EA - Long-Term Future Fund: December 2021 grant recommendations by abergal

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: Long-Term Future Fund: December 2021 grant recommendations, published by abergal on August 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Introduction The Long-Term Future Fund made the following grants as part of its 2021 Q4 grant cycle (grants paid out sometime between August and December 2021): Total funding distributed: 2,081,577 Number of grantees: 34 Acceptance rate (excluding desk rejections): 54% Payout date: July - December 2021 Report authors: Asya Bergal (Chair), Oliver Habryka, Adam Gleave, Evan Hubinger 2 of our grantees requested that we not include public reports for their grants. (You can read our policy on public reporting here). We also referred 2 grants, totalling $110,000, to private funders, and approved 3 grants, totalling $102,000, that were later withdrawn by grantees.If you’re interested in getting funding from the Long-Term Future Fund, apply here.(Note: The initial sections of this post were written by me, Asya Bergal.) Other updates Our grant volume and overall giving increased significantly in 2021 (and in 2022 – to be featured in a later payout report). In the second half of 2021, we applied for funding from larger institutional funders to make sure we could make all the grants that we thought were above the bar for longtermist spending. We received two large grants at the end of 2021: $1,417,000 from the Survival and Flourishing Fund’s 2021-H2 S-process round $2,583,000 from Open Philanthropy Going forward, my guess is that donations from smaller funders will be insufficient to support our grantmaking, and we’ll mainly be relying on larger funders. More grants and limited fund manager time mean that the write-ups in this report are shorter than our write-ups have been traditionally. I think communicating publicly about our decision-making process continues to be valuable for the overall ecosystem, so in future reports, we’re likely to continue writing short one-sentence summaries for most of our grants, and more for larger grants or grants that we think are particularly interesting. Highlights Here are some of the public grants from this round that I thought looked most exciting ex ante: $50,000 to support John Wentworth’s AI alignment research. We’ve written about John Wentworth’s work in the past here. (Note: We recommended this grant to a private funder, rather than funding it through LTFF donations.) $18,000 to support Nicholas Whitaker doing blogging and movement building at the intersection of EA / longtermism and Progress Studies. The Progress Studies community is adjacent to the longtermism community, and is one of a small number of communities thinking carefully about the long-term future. I think having more connections between the two is likely to be good both from an epistemic and a talent pipeline perspective. Nick had strong references and seemed well-positioned to do this work, as the co-founder and editor of the Works in Progress magazine. $60,000 to support Peter Hartree pursuing independent study, plus a few "special projects". Peter has done good work for 80K for several years, received very strong references, and has an impressive history of independent projects, including Inbox When Ready. Grant Recipients In addition to the grants described below, 2 grants have been excluded from this report at the request of the applicants. Note: Some of the grants below include detailed descriptions of our grantees. Public reports are optional for our grantees, and we run all of our payout reports by grantees before publishing them. We think carefully about what information to include to maximize transparency while respecting grantees’ preferences. We encourage anyone who thinks they could use funding to positively influence the long-term trajectory of humanity to apply for funding. Grants evaluated by Evan Hubinger EA Switzerland/PIB...