Fair enough, I guess my take from all this is that you mainly just want the all grants fund to have a different philosophy than the one GiveWell is following in practice? Or do you also think they're making a mistake by their own lights?

Agreed. GiveWell also takes outside donors and OpenPhil doesn't. I've donated to the all grants fund because I wanted to help with risk tolerant and fast giving after the aid cuts, and am glad the opportunity exists

When I read that description I infer "make the best decision we can under uncertainty", not "only make decisions with a decent standard of evidence or to gather more evidence". It's a reasonable position to think that the TSUs grant is a bad idea or that it would be unreasonable to expect it to be a good idea without further evidence, but I feel like GiveWell are pretty clear that they're fine with making high risk grants, and in this case they seem to think this TSUs will be high expected value

What’s unique about these grants?: These grants are a good illustration of how GiveWell is applying increased flexibility, speed, and risk tolerance to respond to urgent needs caused by recent cuts to US foreign assistance. Funded by our All Grants Fund, the grants also demonstrate how GiveWell has broadened its research scope beyond its Top Charities while maintaining its disciplined approach—comparing each new opportunity to established interventions, like malaria prevention or vitamin A supplementation, as part of its grantmaking decisions.

The grants were explicitly made from the all grants fund, which is the place people donate when they are happy for GiveWell to make riskier decisions and hold themselves to lower standards than for top charities. I personally donate to the all grants fund over the top charities fund, am a fan of a more risk tolerant approach, and I'm happy to defer to GiveWell's judgement. I think your post is holding this grant to the standard of a top charity, which I think is unreasonable and would not be worth the effort and expense of GiveWell staff time

I don't have too much context on the actual object details of the grant, so don't have strong takes on most of your criticisms (you definitely know more about this domain than me!). But I find it pretty plausible that lots of high importance decisions get made after a disaster like the USAID cuts, and that this was urgent. And I also expect that there are, in general, a bunch of grants that are time sensitive in response to the USAID cuts and endorse GiveWell moving fast here and maximising expected value.

Your maths needs a term for the conversion between money and labour for the company. I think your current equation assumes 1 to 1 which seems patently false

That's not my understanding of what happened with CAIP, there's various funders who are very happy to disagree with OpenPhil who I know have considered giving to CAIP and decided against. My understanding is that it's based on actual reasons, not just an information cascade from OpenPhil

No idea about Apart though

Strong agree - cause neutrality should not at all imply an even spread of investment. I just in fact do think AI is the most pressing cause according to my values and empirical beliefs

Really glad to hear it! (And that writing several thousand words of very in depth examples was useful!) I'd love to hear if it proves to be useful longer term