Any recommendation for how to explain EA funds grants to friend?

(Removed this comment. Don't know how to delete it.)

It might help if you make a concrete list of grants you're personally confused about.

It would also help if you (or someone) can identify the funding bars for each of the EA cause areas. For instance global health would measure $ / QALYs, x-risk would measure $ / 10^-6 x-risk reduced, and so on. Each cause area makes decisions mostly independently of other cause areas AFAIK, once money has been moved from general fund to a specific cause area. Within each cause area there tends to be a funding bar AFAIK, against which grants get compared.

Regarding movement building grants and early-career spending, I know nothing about it personally, and the following is speculation. But some heuristics that comes to my mind would be as follows. Someone who knows how these decisions are actually made, please feel free to correct me.

If you are willing to spend $100k / year on salary for a great full-time employee for 10 years, you should probably be willing to spend upto $500k on community building to find a similar employee whose output (measured in QALYs, x-risk reduced, etc) will be 50% higher on the same salary.

If you expect your community building effort to find more than one such person, you can multiply by the number of such people you expect to find.

Above assumes you have a fixed amount of money and a fixed amount of employees you can support. If you have an excess of money and insufficiently many potential employees who would actually produce useful output (for instance because they dont buy EA values or dont understand AI alignment), then it might makes sense to spend even more than $500k.

If you believe you're working in a field which has heavy-tailed productivity (some people are 10x or 100x more productive than others), then it makes sense to spend even more than the $500k to find these people, as opposed to support a lot of employees of average productivity on $100k/year.

A bit of a sidestep but there there is also the new Longtermism Fund , for more legible longtermist donations that are probably easier to justify.

I think it's easy to miss the forest for the trees. Unless I've missed something:

1. Before 2022, all of EA outreach/infrastructure funding in total have cost <<$200M,
   1. It's likely <100M, but it's hard to tell because some funding programs blur the lines between outreach/infra and direct work, e.g. paying for someone's PhD program.
   2. Notably this is lower than Open Phil's spending on criminal justice reform.
2. EA outreach funding has likely generated substantially >>$1B in value, and
3. EA outreach is an area where we expect there to be significant lags to happen between spending and impact
   1. For example, Sam Bankman-Fried graduated MIT 8 years ago^[1].

Raising the saliency of our moral obligations and empirical worldviews on the ways to do good to future billionaires and future top researchers (or current billionaires and current top researchers) is by its very nature an extremely hits-based proposition. 

If you're only looking at a budget very loosely, it seems silly to complain about hundreds of thousands of dollars of spending when billions of dollars of foregone opportunities is on the line.

Now, if you're looking at budgets in detail and investigating programs closely, I think it's reasonable to be skeptical of some types of spending (e.g. if people are overpaid or eating overly fancy food or or not trying to save money on flights or whatever). It's probably even more important to be skeptical of weak theories of change, or poor operational execution. 

1. ^{^}

   I think SBF donating to utilitarian/LT stuff is probably overdetermined, so not something that we can say EA outreach was useful for. However, I do not think this is true for everyone who's extremely high impact. I think one of the strongest cruxes for value of EA outreach etc is whether or not "our top people" are drawn to EA without needing any active outreach. Current evidence suggests the outreach is pretty relevant.

I'm not involved with EA funds, but some university group organizers have taken semesters of leave in the past to do group organizing full time for a semester. If you assume their term is 14 weeks, then that's 14*40=560 hours of work. At $20/hr, that's more than $10,000. And I think it is pretty reasonable to request more than $20/hr (various funding sources have previously offered something like $30/hr).

In general, nowadays, many group organizers are not volunteers and are paid for their part time work (if they are not full time, this shouldn't amount to five figures for one semester though). I think this is a good thing, since many university students simply cannot afford to take a volunteer job with a commitment of 10+ hours per week, and I wouldn't want EA groups only run by people who are rich enough that that's feasible.

Good question, and I think this is definitely healthy discussion. In general, money is a sensitive issue, and I would encourage all parties to show nuance, this includes (but not limited to) when: "judging" someone's salary, when asking for a salary, and when granting a salary.

Two steelmen for decent chunky grants 1) Bounded loss and unbounded wins - while theoretically salaries could be cut in half, impact could easily be 10-100x. I.e. the focus should be opportunity cost and not expenditure 2) many smart people in ea, and the people granting, may have previously been earning decent significant salaries as programmers/executives/consultants. You and I may see 80k USD as a lot of money, but its pretty normal for developers in Cali to earn hundreds of USD. Therefore, expecting people to earn 50k a year may effectively be asking them to donate 75% of their income.

And 2 steelmen for keeping salary low - 1) this is a movement about charity, helping others, and donating. We put a lot of effort and time into building health communities around these principles built on a heavy basis of trust. It's important to feel like people are in it for the right reason, and high salaries can jeopardise that. 2) it's pretty easy to justify a high salary with some of the above reasoning, perhaps too easy. As a community builder myself, it seems totally plausible we could attract people that are a poor fit for ea by being too relaxed around the money pedal.

For my own personal opinion, I think it's far too easy to ignore opportunity cost, and concentrate on short term expenditure and salary. However, I can very much imagine myself leaving the community if I salaries became too inflated. And I am likely to feel less aligned with others who require large salaries (just being honest here). Looking at recent posted receipts, I don't see anything that catches my eye in a bad way, although it could be said to be unfair that some community builders will be working 3x harder on a volunteer basis than other community builders on a competitive salary. I think this partially reflects the incentives which produced a world we currently live in (I.e. largely unaltruistic).

Whilst I find the arguments for working hard, and concentrating on impact, rather than earning little, pretty compelling - it's worth pointing out that there's some fantastic work coming out of Charity Entrepreneurship charities (who's employees generally earn little) , so it's not clear the tradeoff is always present.

Lastly, I would say its likely that I've made tradeoffs with my own salary, which have likely significantly negatively effected my social impact. I suspect this is easy to do, and would encourage people to avoid failing into this trap.

If you search the forum for the EAIF tag you can get some more details on past grants.  I'm not sure if this gives you quite what you're looking for, or not.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/effective-altruism-infrastructure-fund?sortedBy=magic

I haven't browsed the grants in much detail myself, but I would default to trying to explain EA's culture of thoroughness by reference to e.g. GiveWell's detailed evaluations of various charities, and say "this is more depth than most grants go into but it sets the tone of the sorts of things people tend to look for".

You could also point out common biases that the person might be falling for. One thing I would be inclined to explain in particular is the bikeshedding bias (https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/bikeshedding) -- it's much easier to critique things we understand. The simplest-looking grants (like university group support) are ones which I can imagine are particularly subject to bikeshedding.

Another thing I would be inclined to explain is the idea of continuing to invest (possibly exponentially) in things that work. e.g., if some intervention has shown that they made good use of $10k in the past, maybe try giving them $100k and see if they can do 10x as much good, or close to it. A related bias is the absurdity heuristic (e.g. ruling good ideas out because "they seem kind of crazy").