Predicting Open Phil Grants

Charles Dillon 🔸

Predicting Open Phil Grants

Charles Dillon 🔸

2 min read · Jul 23, 2021

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WilliamKiely🔸

Open Phil obviously has more information on this than members of the general public. Do we know whether Open Phil is willing to share any of its internal forecasts on this (or internal knowledge that could be used to create such forecasts) publicly?

Davidmanheim

If so, several people at Open Phil are on Metaculus, and can write comments - but I'm skeptical that they will, or that they have very concrete ideas about what they will be doing - I think the plan is essentially to fund everything that seems very promising, and keep looking for more very promising things.

WilliamKiely🔸

This is great. Small point of feedback on the title: I'd prefer: "Forecasting Open Phil Grant Amounts". ("Donations" doesn't seem like the right word to me for large philanthropic grantmaking.)

Charles Dillon 🔸

Agreed, and changed, though I preferred "grants" to "grant amounts"

Nathan Young

I would like a similar set of questions around GiveWell recommendations. You could ask for 10 charities they said they might look into, the forecast their final value for money score. Then, you could resolve based on what they found in any they looked into.

- No risk to them.
- Might help them search
- Only requires names of charities they are researching

WilliamKiely🔸

I really like your questions! If you're open to creating more, I'd suggest creating another (seven) question(s) on the average yearly amount of money granted from 2025-2030 (overall and for each of the six focus areas), since the yearly variance is significant.

Charles Dillon 🔸

This is a good idea - I considered making the original questions averages for this reason, but erred on this side of making the question simpler. As is, I think the variance around the underlying distribution outcomes is large enough to compensate for the variance in year to year grants, such that I would not expect a big difference between 2028-2032 average predictions and 2030 predictions, and I'm hesitant to ask too many questions until the current ones have received sufficient attention.

Davidmanheim

I strongly dislike the idea of having tons more predictions - it increases effort both for people looking up forecasts, and for forecasters.

Forecasting effort is a commons, in the economic sense - forecaster effort is limited, and overuse of forecasts is effectively diluting the available forecaster resources among more questions.

WilliamKiely🔸

That's a good point I didn't consider. I think you're right that the average question would not be very helpful, and not helpful enough to be worth adding.

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