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: A plea for more funding shortfall transparency, published by porby on August 8, 2023 on LessWrong.

[This post is largely from the perspective of AI safety, but most of it should generalize.]

For recipients, well calibrated estimates about funding probability and quantity are extremely valuable. Funding-dependent individuals and organizations need information to optimize their decisionmaking; incorrect estimates cause waste.

At the moment, getting that information seems unnecessarily hard.

To help with this, I would ask organizations up the funding chain to systematically and continuously provide bite-sized updates from their own perspectives on the funding situation when possible.

This needn't be in the form of a lengthy report or deep-dive (though those are nice too!). For example, for a grantmaking organization with open applications, maybe something like:

We've received V requests for funding totaling $W in the last month. We anticipate funding up to $X of these requests; we would fund up to about $Y if we had more funding.

We don't anticipate significant changes in our funding capacity by default.

Reports like this are already done occasionally. For example, I deeply appreciate reports like this one. My concern is that I'm not aware of any consistent source for this information.

I worry that this is partially because writing a dense report takes a lot of time, and many of these organizations are massively overwhelmed as it is. To the extent that this is limiting reports, I would suggest that giving a tweet-sized miniupdate as things change (or just every few months) would be a huge improvement over the status quo.

Even "oof, we're REALLY funding constrained" would be great! If you don't have time for collecting any numbers at all, a vibecheck is still useful!

There's also no need for each report to attempt to capture the entire field's status, just the perspective of that one organization.

An anecdote of awareness not propagating like it should

For the last six-ish months, I've been trying to figure out how to prioritize earning to give and direct alignment research. I've gotten in touch with several people and heard a number of different perspectives.

None of them were "yeah, the field's pretty funding constrained right now, there are more people than funds, it's a major bottleneck."

This continued a confusion I had starting with the FTX collapse. While I fully expected the field to be in a crunch immediately following the collapse, the vibe I collected from a number of people was that this was a probably-temporary thing, and this was seemingly supported by other things I heard a few months later.

A lot of hints - organizations not being able to hire everyone they'd like to hire, not as many grants flowing as I'd expect, and salary targets way too low for a field with tons of cash on hand relative to talent - were inconsistent with the "unconstrained" narrative, but they were too weak in isolation to update me to reality.

One side effect of this confusion was that I started work on a project before receiving grant funding for it based on an incorrectly high probability of being funded. It fell through; it's not a catastrophe, and I was prepared for that possibility, but I would have chosen differently if I had all the information that had existed privately at the time.

Then it seems like everything snapped together with the common knowledge created by one post.

If this is our collective mechanism for creating awareness, something seems broken.

The future

While I've felt reasonably productive in my grant-funded research so far, it seems unlikely that my comparative advantage is in full-time alignment research as opposed to earning to give if this kind of funding environment continues.

In addition to periodic updates about the current funding situation, I've love ...