This is a linkpost for https://www.goodventures.org/blog/an-update-from-good-ventures/
I wanted to share this update from Good Ventures (Cari and Dustin’s philanthropy), which seems relevant to the EA community.
Tl;dr: “while we generally plan to continue increasing our grantmaking in our existing focus areas via our partner Open Philanthropy, we have decided to exit a handful of sub-causes (amounting to less than 5% of our annual grantmaking), and we are no longer planning to expand into new causes in the near term by default.”
A few follow-ups on this from an Open Phil perspective:
- I want to apologize to directly affected grantees (who've already been notified) for the negative surprise here, and for our part in not better anticipating it.
- While this represents a real update, we remain deeply aligned with Good Ventures (they’re expecting to continue to increase giving via OP over time), and grateful for how many of the diverse funding opportunities we’ve recommended that they’ve been willing to tackle.
- An example of a new potential focus area that OP staff had been interested in exploring that Good Ventures is not planning to fund is research on the potential moral patienthood of digital minds. If any readers are interested in funding opportunities in that space, please reach out.
- Good Ventures has told us they don’t plan to exit any overall focus areas in the near term. But this update is an important reminder that such a high degree of reliance on one funder (especially on the GCR side) represents a structural risk. I think it’s important to diversify funding in many of the fields Good Ventures currently funds, and that doing so could make the funding base more stable both directly (by diversifying funding sources) and indirectly (by lowering the time and energy costs to Good Ventures from being such a disproportionately large funder).
- Another implication of these changes is that going forward, OP will have a higher bar for recommending grants that could draw on limited Good Ventures bandwidth, and so our program staff will face more constraints in terms of what they’re able to fund. We always knew we weren’t funding every worthy thing out there, but that will be even more true going forward. Accordingly, we expect marginal opportunities for other funders to look stronger going forward.
- Historically, OP has been focused on finding enough outstanding giving opportunities to hit Good Ventures’ spending targets, with a long-term vision that once we had hit those targets, we’d expand our work to support other donors seeking to maximize their impact. We’d already gotten a lot closer to GV’s spending targets over the last couple of years, but this update has accelerated our timeline for investing more in partnerships and advising other philanthropists. If you’re interested, please consider applying or referring candidates to lead our new partnerships function. And if you happen to be a philanthropist looking for advice on how to invest >$1M/year in new cause areas, please get in touch.
(Mostly agreeing)
I feel like:
1. I haven't seen any writing about how disagreements between Dustin/Cari, and other OP execs, have changed priorities. (Or how other "political" considerations changed priorities)
2. I'm sure that there have been disagreements between them, that have changed priorities.
3. I would naively expect many organizations to swipe "changes made, just because some other exec wanted them" under the rug of some other reason or other, like, "Well, we have a lot of uncertainty on this topic." Likewise, I don't trust the reasons that many organizations give to many of their non-obvious high-level decisions.
Therefore, I think it's pretty natural to conclude that there's probably something funky going on, as I'd similar expect for other institutions. That some/many of the reasons for high-level decisions are political instead of epistemic.
I'd similarly assume that many high-level people at OP would like to signal these differences, but it would be difficult for them to do so (as is usually the case), so wouldn't mind EAs making conclusions like this.
That said - if it is the case that there are important political reasons for things, I think it would be really useful if people at OP could signal that more, in some fashion.
Like, "Again, we want to remind people that many of our high-level assessments are made in ways specific to opinions of Dustin, Cari, and OP execs, often opinions we expect that other EAs would disagree with. Many of these opinions are private. So please don't assume that the conclusions we find should mirror ones that others would conclude on."
I've heard from a few people who have taken some of OP's high-level prioritization far too seriously as a conclusive epistemic take, in my opinion. Like, "OP has split it's top-level budget this way, so I assume that I'd also conclude that for my own spending or time."