I long wondered why OpenPhil made so many obvious mistakes in the policy space. That level of incompetence just did not make any sense.
I did not expect this to be the explanation:
THEY SIMPLY DID NOT HAVE ANYONE WITH ANY POLITICAL EXPERIENCE ON THE TEAM until hiring one person in April 2025.
This is, like, insane. Not what I’d expect at all from any org that attempts to be competent.
(openphil, can you please hire some cracked lobbyists to help you evaluate grants? This is, like, not quite an instance of Graham’s Design Paradox, because instead of trying to evaluate grants you know nothing about, you can actually hire people with credentials you can evaluate, who’d then evaluate the grants. thank you <3)
To be clear, I don’t think this is an accurate assessment of what is going on. If anything, I think marginally people with more “political experience” seemed to me to mess up more.
In-general, takes of the kind “oh, just hire someone with expertise in this” almost never make sense IMO. First of all, identifying actual real expertize is hard. Second, general competence and intelligence is a better predictor of task performance in almost all domains after even just a relatively short acclimation period that OpenPhil people far exceed. Third, the standard practices in many industries are insane and most of the time if you hire someone specifically for their expertise in a domain, not just as an advisor but an active team member, they will push for adopting those standard practices even when it doesn’t make sense.
I don’t think Mikhail’s saying that hiring an expert is sufficient. I think he’s saying that hiring an expert, in a very high-context and unnatural/counter-intuitive field like American politics, is necessary, or that you shouldn’t expect success trying to re-derive all of politics in a vacuum from first principles. (I’m sure OpenPhil was doing the smarter version of this thing, where they had actual DC contacts they were in touch with, but that they still should have expected this to be insufficient.)
Often the dumb versions of ways of dealing with the political sphere (advocated by people with some experience) just don’t make any sense at all, because they’re directional heuristics that emphasize their most counterintuitive elements. But, in talking to people with decades of experience and getting the whole picture, the things they say actually do make sense, and I can see how the random interns or whatever got their dumb takes (by removing the obvious parts from the good takes, presenting only the non-obvious parts, and then over-indexing on them).
I big agree with Habryka here in the general case and am routinely disappointed by input from ‘experts’; I think politics is just a very unique space with a bunch of local historical contingencies that make navigation without very well-calibrated guidance especially treacherous. In some sense it’s more like navigating a social environment (where it’s useful to have a dossier on everyone in the environment, provided by someone you trust) than it is like navigating a scientific inquiry (where it’s often comparatively cheap to relearn or confirm something yourself rather than deferring).
I mean, it’s not like OpenPhil hasn’t been interfacing with a ton of extremely successful people in politics. For example, OpenPhil approximately co-founded CSET, and talks a ton with people at RAND, and has done like 5 bajillion other projects in DC and works closely with tons of people with policy experience.
The thing that Jason is arguing for here is “OpenPhil needs to hire people with lots of policy experience into their core teams”, but man, that’s just such an incredibly high bar. The relevant teams at OpenPhil are like 10 people in-total. You need to select on so many things. This is like saying that Lightcone “DOESN’T HAVE ANYONE WITH ARCHITECT OR CONSTRUCTION OR ZONING EXPERIENCE DESPITE RUNNING A LARGE REAL ESTATE PROJECT WITH LIGHTHAVEN”. Like yeah, I do have to hire a bunch of people with expertise on that, but it’s really very blatantly obvious from where I am that trying to hire someone like that onto my core teams would be hugely disruptive to the organization.
It seems really clear to me that OpenPhil has lots of contact with people who have lots of policy experience, frequently consults with them on stuff, and that the people working there full-time seem reasonably selected for me. The only way I see the things Jason is arguing for work out is if OpenPhil was to much more drastically speed up their hiring, but hiring quickly is almost always a mistake.
Part of the distinction I try to draw in my sequence is that the median person at CSET or RAND is not “in politics” at all. They’re mostly researchers at think tanks, writing academic-style papers about what kinds of policies would be theoretically good for someone to adopt. Their work is somewhat more applied/concrete than the work of, e.g., a median political science professor at a state university, but not by a wide margin.
If you want political experts—and you should—you have to go talk to people who have worked on political campaigns, served in the government, or led advocacy organizations whose mission is to convince specific politicians to do specific things. This is not the same thing as a policy expert.
For what it’s worth, I do think OpenPhil and other large EA grantmakers should be hiring many more people. Hiring any one person too quickly is usually a mistake, but making sure that you have several job openings posted at any given time (each of which you vet carefully) is not.
I agree that this is the same type of thing as the construction example for Lighthaven, but I also think that you did leave some value on the table there in certain ways (e.g. commercial-grade furniture vs consumer-grade furniture), and I think that a larger total % domain-specific knowledge I’d hope exists at Open Phil is policy knowledge than total % domain-specific knowledge I’d hope exists at Lightcone is hospitality/construction knowledge.
I hear you as saying ‘experts aren’t all that expert’ *‘hiring is hard’ + ‘OpenPhil does actually have access to quite a few experts when they need them’ = ‘OpenPhil’s strategy here is very reasonable.’
I agree in principal here but think that, on the margin, it just is way more valuable to have the skills in-house than to have external people giving you advice (so that they have both sides of the context, so that you can make demands of them rather than requests, so that they’re filtered for a pretty high degree of value alignment, etc). This is why Anthropic and OAI have policy teams staffed with former federal government officials. It just doesn’t get much more effective than that.
I don’t share Mikhail’s bolded-all-caps-shock at the state of things; I just don’t think the effects you’re reporting, while elucidatory, are a knockdown defense of OpenPhil being (seemingly) slow to hire for a vital role. But running orgs is hard and I wouldn’t shackle someone to a chair to demand an explanation.
Separately, a lot of people defer to some discursive thing like ‘The OP Worldview’ when defending or explicating their positions, and I can’t for the life of me hammer out who the keeper of that view is. It certainly seems like a knock against this particular kind of appeal when their access to policy experts is on-par with e.g. MIRI and Lightcone (informal connections and advisors), rather than the ultra-professional, ultra-informed thing it’s often floated as being. OP employees have said furtive things like ‘you wouldn’t believe who my boss is talking to’ and, similarly, they wouldn’t believe who my boss is talking to. That’s hardly the level of access to experts you’d want from a central decision-making hub aiming to address an extinction-level threat!
To be clear, I was a lot more surprised when I was told about some of what OpenPhil did in DC, once starting to facepalm really hard after two sentences and continuing to facepalm very hard for most of a ten-minute-long story. It was so obviously dumb, that even me, with basically zero exposure to American politics or local DC norms and only some tangential experience running political campaigns in a very different context (an authoritarian country), immediately recognized it as obviously very stupid. While listening, I couldn’t think of better explanations than stuff like “maybe Dustin wanted x and OpenPhil didn’t have a way to push back on it”. But not having anyone who could point out how this would be very, very stupid, on the team, is a perfect explanation for the previous cringe over their actions; and it’s also incredibly incompetent, on the level I did not expect.
As Jason correctly noted, it’s not about “policy”. This is very different from writing papers and figuring out what a good policy should be. It is about advocacy: getting a small number of relevant people to make decisions that lead to the implementation of your preferred policies. OpenPhil’s goals are not papers; and some of the moves they’ve made that their impact their utility more than any of the papers they’ve funded more are ridiculously bad.
A smart enough person could figure it out from the first principles, with no experience, or by looking at stuff like how climate change became polarized, but for most people, it’s a set of intuitions, skills, knowledge that are very separate from those that make you a good evaluator of research grants.
It is absolutely obvious to me that someone experienced in advocacy should get to give feedback on a lot of decisions that you plan to make, including because some of them can have strategic implications you didn’t think about.
Instead, OpenPhil are a bunch of individuals who apparently often don’t know the right questions to ask even despite their employer’s magic of everyone wanting to answer their questions.
(I disagree with Jason on how transparent grant evaluations are ought to be; if you’re bottlenecked by time, it seems fine to make handwavy bets. You just need people who are good of making bets. The issue is that they’re not selected for making good bets in politics, and so they fuck up; not with the general idea of having people who make bets.)
I’m the author of the LW post being signal-boosted. I sincerely appreciate Oliver’s engagement with these critiques, and I also firmly disagree with his blanket dismissal of the value of “standard practices.”
As I argue in the 7th post in the linked sequence, I think OpenPhil and others are leaving serious value on the table by not adopting some of the standard grant evaluation practices used at other philanthropies, and I don’t think they can reasonably claim to have considered and rejected them—instead the evidence strongly suggests that they’re (a) mostly unaware of these practices due to not having brought in enough people with mainstream expertise, and (b) quickly deciding that anything that seems unfamiliar or uncomfortable “doesn’t make sense” and can therefore be safely ignored.
We have a lot of very smart people in the movement, as Oliver correctly points out, and general intelligence can get you pretty far in life, but Washington, DC is an intensely competitive environment that’s full of other very smart people. If you try to compete here with your wits alone while not understanding how politics works, you’re almost certainly going to lose.
general competence and intelligence is a better predictor of task performance in almost all domains after even just a relatively short acclimation period
Can you say more about this? I’m aware of the research on g predicting performance on many domains, but the quoted claim is much stronger than the claims I can recall reading.
random thought, not related to GP comment: i agree identifying expertise in a domain you don’t know is really hard, but from my experience, identifying generalizable intelligence/agency/competence is less hard. generally it seems like a useful signal to see how fast they can understand and be effective at a new thing that’s related to what they’ve done before but that they’ve not thought much specifically about before. this isn’t perfectly correlated with competence at their primary field, but it’s probably still very useful.
e.g it’s generally pretty obvious if someone is flailing on an ML/CS interview Q because they aren’t very smart, or just not familiar with the tooling. people who are smart will very quickly and systematically figure out how to use the tooling, and people who aren’t will get stuck and sit there being confused. I bet if you took e.g a really smart mathematician with no CS experience and dropped them in a CS interview, it would be very fascinating to watch them figure out things from scratch
disclaimer that my impressions here are not necessarily strictly tied to feedback from reality on e.g job performance (i can see whether people pass the rest of the interview after making a guess at the 10 minute mark, but it’s not like i follow up with managers a year after they get hired to see how well they’re doing)
I want to signal-boost this LW post.
I long wondered why OpenPhil made so many obvious mistakes in the policy space. That level of incompetence just did not make any sense.
I did not expect this to be the explanation:
THEY SIMPLY DID NOT HAVE ANYONE WITH ANY POLITICAL EXPERIENCE ON THE TEAM until hiring one person in April 2025.
This is, like, insane. Not what I’d expect at all from any org that attempts to be competent.
(openphil, can you please hire some cracked lobbyists to help you evaluate grants? This is, like, not quite an instance of Graham’s Design Paradox, because instead of trying to evaluate grants you know nothing about, you can actually hire people with credentials you can evaluate, who’d then evaluate the grants. thank you <3)
To be clear, I don’t think this is an accurate assessment of what is going on. If anything, I think marginally people with more “political experience” seemed to me to mess up more.
In-general, takes of the kind “oh, just hire someone with expertise in this” almost never make sense IMO. First of all, identifying actual real expertize is hard. Second, general competence and intelligence is a better predictor of task performance in almost all domains after even just a relatively short acclimation period that OpenPhil people far exceed. Third, the standard practices in many industries are insane and most of the time if you hire someone specifically for their expertise in a domain, not just as an advisor but an active team member, they will push for adopting those standard practices even when it doesn’t make sense.
I don’t think Mikhail’s saying that hiring an expert is sufficient. I think he’s saying that hiring an expert, in a very high-context and unnatural/counter-intuitive field like American politics, is necessary, or that you shouldn’t expect success trying to re-derive all of politics in a vacuum from first principles. (I’m sure OpenPhil was doing the smarter version of this thing, where they had actual DC contacts they were in touch with, but that they still should have expected this to be insufficient.)
Often the dumb versions of ways of dealing with the political sphere (advocated by people with some experience) just don’t make any sense at all, because they’re directional heuristics that emphasize their most counterintuitive elements. But, in talking to people with decades of experience and getting the whole picture, the things they say actually do make sense, and I can see how the random interns or whatever got their dumb takes (by removing the obvious parts from the good takes, presenting only the non-obvious parts, and then over-indexing on them).
I big agree with Habryka here in the general case and am routinely disappointed by input from ‘experts’; I think politics is just a very unique space with a bunch of local historical contingencies that make navigation without very well-calibrated guidance especially treacherous. In some sense it’s more like navigating a social environment (where it’s useful to have a dossier on everyone in the environment, provided by someone you trust) than it is like navigating a scientific inquiry (where it’s often comparatively cheap to relearn or confirm something yourself rather than deferring).
I mean, it’s not like OpenPhil hasn’t been interfacing with a ton of extremely successful people in politics. For example, OpenPhil approximately co-founded CSET, and talks a ton with people at RAND, and has done like 5 bajillion other projects in DC and works closely with tons of people with policy experience.
The thing that Jason is arguing for here is “OpenPhil needs to hire people with lots of policy experience into their core teams”, but man, that’s just such an incredibly high bar. The relevant teams at OpenPhil are like 10 people in-total. You need to select on so many things. This is like saying that Lightcone “DOESN’T HAVE ANYONE WITH ARCHITECT OR CONSTRUCTION OR ZONING EXPERIENCE DESPITE RUNNING A LARGE REAL ESTATE PROJECT WITH LIGHTHAVEN”. Like yeah, I do have to hire a bunch of people with expertise on that, but it’s really very blatantly obvious from where I am that trying to hire someone like that onto my core teams would be hugely disruptive to the organization.
It seems really clear to me that OpenPhil has lots of contact with people who have lots of policy experience, frequently consults with them on stuff, and that the people working there full-time seem reasonably selected for me. The only way I see the things Jason is arguing for work out is if OpenPhil was to much more drastically speed up their hiring, but hiring quickly is almost always a mistake.
Part of the distinction I try to draw in my sequence is that the median person at CSET or RAND is not “in politics” at all. They’re mostly researchers at think tanks, writing academic-style papers about what kinds of policies would be theoretically good for someone to adopt. Their work is somewhat more applied/concrete than the work of, e.g., a median political science professor at a state university, but not by a wide margin.
If you want political experts—and you should—you have to go talk to people who have worked on political campaigns, served in the government, or led advocacy organizations whose mission is to convince specific politicians to do specific things. This is not the same thing as a policy expert.
For what it’s worth, I do think OpenPhil and other large EA grantmakers should be hiring many more people. Hiring any one person too quickly is usually a mistake, but making sure that you have several job openings posted at any given time (each of which you vet carefully) is not.
I agree that this is the same type of thing as the construction example for Lighthaven, but I also think that you did leave some value on the table there in certain ways (e.g. commercial-grade furniture vs consumer-grade furniture), and I think that a larger total % domain-specific knowledge I’d hope exists at Open Phil is policy knowledge than total % domain-specific knowledge I’d hope exists at Lightcone is hospitality/construction knowledge.
I hear you as saying ‘experts aren’t all that expert’ * ‘hiring is hard’ + ‘OpenPhil does actually have access to quite a few experts when they need them’ = ‘OpenPhil’s strategy here is very reasonable.’
I agree in principal here but think that, on the margin, it just is way more valuable to have the skills in-house than to have external people giving you advice (so that they have both sides of the context, so that you can make demands of them rather than requests, so that they’re filtered for a pretty high degree of value alignment, etc). This is why Anthropic and OAI have policy teams staffed with former federal government officials. It just doesn’t get much more effective than that.
I don’t share Mikhail’s bolded-all-caps-shock at the state of things; I just don’t think the effects you’re reporting, while elucidatory, are a knockdown defense of OpenPhil being (seemingly) slow to hire for a vital role. But running orgs is hard and I wouldn’t shackle someone to a chair to demand an explanation.
Separately, a lot of people defer to some discursive thing like ‘The OP Worldview’ when defending or explicating their positions, and I can’t for the life of me hammer out who the keeper of that view is. It certainly seems like a knock against this particular kind of appeal when their access to policy experts is on-par with e.g. MIRI and Lightcone (informal connections and advisors), rather than the ultra-professional, ultra-informed thing it’s often floated as being. OP employees have said furtive things like ‘you wouldn’t believe who my boss is talking to’ and, similarly, they wouldn’t believe who my boss is talking to. That’s hardly the level of access to experts you’d want from a central decision-making hub aiming to address an extinction-level threat!
To be clear, I was a lot more surprised when I was told about some of what OpenPhil did in DC, once starting to facepalm really hard after two sentences and continuing to facepalm very hard for most of a ten-minute-long story. It was so obviously dumb, that even me, with basically zero exposure to American politics or local DC norms and only some tangential experience running political campaigns in a very different context (an authoritarian country), immediately recognized it as obviously very stupid. While listening, I couldn’t think of better explanations than stuff like “maybe Dustin wanted x and OpenPhil didn’t have a way to push back on it”. But not having anyone who could point out how this would be very, very stupid, on the team, is a perfect explanation for the previous cringe over their actions; and it’s also incredibly incompetent, on the level I did not expect.
As Jason correctly noted, it’s not about “policy”. This is very different from writing papers and figuring out what a good policy should be. It is about advocacy: getting a small number of relevant people to make decisions that lead to the implementation of your preferred policies. OpenPhil’s goals are not papers; and some of the moves they’ve made that their impact their utility more than any of the papers they’ve funded more are ridiculously bad.
A smart enough person could figure it out from the first principles, with no experience, or by looking at stuff like how climate change became polarized, but for most people, it’s a set of intuitions, skills, knowledge that are very separate from those that make you a good evaluator of research grants.
It is absolutely obvious to me that someone experienced in advocacy should get to give feedback on a lot of decisions that you plan to make, including because some of them can have strategic implications you didn’t think about.
Instead, OpenPhil are a bunch of individuals who apparently often don’t know the right questions to ask even despite their employer’s magic of everyone wanting to answer their questions.
(I disagree with Jason on how transparent grant evaluations are ought to be; if you’re bottlenecked by time, it seems fine to make handwavy bets. You just need people who are good of making bets. The issue is that they’re not selected for making good bets in politics, and so they fuck up; not with the general idea of having people who make bets.)
I’m the author of the LW post being signal-boosted. I sincerely appreciate Oliver’s engagement with these critiques, and I also firmly disagree with his blanket dismissal of the value of “standard practices.”
As I argue in the 7th post in the linked sequence, I think OpenPhil and others are leaving serious value on the table by not adopting some of the standard grant evaluation practices used at other philanthropies, and I don’t think they can reasonably claim to have considered and rejected them—instead the evidence strongly suggests that they’re (a) mostly unaware of these practices due to not having brought in enough people with mainstream expertise, and (b) quickly deciding that anything that seems unfamiliar or uncomfortable “doesn’t make sense” and can therefore be safely ignored.
We have a lot of very smart people in the movement, as Oliver correctly points out, and general intelligence can get you pretty far in life, but Washington, DC is an intensely competitive environment that’s full of other very smart people. If you try to compete here with your wits alone while not understanding how politics works, you’re almost certainly going to lose.
Can you say more about this? I’m aware of the research on g predicting performance on many domains, but the quoted claim is much stronger than the claims I can recall reading.
random thought, not related to GP comment: i agree identifying expertise in a domain you don’t know is really hard, but from my experience, identifying generalizable intelligence/agency/competence is less hard. generally it seems like a useful signal to see how fast they can understand and be effective at a new thing that’s related to what they’ve done before but that they’ve not thought much specifically about before. this isn’t perfectly correlated with competence at their primary field, but it’s probably still very useful.
e.g it’s generally pretty obvious if someone is flailing on an ML/CS interview Q because they aren’t very smart, or just not familiar with the tooling. people who are smart will very quickly and systematically figure out how to use the tooling, and people who aren’t will get stuck and sit there being confused. I bet if you took e.g a really smart mathematician with no CS experience and dropped them in a CS interview, it would be very fascinating to watch them figure out things from scratch
disclaimer that my impressions here are not necessarily strictly tied to feedback from reality on e.g job performance (i can see whether people pass the rest of the interview after making a guess at the 10 minute mark, but it’s not like i follow up with managers a year after they get hired to see how well they’re doing)