EA - Some concerns about policy work funding and the Long Term Future Fund by weeatquince

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: Some concerns about policy work funding and the Long Term Future Fund, published by weeatquince on August 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Situation As far as I can tell The Long-Term Future Fund (LTFF) wants to fund work that will influence public policy. They say they are looking to fund “policy analysis, advocacy ...” work and post in policy Facebook groups asking for applications. However, as far as I can tell, in practice, the LTFF appears to never (or only very rarely) fund such projects that apply for funding. Especially new projects.My view that such funding is rare is based on the following pieces of evidence: Very few policy grants have been made. Looking at the payout reports of the LTFF, they funded a grant for policy influencing work in 2019 (to me, for a project that was not a new project). Upon asking them they say they have funded at least one more policy grant that has not been written up. Very many policy people have applied for LTFF grants. Without actively looking for it I know of: someone in an established think tank looking for funds for EA work, 3 groups wanting to start EA think tank type projects, a group wanting to do mass campaigning work. All these groups looked competent and were rejected. I am sure many others apply too. I know one of these has gone on to get funding elsewhere (FTX). Comments from staff at leading EA orgs. In January last year, a senior staff member at a leading EA institution mentioned, to my surprise, that EA funders tend not to fund any new longtermist policy projects (except perhaps with very senior trusted people like OpenPhil funding CSET). Recently I spoke to someone at CEA about this and asked if it matched their views too and they said they do think there is a problem here. Note this was about EA funders in general, not specifically the LTFF. Comments from EA policy folk looking for funding. There seems to be (at least there was in 2021) a general view from EAs working in the policy space that it has been very hard to find funding for policy work. Note this is about EA funders in general, not the LTFF. Odd lines of questioning. When I applied, the line of questioning was very odd. I faced an hour of: Why should we do any policy stuff? Isn't all policy work a waste of time? Didn’t [random unconnected policy thing] not work? Etc. Of course it can be useful to check applicants have a good understanding of what they are doing, but it made me question whether they wanted to fund policy work at all. Odd feedback. Multiple applicants to the LTFF have reported receiving feedback along the lines of: We see high downside risks but cannot clarify what those risks are. Or: We want to fund you but an anonymous person vetoed you and we cannot say who or why. Or: Start-up policy projects are too risky. Or: We worry you might be successful and hard to shut down if we decided we don’t like you in future. This makes me worry that the fund managers do not think through the risks and reasons for funding or not funding policy work in as much depth as I would like, and that they maybe do not fund any new/start-up policy projects. Acknowledgment that they do apply a higher bar for policy work. Staff at the LTFF have told me that they apply a higher bar for policy work than for other grants. Of course, this is all circumstantial, and not necessarily a criticism of the LTFF. The fund managers might argue they never get any policy projects worth funding and that all the promising projects I happened to hear of were actually net negative and it was good not to fund them. It is also possible that things have improved in the last year (the notes that make up this post have been sitting in an email chain for a long while now). Relevance and recommendation That said I thought it was worth me writing this up publicly as the possibilit...