In the second half of this year (2024), twelve people participated as “Recommenders” in a single round of a grant-recommendation process for the Funder Jaan Tallinn. The round featured three tracks: the Main Track, the Fairness Track, and the Freedom Track. The following Recommenders in this round agreed to have their identities made public:
We call the recommendation process used in this grant round the “S-Process”, for “Simulation Process”, because it involves allowing the Recommenders and Funder to simulate a large number of counterfactual delegation scenarios using a table of marginal utility functions. Recommenders specified marginal utility functions for funding each application, and adjusted those functions through discussions with each other as the round progressed. Similarly, the Funder specified and adjusted different utility functions for deferring to each Recommender. In this round, the process also allowed the Funder to make some final adjustments to decide on their final intended grant amounts.
As part of the process this round, we used Recommenders’ inputs to create a synthetic mean Recommender. This feature acts as a simulated Recommender, using an equal weighted average of all the Recommenders’ utility functions to generate grant recommendations.
We also introduced a couple of changes to the process that impacted both the direction and scope of funding. Two specialized tracks, the Fairness Track and the Freedom Track, ran with three Recommenders each, in parallel with the Main Track which had six Recommenders. All guaranteed eligible applications (applications who received Speculation Grant funding) were qualified to be evaluated by Recommenders in all tracks (Main, Freedom, and Fairness). As a result, in the final recommendations table there are three columns showing the recommendations of the three different tracks, as well as a column showing the Synthetic Mean Recommender’s allocation. In the “Total Funding Recommended” column is the total funding recommendation an org received, which is the sum of the recommendations from the three tracks and the Synthetic Mean Recommender.
The S-Process app is still being developed for broader use.
The total funding expected to be distributed in association with this round is $19.86MM, in excess of our $5MM-$15MM estimate. This includes $19.01MM which was recommended in the round, as well as $0.85M in funding distributed previously through Speculation Grants, in excess of the amounts recommended in the round. (Please note that due to rounding, subtotals may not precisely add up to the total figure.)
The total funding expected to be distributed in association with this round:
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† The total in parentheses reflects additional funding that was distributed in cases where the amount of the Speculation Grant awarded to an organization exceeded the eventual recommendation amount for that organization. This additional funding is not included in the figure for the total funding recommended in this round, but is included in the amount of funding expected to be distributed in total.
Most of the final endorsed recommendations of this round of the S-Process are listed below. These numbers have resulted from numerical inputs from both the Funder and Recommenders, which represented estimates of the marginal utility of granting to each organization. Note that: