If there is a shortage of staff time, then AI safety funders need to hire more staff. If they don’t have time to hire more staff, then they need to hire headhunters to do so for them. If a grantee is running up against a budget crisis before the new grantmaking staff can be on-boarded, then funders can maintain the grantee’s program at present funding levels while they wait for their new staff to become available.
Also, there are very few competent people who want to be full-time grantmakers. Lots of people are OK with being advisors to grantmakers, or ~10 hours a week grantmakers, but very few qualified people are interested in full-time grantmaking jobs.
This means you end up with lots of part-time people, which increases the relative costs of hiring, because you still have to spend a lot of time evaluating someone’s judgement, but you only get like a fourth of an employee out of it at the end. Also, half-time commitment appear to have much shorter half-lifes than full-time commitments.
Additionally, it’s hard to pay highly competetive salaries due to everyone always being paranoid about self-dealing and corruption on anything that touches anything related to nonprofit land (and various purity instincts around that).
These are important points, and I’m glad you’re bringing them up!
Is spending a lot of time to assess new grantmakers merely distressing (but still net positive in terms of extending your total grantmaking ability), or is it actually causing you to lose time in expectation? In other words, if you spend 40 hours recruiting and assessing candidates, does one of those candidates then go on to do 100+ hours of useful grantmaking work? Or is it more like 20 hours of useful grantmaking work?
How closely connected is the shortage of people willing to be full-time grantmakers with an expectation that grantmakers will already be fluent in technical AI safety when they start work? I could imagine that people who could otherwise be working for ARC or Anthropic would be very difficult to lure away full-time, but there’s an entire field of mainstream philanthropic foundations that mostly have full-time staff working on their grants. Could we hire some of those grantmakers full time to lend their general grantmaking expertise, evaluating things like budgets and org charts and performance targets, while relying on part-time advisors to provide technical expertise about the details of AI safety research? If not, why not?
What do you see as the most likely or most important negative consequence if grantmakers try to offer highly competitive salaries? Is this something that your funders have literally refused to pay for, or are you worried about being criticized for it (by whom? what consequences would follow from that criticism?), or does it just generally increase team members’ anxiety levels, or what exactly is the downside? I have definitely seen some of this paranoia you’re talking about, so it’s a real problem, but I wonder if it’s worth accepting the costs associated with paying highly competitive salaries in order to attract more and better people. It’s also worth noting that ‘highly competitive nonprofit salaries’ are still lower than ‘highly competitive tech salaries,’ probably by a factor of about 3. You can get top-notch grantmaking talent for much less than the price of top-notch computer engineering talent.
As a donor, I’m nervous about charities that pay fully competitive wages, although it only gets about 2% weighting in my decisions. If someone can clearly make more money somewhere else, then that significantly reduces my concern that they’ll mislead me about the value of their charity.
Fair enough; we certainly paid much less than people could make in the private sector at CAIP, for essentially that reason. It’s good for nonprofit staff to have some skin in the game.
My suggestion to consider more competitive wages is mostly a response to Oliver suggesting that LTFF has had a serious and long-term challenge in hiring as many people as they would need to fully accomplish their mission.
+1 - and this has been a problem for many years.
I’ve spoken to grantmakers about this in the past and I got the impression that they see it as a largely unavoidable problem:
You can’t hire good people without taking a lot of time to assess them, which takes time away from other important activities.
Expanding the team requires hiring more managers, who are even harder to assess than grantmakers.
Also, there are very few competent people who want to be full-time grantmakers. Lots of people are OK with being advisors to grantmakers, or ~10 hours a week grantmakers, but very few qualified people are interested in full-time grantmaking jobs.
This means you end up with lots of part-time people, which increases the relative costs of hiring, because you still have to spend a lot of time evaluating someone’s judgement, but you only get like a fourth of an employee out of it at the end. Also, half-time commitment appear to have much shorter half-lifes than full-time commitments.
Additionally, it’s hard to pay highly competetive salaries due to everyone always being paranoid about self-dealing and corruption on anything that touches anything related to nonprofit land (and various purity instincts around that).
These are important points, and I’m glad you’re bringing them up!
Is spending a lot of time to assess new grantmakers merely distressing (but still net positive in terms of extending your total grantmaking ability), or is it actually causing you to lose time in expectation? In other words, if you spend 40 hours recruiting and assessing candidates, does one of those candidates then go on to do 100+ hours of useful grantmaking work? Or is it more like 20 hours of useful grantmaking work?
How closely connected is the shortage of people willing to be full-time grantmakers with an expectation that grantmakers will already be fluent in technical AI safety when they start work? I could imagine that people who could otherwise be working for ARC or Anthropic would be very difficult to lure away full-time, but there’s an entire field of mainstream philanthropic foundations that mostly have full-time staff working on their grants. Could we hire some of those grantmakers full time to lend their general grantmaking expertise, evaluating things like budgets and org charts and performance targets, while relying on part-time advisors to provide technical expertise about the details of AI safety research? If not, why not?
What do you see as the most likely or most important negative consequence if grantmakers try to offer highly competitive salaries? Is this something that your funders have literally refused to pay for, or are you worried about being criticized for it (by whom? what consequences would follow from that criticism?), or does it just generally increase team members’ anxiety levels, or what exactly is the downside? I have definitely seen some of this paranoia you’re talking about, so it’s a real problem, but I wonder if it’s worth accepting the costs associated with paying highly competitive salaries in order to attract more and better people. It’s also worth noting that ‘highly competitive nonprofit salaries’ are still lower than ‘highly competitive tech salaries,’ probably by a factor of about 3. You can get top-notch grantmaking talent for much less than the price of top-notch computer engineering talent.
As a donor, I’m nervous about charities that pay fully competitive wages, although it only gets about 2% weighting in my decisions. If someone can clearly make more money somewhere else, then that significantly reduces my concern that they’ll mislead me about the value of their charity.
Fair enough; we certainly paid much less than people could make in the private sector at CAIP, for essentially that reason. It’s good for nonprofit staff to have some skin in the game.
My suggestion to consider more competitive wages is mostly a response to Oliver suggesting that LTFF has had a serious and long-term challenge in hiring as many people as they would need to fully accomplish their mission.