Most of our funding comes from academic sources, which for the most part are quite constrained and not suitable for funding the full range of activities of a centre like the FHI. In order to be successful, we need to produce “lean and tight” funding applications that typically cover researchers’ salaries, perhaps some workshop/conference funds and a bare minimum of admin support. Most academic institutes within philosophy do not do nearly as much public outreach, projects of various types, visitor hosting and policy engagement as FHI does.
The result of this is that:
We’re typically underfunded in “core staff”. E.g. last year I was doubling up for the FHI as staff manager, fundraiser, grantwriter/coordinator, communications+media manager, administrator, researcher, workshop/conference organiser, research strategist, research networks person, and general purpose project manager. It also means that a lot of Nick Bostrom’s time ends up spend on this stuff (as well as on admin for himself that a PA could be doing), whereas ideally he would be able to focus on FHI research strategy and his own research. (In academia the expectation appears to be that a centre Director is a manager/administrator/networker/research strategist, whereas ideally we would like to free up Nick from as much of the admin/management/fundraising/networking burden as possible to allow research time).
This year, our acquisition of industry funding has allowed us to get two new core staff members: an office administrator+PA for Nick Bostrom, and a general purpose academic project manager, which will help a lot—however, our overall research staff has also expanded (we currently have 13 staff members + 3 active collaborators, whereas we had 4 or 5 when I arrived in 2011).
Therefore I believe core operations funding still represents a bottleneck (though less severely than before). I.e. a minimal (in the overall scheme) increase in our funding here would represent a very cost-effective way to increase our overall output of various types (research, outreach, fundraising, policy engagement, networking). While our “core” to “pure research” staffing ratio is large compared to a traditional academic research unit (e.g. a group in a room researching religious epistemology), it’s still very small compared to the organisations I know that are more directly similar to the FHI.
Many of the projects we would like to do are ones that are difficult to fund through academic means—e.g. the thesis prize competitions, currently-shelved plans for a “top young talent” summer school, some public communications/outreach projects. Also, having a reserve fund to hold onto key researchers between grants is extremely valuable (I’m trying to rebuild this at present after we depleted it last year holding onto Stuart Armstrong and Anders Sandberg. Several current researchers’ funds will run out in late 2014, so this fund may need to be put to use again!). This fund can also double up as funds FHI (as host institute) can commit towards supporting aspects of larger grant applications (e.g. support a conference/academic visitor programme to complement the research programme), which apparently “looks” very good to reviewers and may increase their likelihood of success.
On the research front:
There are several areas of research that we think would be valuable to expand into—some examples include surveillance technology and synthetic biology/genomics/biotech, while maintaining our AI risk research—and the in-house consensus is that doing more work on “core” existential risk concepts would also be very valuable. We are currently writing grants to support work in this area, but given success is not a guarantee, philanthropic support of additional researchers in these areas would be very valuable.
As mentioned elsewhere, at all times there appears to be at least one researcher available who we would love to hire, and who we have not been able to afford to.
As mentioned elsewhere, there are several researchers who are having to spend quite a bit of their time suboptimally (e.g. doing some direct X-risk research, but also producing less X-risk-relevant work in order to satisfy a funder) who it would be valuable to be able to “buy out” and have work full-time on X-risk, were the funds available.
Having funds to hire a research assistant to support the research work of key researchers—e.g. Nick Bostrom, Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong, Toby Ord, Nick Beckstead—would be a very cost-effective way to increase their output and productivity (we did this to good effect for Nick’s Superintelligence book, but don’t currently have the funds to hire someone to do this full-time).
Different amounts of funding allow us to tackle different ones of these. I have a rough priority list based on what I think most cost-effectively increases our output/situation at a given time (and what I think we may not be able to get academic funding for) that currently goes Reserve fund → “hard to fund normally” projects → core activities → research assistant → hire more researchers/sub out researchers (depending on what talent is available at a given time). However, we’re constantly reassessing this as our research and situation evolves. It’s also the case that larger donations can be used in a different way than smaller ones (e.g. a new researcher may need to be funded 100% or not at all depending on situation). It’s also the case that if a donor specifically wants to fund desirable thing X, then that’s what we use the funds for.
Sorry for the essay, hope this is the kind of information you wanted.
Thanks. At least let me apologise for the formatting. I’m a frequent LW reader but infrequent poster. I’m trying to fix it, but not doing a great job ;)
If anything, I could use more information from the CEA, the FHI, and the GPP. Within effective altruism, there’s a bit of a standard of expecting some transparency of the organizations, purportedly effective, which are supported. In terms of financial support, this would mean the open publishing of budgets. Based upon Mr. O’Heigeartaigh’s report above, the FHI itself might be strapped for available time, among all its other core activities, to provide this sort of insight.
Ways in which we’re underfunded:
Most of our funding comes from academic sources, which for the most part are quite constrained and not suitable for funding the full range of activities of a centre like the FHI. In order to be successful, we need to produce “lean and tight” funding applications that typically cover researchers’ salaries, perhaps some workshop/conference funds and a bare minimum of admin support. Most academic institutes within philosophy do not do nearly as much public outreach, projects of various types, visitor hosting and policy engagement as FHI does.
The result of this is that:
We’re typically underfunded in “core staff”. E.g. last year I was doubling up for the FHI as staff manager, fundraiser, grantwriter/coordinator, communications+media manager, administrator, researcher, workshop/conference organiser, research strategist, research networks person, and general purpose project manager. It also means that a lot of Nick Bostrom’s time ends up spend on this stuff (as well as on admin for himself that a PA could be doing), whereas ideally he would be able to focus on FHI research strategy and his own research. (In academia the expectation appears to be that a centre Director is a manager/administrator/networker/research strategist, whereas ideally we would like to free up Nick from as much of the admin/management/fundraising/networking burden as possible to allow research time). This year, our acquisition of industry funding has allowed us to get two new core staff members: an office administrator+PA for Nick Bostrom, and a general purpose academic project manager, which will help a lot—however, our overall research staff has also expanded (we currently have 13 staff members + 3 active collaborators, whereas we had 4 or 5 when I arrived in 2011). Therefore I believe core operations funding still represents a bottleneck (though less severely than before). I.e. a minimal (in the overall scheme) increase in our funding here would represent a very cost-effective way to increase our overall output of various types (research, outreach, fundraising, policy engagement, networking). While our “core” to “pure research” staffing ratio is large compared to a traditional academic research unit (e.g. a group in a room researching religious epistemology), it’s still very small compared to the organisations I know that are more directly similar to the FHI.
Many of the projects we would like to do are ones that are difficult to fund through academic means—e.g. the thesis prize competitions, currently-shelved plans for a “top young talent” summer school, some public communications/outreach projects. Also, having a reserve fund to hold onto key researchers between grants is extremely valuable (I’m trying to rebuild this at present after we depleted it last year holding onto Stuart Armstrong and Anders Sandberg. Several current researchers’ funds will run out in late 2014, so this fund may need to be put to use again!). This fund can also double up as funds FHI (as host institute) can commit towards supporting aspects of larger grant applications (e.g. support a conference/academic visitor programme to complement the research programme), which apparently “looks” very good to reviewers and may increase their likelihood of success.
On the research front:
There are several areas of research that we think would be valuable to expand into—some examples include surveillance technology and synthetic biology/genomics/biotech, while maintaining our AI risk research—and the in-house consensus is that doing more work on “core” existential risk concepts would also be very valuable. We are currently writing grants to support work in this area, but given success is not a guarantee, philanthropic support of additional researchers in these areas would be very valuable.
As mentioned elsewhere, at all times there appears to be at least one researcher available who we would love to hire, and who we have not been able to afford to.
As mentioned elsewhere, there are several researchers who are having to spend quite a bit of their time suboptimally (e.g. doing some direct X-risk research, but also producing less X-risk-relevant work in order to satisfy a funder) who it would be valuable to be able to “buy out” and have work full-time on X-risk, were the funds available.
Having funds to hire a research assistant to support the research work of key researchers—e.g. Nick Bostrom, Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong, Toby Ord, Nick Beckstead—would be a very cost-effective way to increase their output and productivity (we did this to good effect for Nick’s Superintelligence book, but don’t currently have the funds to hire someone to do this full-time).
Different amounts of funding allow us to tackle different ones of these. I have a rough priority list based on what I think most cost-effectively increases our output/situation at a given time (and what I think we may not be able to get academic funding for) that currently goes Reserve fund → “hard to fund normally” projects → core activities → research assistant → hire more researchers/sub out researchers (depending on what talent is available at a given time). However, we’re constantly reassessing this as our research and situation evolves. It’s also the case that larger donations can be used in a different way than smaller ones (e.g. a new researcher may need to be funded 100% or not at all depending on situation). It’s also the case that if a donor specifically wants to fund desirable thing X, then that’s what we use the funds for.
Sorry for the essay, hope this is the kind of information you wanted.
Don’t apologize! This is great info!
Thanks. At least let me apologise for the formatting. I’m a frequent LW reader but infrequent poster. I’m trying to fix it, but not doing a great job ;)
If anything, I could use more information from the CEA, the FHI, and the GPP. Within effective altruism, there’s a bit of a standard of expecting some transparency of the organizations, purportedly effective, which are supported. In terms of financial support, this would mean the open publishing of budgets. Based upon Mr. O’Heigeartaigh’s report above, the FHI itself might be strapped for available time, among all its other core activities, to provide this sort of insight.