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EA - Grantmakers should give more feedback by Ariel Pontes
Welcome 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: Grantmakers should give more feedback, published by Ariel Pontes on January 22, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.BackgroundI've been actively involved in EA since 2020, when I started EA Romania. In my experience, one problem that frustrates many grant applicants is the limited feedback offered by grantmakers. In 2022, at the EAG in London, while trying to get more detailed feedback regarding my own application at the EAIF office hours, I realized that many other people had similar complaints. EAIF's response seemed polite but not very helpful. Shortly after this experience, I also read aforum post where Linch, a junior grantmaker at the time, argued that it's "rarely worth your time to give detailed feedback." The argument was:[F]rom a grantmaking perspective, detailed feedback is rarely worthwhile, especially to rejected applicants. The basic argument goes like this: it's very hard to accurately change someone's plans based on quick feedback (and it's also quite easy to do harm if people overupdate on your takes too fast just because you're a source of funding). Often, to change someone's plans enough, it requires careful attention and understanding, multiple followup calls, etc.And this time investment is rarely enough for you to change a rejected (or even marginal) grant to a future top grant. Meanwhile, the opportunity cost is again massive.Similarly, giving useful feedback to accepted grants can often be valuable, but it just isn't high impact enough compared to a) making more grants, b) making grants more quickly, and c) soliciting creative ways to get more highest-impact grants out.Since then I have heard many others complain about the lack of feedback when applying for grants in the EA space. My specific experience was with the EAIF, but based on what I've heard I have the feeling this problem might be endemic in the EA grantmaking culture in general.The case for more feedbackLinch's argument that "the opportunity cost of giving detailed feedback is massive" is only valid if by "detailed feedback" he means something really time consuming. However, it cannot be used to justify EAIF's current policy of giving no feedback at all by default, and giving literally a one-sentence piece of feedback upon request. Using this argument to justify something so extreme would be an example of what some might call "act utilitarianism", "naive utilitarianism", or"single-level" utilitarianism: it may seem that, in certain cases, giving feedback is a waste of resources compared to other counterfactual actions. If you only consider first-order consequences, however, killing a healthy checkup patient and using his organs to save five is also effective. In reality, we need to also consider higher order consequences. Is it healthy for a movement to adopt a policy of not giving feedback to grant applicants?Personally, I feel such a policy runs the risk of seeming disrespectful towards grant applicants who spend time and energy planning projects that end up never being implemented. This is not to say that the discomfort of disappointed applicants counts more than the suffering of Malaria infected children. But we are human and there is a limit to how much we can change via emotional resilience workshops. Besides,there is such a thing as too much resilience. I have talked to other EAs who applied for funds, 1:1 advice from 80k, etc, and many of them felt frustrated and somewhat disrespected after being rejected multiple times with no feedback or explanation. I find this particularly worrisome in the case of founders of national groups, since our experience may influence the development of the local movement. There is a paragraph from anarticle by The Economist which I think adds to my point:As the community has expanded, it has also become more exclusive. Conference...
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