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:
†
† 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:
† Parentheses indicate a Speculation Grant awarded to certain grantees, prior to the completion of the S-Process round. If the Speculation Grant amount was higher than the S-Process recommendation, it subsumed the S-Process recommendation, so only the Speculation Grant amount is meant to be granted. If the Speculation Grant was less, it was deducted from the S-Process recommendation, so the total granted is meant to be the amount of the S-Process recommendation.
“*” Asterisks demarcate grants that were “controversial” in that one or more Recommenders wished to publicly disendorse the grant. Multiple asterisks correspond to multiple disendorsements.
Note that the S-Process system is designed to generally favor funding things that at least one Recommender is excited to fund, rather than things that every Recommender is excited to fund. As such, the grant recommendations above do not especially represent the “average” opinion of the group in any sense.
The S-Process is designed to allow a lot of freedom and autonomy for the Recommenders and the Funders. Funders retain the right and freedom to make and/or recommend grants that the S-Process, as a whole, did not endorse, based on information the Funders learn from the S-Process. As well, the Recommenders and Funders are free to communicate with each other as much as they want outside of the S-Process structure. As such, while the S-Process might be useful in helping the Funders learn about grant-making opportunities and opinions, the Funders need not be limited by the outputs of the S-Process in order for it to function.
Each Recommender’s own inputs to the process (both initial and final versions) are free for that Recommender to share privately or publicly in any form and for any use-case, as long as they anonymize any other Recommenders who have requested anonymity, and respect the privacy of the organizations who applied to the round. In particular, the S-Process does not require Recommenders to avoid sharing their own (appropriately anonymized) inputs, even when sharing some documents might make it somewhat easier in principle for an adversary to reverse-engineer the inputs of other Recommenders. The spirit of the S-Process is, however, to discourage this sort of intentionally adversarial de-anonymization, as it is disrespectful of the Recommenders who contributed their time and effort under the conditions of anonymity.