In the latter case, you are "black swan farming"; the important thing is to not miss out on the one Facebook that 1000xs, and you're happy to fund 99 duds in the meantime.

One risk of this framing is that as a seed funder your downside is pretty much capped at "you don't get any money" while with longtermist grantmaking your downside could be much larger. For example, you could fund someone to do outreach who is combative and unconvincing or someone who will use poor and unilateral judgement around information hazards. The article has an example of avoiding a grant that could potentially have had this kind of significant downside risk with "concluded that the applicant has enough integrity or character issues or red flags that I’m not comfortable with recommending funding to them".

Yeah we're working on something like this! There are a few logistical and legal details, but I think we can at least make something like this work between legible-to-us grantmakers (from my lights, LTFF, EAIF, OP longtermism, Lightspeed, Manifund, and maybe a few of the European groups like Longview and Effective Giving). Obviously there are still limitations (eg we can't systematically coordinate with academic groups, government bodies, and individual rich donors), but I think an expectation that longtermist nonprofit grantmakers talk to each other by default would be an improvement over the status quo.

(Note that weaker versions of this already happens, just not very systematically)

I think this is worth doing for large grants (eg >$50k); for smaller grants, coordination can get to be costly in terms of grantmaker time. Each additional step of the review process adds to the time until the applicant gets their response and their money.

Background checks with grantmakers are relatively easier with an application system that works in rounds (eg SFF is twice a year, Lightspeed and ACX also do open/closed rounds) -- you can batch them up, "here's 40 potential grantees, let us know if you have red flags on any". But if you have a continuous system like LTFF or Manifund, then every coordination request between two funders adds an interruption point/context switch. I think out of ~20 grants we've made on Manifund, we checked in with LTFF/Lightspeed on 2 of them, mostly not wanting to bother them too much.

Background checks also take longer the more people you're checking with; you can ask in parallel but you'll be bottlenecked by the time of the slowest respondent. Reliability can get especially hard (what if a grantmaker is sick/on vacation)? You can also try setting a fixed timeline "we're going to approve this in 48h", I guess, and try to find a tradeoff between "enough time for checks to come back" and "not delaying process overmuch"

I thought I'd work through how my reasoning goes for the provided examples. 

Many of these examples are grants that have later been funded by other grantmakers or private donors.

In my judgement, most of these (very helpful) concrete examples fall under either a) this deserves a public statement, or b) this represents a subjective judgement call where other funders should make that call independently. It's not that I think a private communication is never the right way to handle it, it's just that it seems to me like they usually aren't, even in the examples that are picked out.

The first three examples all involve subjective judgement calls, by a scientist, by yourself, and by an acquaintance, and it would be bad if these judgement calls (especially by just an acquantance!) propagated via a whisper network instead of other people making an independent decision. 

The next two examples, which involve grantees not delivering on promises, if they involve sufficiently large grants...well, I think a grantmaker ought to state what the impact of their grant are, and if a grant didn't have impact then that should be a made a note of publicly. This should not be an attack on the grantee, this is transparency by the grantmaker about what the impact their grant had, and bad grants should be acknowledged. However, I guess in the scenario where the grantee is intended to remain anonymous, then it is fair to propagate that info via whisper network but not public statement, but I would question the practice of giving large grants to anonymous grantees. For small grants to individuals, I guess if someone failed to deliver once isn't it best to let it go and let them try again elsewhere with someone else, the way it would be in any other professional realm? If they failed to deliver multiple times a whisper network is justified. If they seem to be running a scam then it's time for a public statement.

The rest of the examples save the last, which involve concerns about character...I mean, outright plagiarism and faking data absolutely should be called out publicly. When it's about less substantial and more vague reputational concerns, I can see the case for private comms a bit more, although it's a goldilocks scenario even then because if the concerns aren't substantially verified then shouldn't others independently make their judgement calls?

(The final example is valid for a private check, but tautologically so - yes of course, if the rational for a grantmaker is "LTFF would probably fund it" they ought to check if LTFF did in fact evaluate and reject it.)

In summary I think for the majority of these examples, I think either the public statement should be made, or the issue should be dropped, and it's only the very rare borderline case where private communications such that all grantmakers are actually secretly talking to each other and deferring to each other are the way to go.

You make good points. Initial thoughts:

Rejection reasons that are fine/good to spread through whisper network:

• Poor performance on a previous grant project that you directly evaluated
• Reasonably verified character issues

Rejection reasons that should not be shared through whisper network:

• Grant proposal content did not meet granting threshold
• Someone in a related field told you of weak job performance

(The idea being other granters should find out those reasons for themselves. Seek out the field experts, maybe talk to new ones).

I can't speak about all cases, but I think for most cases in the rough cluster of situations like the above, we do not currently give reasons for rejection at the level of granularity of the above. I'm a bit sad about this but I think it's probably the right call. I remember a specific situation some months ago where I wrote fairly elaborate feedback for an applicant but I was dissuaded from sending it, in retrospect for probably the right reasons. 

If we have something like 3x the current grantmaker capacity, I'd love for us to give more feedback, but this is not a priority now and I think it won't be in the near future, as I think the following are all more important:

1. Finding a chair to take over Asya's role to formalize separation between LTFF and Open Phil 
2. Evaluating grants faster and improving our turnaround times
3. Have more eyeballs per grant evaluation
4. More transparency and public communication with donors/applicants/the broader community (like this article and future ones)
5. Feedback for the most promising applicants/grantees
6. Donor engagement (especially with high-net-worth individuals) and fundraising
7. Retroactive evaluations of and comparing LTFF grants with other grantmakers like Open Phil.
8. More experiments with active grantmaking and trying to find more of a product-market fit in other areas adjacent to LTFF's interests (eg a fund specifically for AI Safety)

(Also FWIW if there is a private behind the sceens grantmaker feedback channel, I'm not sure I would be comfortable with the idea of grant makers sharing information with each other that they weren't also willing to share with the applicants.)

Thanks, this is helpful feedback.

Yeah, agreed! I haven’t thought about impact markets through Linch’s particular lens. (I’m cofounder of AI Safety Impact Markets.) 

Distinguishing different meanings of costly: Impact markets make applying for funding more costly in terms of reputation, in the sense that people might write public critiques of proposals. But they make applying less costly in terms of time, in the sense that you can post one standardized application rather than one bespoke one per funder.

But most people I’ve talked to don’t consider costly in terms of reputation to be a cost at all because they’re eager to get feedback on their plans to improve them, and rejections from funders rarely include feedback. (Critical feedback would then reflect badly on the previous draft but not on the latest one.)

Conversely, I’ve also heard of funders reasoning like “This project falls into the purview of the LTFF, so if it hasn’t gotten funded by them, there’s probably something wrong with it, and I shouldn’t fund it either.” Public feedback like, “We decided not to fund this project because we couldn’t find an expert in the field to assess its merits” would actually be “negatively costly” or beneficial in terms of reputation. It could also help with unwarranted yellow flags because impact markets are all about aggregating and amplifying specialized local knowledge. If, for example, the rumor mill claims that someone is a drug addict, a longterm flatmate could make a symbolic donation and clarify that the person in question only microdoses LSD, no hard drugs. That could silence the incorrect rumor. The flatmate could thus become an early donor to the project and reap an outsized (compared to the size of the donation) reward in terms of their score or later Impact Marks for adding this information to the market.

Our scores will be based on evaluations of the outputs, so all the issues that have to do with lacking rigor or not publishing anything in the first place are priced in. The issue with plagiarism, low integrity, and interpersonal harm is more concerning for me. I’ll consider adding a “whistle-blowing” tab to the comment section where users can post anonymously to deter low-integrity actors from using the platform. We (GoodX) can also manually intervene if we become aware of bad actors.

Generally, my “bias” is to keep things public by default. The funding ecosystem can then make exceptions in cases where that is not possible. The current default seems to be secret by default, which seems unnecessarily costly to me in multiple ways (reapplying to multiple funders in different formats, no feedback, bad coordination between funders, few funding gaps for small donors).

First two points sounds like a valid application of Grossman-Stiglitz 1980

I think this is already done. The application asks if you are receiving OpenPhil funding for said project or have done so in the past. It also asks if you've applied. I think people also generally disclose because the payoff of not disclosing is pretty low compared to the costs. EA is a pretty small community I don't think non-disclosure ever helps.