Open Philanthropy is expanding and we are recruiting a number of talented new hires to help us direct philanthropic funding in new-to-OP causes and to join the team that identifies new areas for grantmaking. Our Global Health and Wellbeing team – which works to improve life through causes like global development, scientific research, and farm animal welfare – is ramping up its grantmaking. The GHW team directed more than $200M in grants in 2020 and we expect that number to rise substantially in the years to come.
We’re looking for two types of roles to help us direct billions of dollars of new giving over the coming years. First, we’re looking for experts who will lead Open Philanthropy’s giving in new cause areas we’ve identified as potential focus areas. We’re hiring two new Program Officers, in South Asian air quality and global aid advocacy. Each of these Program Officers will identify specific grants and grantees that we believe can beat our 1,000x social return on investment bar.1 We expect these positions to be filled by grantmakers who combine deep expertise in their area, strategic vision, and a quantitative mindset. We’re looking for people who already know many potential grantee organizations and can make reasoned and balanced arguments about why their approach is likely to clear our high bar for giving. We think finding the right grantmaker is a key ingredient to our potential impact in these causes, so we may not end up going into them if we can’t find the right people.
Read More Since 1900, the global economy has grown by about 3% each year, meaning that it doubles in size every 20–30 years. I’ve written a report assessing whether significantly faster growth might occur this century. Specifically, I ask whether growth could be ten times faster, with the global economy growing by 30% each year. This would mean it doubled in size every 2–3 years; I call this possibility ‘explosive growth’.
The report builds on the work of my colleague, David Roodman. Although recently growth has been fairly steady, in the distant past it was much slower. David developed a mathematical model for extrapolating this pattern into the future; after calibration to data for the last 12,000 years, the model predicts that the global economy will grow ever faster over time and that explosive growth is a couple of decades away! My report assesses David’s model, and compares it to other methods for extrapolating growth into the future.
At first glance, it might seem that explosive growth is implausible — that it is somehow absurd or economically naive. Contrary to this view, I offer three considerations from economic history and growth theory that suggest advanced AI could drive explosive growth. In brief:
Read More We’re excited to announce that Open Philanthropy co-founder Alexander Berger has been promoted to co-CEO!
For some time now, Alexander has been the primary leader for most of our work on causes focused on maximizing verifiable impact within our lifetimes, while I have increasingly focused on causes directly aimed at affecting the very long-run future. I felt that Alexander should be promoted to recognize this reality and formalize the division of labor at Open Philanthropy. I am confident that he is an excellent fit for this role.
Read More Since our last hiring update, we have had a lot of new staff join Open Philanthropy. I’d like to use this post to introduce the new members of our team. We’re excited to have them!
If you are interested in joining our team, check out open positions on our Working at Open Phil page.
Read More This post compares our progress with the goals we set forth a year ago, and lays out our plans for the coming year.
Read More One of Open Phil’s major focus areas is technical research and policy work aimed at reducing potential risks from advanced AI.
To inform this work, I have written a report developing one approach to forecasting when artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be developed. By AGI, I mean computer program(s) that can perform virtually any cognitive task as well as any human, for no more money than it would cost for a human to do it. The field of AI is largely understood to have begun in Dartmouth in 1956, and since its inception one of its central aims has been to develop AGI.1
Read More Open Philanthropy’s ability to give effectively to the world’s most important and neglected causes hinges on the collective strength and expertise of our team. As such, we’ve thought extensively about how we can identify those who could most meaningfully contribute to Open Philanthropy’s mission, and how we can craft a recruitment process that encourages them to apply.
Recruiting Manager Anya Hunt sat down with Communications Officer Michael Levine to talk about Open Philanthropy’s approach to recruiting, the role of work tests in the application process, and measures we are taking to diversify our pipeline and attract talent from different communities. The questions and answers have been edited lightly for clarity.
There are parallels to the way we approach grantmaking. Each hire is an investment — we’re making a bet that this person will help Open Phil more effectively carry out our mission. In both cases, we’re trying to be evidence-based where we can, but we’re also trying to minimize bureaucracy. We try to hold ourselves to rigorous standards of decision-making, accounting for our biases wherever possible. We can only be as effective as the people we hire. So we’re willing to invest an unusual amount of time and energy into sourcing and vetting candidates.
Mainly, it causes us to put work tests at the center of the process. After some basic screening, the first thing candidates do, typically, before we interview them, before anything else happens, is to take at least one work test, and we’ll pay them an honorarium to complete it. Then we evaluate it blind and generally admit people to the next round only if they meet a certain preset standard. This results in an unusually long process — that’s both an upside and a downside. It’s a downside for the obvious reasons, but it’s an upside because we think making a hire, and accepting an offer, is a really important decision on both our end and the candidate’s. Because onboarding new staff can be very costly to both us and the new hire, we aim to be highly confident in every offer we make (though of course we do still make mistakes).
Read More We believe that every life has equal value — and that philanthropic dollars can go particularly far by helping those who are living in poverty by global standards. Currently, many of the best giving opportunities we’ve found in the Global Health and Development focus area are recommended by GiveWell, a nonprofit dedicated to finding outstanding giving opportunities and publishing its full analysis to help donors decide where to give. (Learn more about our relationship with GiveWell here.)
GiveWell recently announced its recommendations for giving, a list that focuses on programs with a strong track record and excellent cost-effectiveness, can use additional funding to expand their core programs, and are exceptionally transparent. We have allocated an additional $100 million for GiveWell top charities, GiveWell standout charities, and GiveWell Incubation Grants in the year-end period (beyond what we’ve already granted to GiveWell-recommended charities earlier this year).
Read More When the Soviet Union began to fracture in 1991, the world was forced to reckon with the first collapse of a nuclear superpower in history.1 The USSR was home to more than 27,000 nuclear weapons, more than one million citizens working at nuclear facilities, and over 600 metric tons of nuclear fissile materials.2 It seemed inevitable that some of these weapons, experts, and materials would end up in terrorist cells or hostile states,3 especially given a series of recent failed attempts at non-proliferation cooperation between the US and the USSR.">
Read More Last year, the year before, the year before that, the year before that, and the year before that, we published a set of suggestions for individual donors looking for organizations to support. This year, we are repeating the practice and publishing updated suggestions from Open Philanthropy program staff who chose to provide them.
Similar caveats to previous years apply:
In addition, we’d add that these recommendations are made by the individual program officers or teams cited, and do not necessarily represent my (Holden’s) personal or Open Phil’s institutional “all things considered” view.
Note that we are no longer including “Why we haven’t fully funded it” information for each option. In most cases, these grants are coming from limited per-focus-area budgets.
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