Datapoint: I saw that LTFF funded a project I liked but expected to be hard to justify on the form’s terms; it was capacity building and the benefits would be hard to measure (although easy to goodhart). The application did ~what I suggested here, declaring an intermediate goal for the project and letting the grantmakers figure out if they valued that goal or not, without justifying why it was valuabe. And it got funded.
I take this as mild evidence that this technique works, and mild evidence against the forms needing to spell this out explicitly. It might have helped that this person was reasonably well-networked, and I expect had good references.
Datapoint: I saw that LTFF funded a project I liked but expected to be hard to justify on the form’s terms; it was capacity building and the benefits would be hard to measure (although easy to goodhart). The application did ~what I suggested here, declaring an intermediate goal for the project and letting the grantmakers figure out if they valued that goal or not, without justifying why it was valuabe. And it got funded.
I take this as mild evidence that this technique works, and mild evidence against the forms needing to spell this out explicitly. It might have helped that this person was reasonably well-networked, and I expect had good references.