EA - Longtermism Fund: December 2022 Grants Report by Michael Townsend

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Longtermism Fund: December 2022 Grants Report, published by Michael Townsend on December 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.IntroductionThe Longtermism Fund is pleased to announce that we will be providing grants to the following organisations in our first-ever grantmaking round:Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence ($70,000 USD)SecureBio ($60,000 USD)Rethink Priorities' General Longtermism Team ($30,000 USD)Council on Strategic Risks' nuclear weapons policy work ($15,000 USD)These grants will be paid out in January 2023; the amounts were chosen based on what the Fund has received in donations as of today.In this payout report, we will provide more details about the grantmaking process and the grantees the fund is supporting. This report was written by Giving What We Can, which is responsible for the fund's communications. Longview Philanthropy is responsible for the Fund's research and grantmaking.Read more about the Longtermism Fund here and about funds more generally here.The grantmaking processLongview actively investigates high-impact funding opportunities for donors looking to improve the long-term future. This means the grants for the Longtermism Fund are generally decided by:Longview’s general work (which is not specific to the Longtermism Fund) evaluating the most cost-effective funding opportunities. This involves thousands of hours of work each year from their team. Read more about why we trust Longview as a grantmaker.Choosing among those opportunities based on the scope of the Fund.In addition to this, the Fund decided to support a diverse range of longtermist causes this grantmaking round. Our current plan is to provide grant reports approximately every six months.The scope of the FundThe scope of the Longtermism Fund is to support organisations that are:Reducing existential and catastrophic risks.Promoting, improving, and implementing key longtermist ideas.In addition, the fund aims to support organisations with a compelling and transparent case in favour of their cost-effectiveness that most donors interested in longtermism will understand, and/or that would benefit from being funded by a large number of donors.Why the fund is supporting organisations working on a diverse range of longtermist causesThere are several major risks to the long-term future that need to be addressed, and they differ in their size, potential severity, and how many promising solutions are available and in need of additional funding. However, there is a lot of uncertainty about which of these risks are most cost-effectively addressed by the next philanthropic dollar, even among expert grantmakers.Given this, the Fund aimed to:Provide funding to organisations working across a variety of high-impact longtermist causes, including:Improving biosecurity and pandemic preparednessPromoting beneficial AIAnd reducing the risks from nuclear war.Allocate an amount of funding to highly effective organisations working on these causes representative of how the fund might deploy resources across areas in the future.A benefit of this approach is that the grants highlight a diverse range of approaches to improving the long-term future.We expect the Fund to take a similar approach for the foreseeable future, but we could imagine it changing if there is a persistent and notable difference in the cost-effectiveness in the funding opportunities between causes. At this point, so long as those opportunities are within the Fund’s scope, funding the most cost-effective opportunities will likely outweigh supporting a more diverse range of causes.GranteesThis section will provide further information about the grantees and a specific comment from Longview on why they chose to fund the organisation and how they expect the funding to be used. Each page lin...