I was a team member of OxPrio. To answer your question, we granted the money to 80,000 hours. I personally agree with your reasoning that the grant amount was too small compared to the effort put in; 800 person-hours is an underestimate (only counting the work of the two most-committed team members), and counterfactually the time could have been spent more productively than working minimum-wage. However, I don’t follow why giving the money to “basically anywhere” would have been good enough, since “remotely effective charities” plausibly still vary significantly in cost-effectiveness: for our OxPrio shortlist, we saw two orders of magnitude difference in our model’s cost-effectiveness estimates among the 4 options.
I was a team member of OxPrio. To answer your question, we granted the money to 80,000 hours. I personally agree with your reasoning that the grant amount was too small compared to the effort put in; 800 person-hours is an underestimate (only counting the work of the two most-committed team members), and counterfactually the time could have been spent more productively than working minimum-wage. However, I don’t follow why giving the money to “basically anywhere” would have been good enough, since “remotely effective charities” plausibly still vary significantly in cost-effectiveness: for our OxPrio shortlist, we saw two orders of magnitude difference in our model’s cost-effectiveness estimates among the 4 options.