If you “withdraw from a cause area” you would expect that if you have an organization that does good work in multiple cause areas, then you would expect you would still fund the organization for work in cause areas that funding wasn’t withdrawn from. However, what actually happened is that Open Phil blacklisted a number of ill-defined broad associations and affiliations, where if you are associated with a certain set of ideas, or identities or causes, then no matter how cost-effective your other work is, you cannot get funding from OP
I’m wondering if you have a list of organizations where Open Phil would have funded their other work, but because they withdrew from funding part of the organization they decided to withdraw totally.
This feels very importantly different from good ventures choosing not to fund certain cause areas (and I think you agree, which is why you put that footnote).
I don’t have a long list, but I know this is true for Lightcone, SPARC, ESPR, any of the Czech AI-Safety/Rationality community building stuff, and I’ve heard a bunch of stories since then from other organizations that got pretty strong hints from Open Phil that if they start working in an area at all, they might lose all funding (and also, the “yes, it’s more like a blacklist, if you work in these areas at all we can’t really fund you, though we might make occasional exceptions if it’s really only a small fraction of what you do” story was confirmed to me by multiple OP staff, so I am quite confident in this, and my guess is OP staff would be OK with confirming to you as well if you ask them).
is there a list of these somewhere/details on what happened?
You can see some of the EA Forum discussion here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/foQPogaBeNKdocYvF/linkpost-an-update-from-good-ventures?commentId=RQX56MAk6RmvRqGQt
The current list of areas that I know about are:
Anything to do with the rationality community (“Rationality community building”)
Anything to do with moral relevance of digital minds
Anything to do with wild animal welfare and invertebrate welfare
Anything to do with human genetic engineering and reproductive technology
Anything that is politically right-leaning
There are a bunch of other domains where OP hasn’t had an active grantmaking program but where my guess is most grants aren’t possible:
Most forms of broad public communication about AI (where you would need to align very closely with OP goals to get any funding)
Almost any form of macrostrategy work of the kind that FHI used to work on (i.e. Eternity in Six Hours and stuff like that)
Anything about acausal trade of cooperation in large worlds (and more broadly anything that is kind of weird game theory)
You said
I’m wondering if you have a list of organizations where Open Phil would have funded their other work, but because they withdrew from funding part of the organization they decided to withdraw totally.
This feels very importantly different from good ventures choosing not to fund certain cause areas (and I think you agree, which is why you put that footnote).
I don’t have a long list, but I know this is true for Lightcone, SPARC, ESPR, any of the Czech AI-Safety/Rationality community building stuff, and I’ve heard a bunch of stories since then from other organizations that got pretty strong hints from Open Phil that if they start working in an area at all, they might lose all funding (and also, the “yes, it’s more like a blacklist, if you work in these areas at all we can’t really fund you, though we might make occasional exceptions if it’s really only a small fraction of what you do” story was confirmed to me by multiple OP staff, so I am quite confident in this, and my guess is OP staff would be OK with confirming to you as well if you ask them).
Thanks!