EA - We're no longer "pausing most new longtermist funding commitments" by Holden Karnofsky

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: We're no longer "pausing most new longtermist funding commitments", published by Holden Karnofsky on January 30, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.In November, I wrote about Open Philanthropy’s soft pause of new longtermist funding commitments:We will have to raise our bar for longtermist grantmaking: with more funding opportunities that we’re choosing between, we’ll have to fund a lower percentage of them. This means grants that we would’ve made before might no longer be made, and/or we might want to provide smaller amounts of money to projects we previously would have supported more generously ..Open Philanthropy also need[s] to raise its bar in light of general market movements (particularly the fall in META stock) and other factors ... the longtermist community has been growing; our rate of spending has been going up; and we expect both of these trends to continue. This further contributes to the need to raise our bar ...It’s a priority for us to think through how much to raise the bar for longtermist grantmaking, and therefore what kinds of giving opportunities to fund. We hope to gain some clarity on this in the next month or so, but right now we’re dealing with major new information and don’t have a lot to say about what it means. It could mean reducing support for a lot of projects, or for relatively few ...Because of this, we are pausing most new longtermist funding commitments (that is, commitments within Potential Risks from Advanced Artificial Intelligence, Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness, and Effective Altruism Community Growth) until we gain more clarity, which we hope will be within a month or so ...It’s not an absolute pause: we will continue to do some longtermist grantmaking, mostly when it is time-sensitive and seems highly likely to end up above our bar (this is especially likely for relatively small grants).Since then, we’ve done some work to assess where our new funding bar should be, and we have created enough internal guidance that the pause no longer applies. (The pause stopped applying about a month ago, but it took some additional time to write publicly about it.)What did we do to come up with new guidance on where the bar is?What we did:Ranking past grants: We created1 a rough ranking of nearly all the grants we’d made over the last 18 months; we also included a number of grants now-defunct FTX-associated funders had made.The basic idea of the ranking is essentially: “For any two grants, the grant we would make if we could only make one should rank higher.”2 It is based on a combination of rough quantitative impact estimates, grantmaker intuitions, etc.With this ranking, we are now able to take any given total Open Phil longtermist budget for the time period in question, and identify which grants would and would not have made the cut under that budget.In some cases, we gave separate rankings to separate “tranches” of a grant (e.g., the first $1 million of a grant might be ranked much higher than the next $1 million, because of diminishing returns to adding more funding to a given project).Annual spending guidelines: We estimated how much annual spending would exhaust the capital we have available for longtermist grantmaking over the next 20-50 years (the difference between 20 years and 50 years is not huge3 in per-year spending terms), to get some anchors on what our annual budget for longtermist grantmaking should be.We planned conservatively here, assuming that longtermist work would end up with 30-50% of all funding available to Open Philanthropy.4 OP is also working on a longer-term project to revisit how we should allocate our resources between longtermist and global health and wellbeing funding; it’s possible that longtermist work will end up with more than 50%, which would leave more room to grow.Setting the b...