plausible?
  
  
  • If I thought that AI capabilities were perfectly entangled with their ability to learn human preferences, I would be unlikely to fund AI alignment work.
  • If I thought institutional incentives were such that people wouldn’t create AI systems that could be existentially threatening without taking maximal precautions, I would be unlikely to fund AI risk work at all.
  • If I thought our lightcone was overwhelmingly likely to be settled by another intelligent species similar to us, I would be unlikely to fund existential risk mitigation outside of AI.
     
• What kind of movement-building work is effective?
  
  
  • Adam writes above how he thinks movement-building work that sacrifices quality for quantity is unlikely to be good. I agree with him, but I could be wrong about that. If I changed my mind here, I’d be more likely to fund a larger number of movement-building projects.
  • It seems possible to me that work that’s explicitly labeled as ‘movement-building’ is generally not as effective for movement-building as high-quality direct work, and could even be net-negative. If I decided this was true, I’d be less likely to fund movement-building projects at all.
     
• What strands of AI safety work are likely to be useful?
  
  
  • I currently take a fairly unopinionated approach to funding AI safety work-- I feel willing  to fund anything that I think a sufficiently large subset of smart researchers would think is promising. I can imagine becoming more opinionated here, and being less likely to fund certain kinds of work.
  • If I believed that it was certain that very advanced AI systems were coming soon and would look like large neural networks, I would be unlikely to fund speculative work focused on alternate paths to AGI.
  • If I believed that AI systems were overwhelmingly unlikely to look like large neural networks, this would have some effect on my funding decisions, but I’d have to think more about the value of near-term work from an AI safety field-building perspective.

Thanks for the input, we'll take this into account. We do provide tax advice for the US and UK, but we've also looked into expanding this. Edit: If you don't mind, could you let me know which jurisdiction was relevant to you at the time?

It's actually pretty rare that we've not been able to fund something; I don't think this has come up at all while I've been on the fund (2 rounds), and I can only think of a handful of cases before.

It helps that the fund knows some other private donors we can refer grants to (with applicants permission), so in the rare cases something is out of scope, we can often still get it funded.

Of course, people who know we can't fund them because of the fund's scope may choose not to apply, so the true proportion of opportunities we're missing may be higher. A big class of things the LTFF can't fund is political campaigns. I think that might be high-impact in some high-stakes elections, though I've not donated to campaigns myself, and I'm generally pretty nervous of anything that could make long-termism perceived as a partisan issue (which it obviously is not).

I don't think we'd often want to invest in private companies. As discussed elsewhere in this thread, we tend to find grants to individuals better than to orgs. Moreover, one of the attractive points of investing in a private company is that you may get a return on your investment. But I think the altruistic return on our current grants is pretty high, so I wouldn't want to lock up capital. If we had 10-100x more money to distribute and so had to invest some of it to grant out later, then investing some proportion of it in companies where there's an altruistic upside might make more sense.

If a private company applied for funding to the LTFF and they checked the "forward to other funders" checkbox in their application, I'd refer them to private donors who can directly invest in private companies (and have done so once in the past, though they weren't funded).

If you're applying for funding for a project that's already well-developed (i.e. you have thought carefully about its route to value, what the roadmap looks like, etc.), 30-60 minutes should be enough, and further time spent polishing likely won't improve your chances of getting funding.

If you don't have a well-developed project, it seems reasonable to add whichever amount of time it takes to develop the project in some level of detail on top of that.

This isn't exactly what you asked, but the LTFF's acceptance rate of applications that aren't obvious rejections is ~15-30%.