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.)
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.)