EA - Reflections on my time on the Long-Term Future Fund by abergal

Welcome 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: Reflections on my time on the Long-Term Future Fund, published by abergal on August 2, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I'm stepping down as chair of the Long-Term Future Fund. I'm writing this post partially as a loose set of reflections on my time there, and partially as an overall update on what's going on with the fund, as I think we should generally be transparent with donors and grantees, and my sense is the broader community has fairly little insight into the fund's current operations. I'll start with a brief history of what's happened since I joined the fund, and its impact, and move to a few reflections on ways the fund is working now.(Also- you can donate to the Long-Term Future Fund here, and let us know here if you might be interested in becoming a fund manager. (The Long-Term Future Fund is part of EA Funds, which is a fiscally sponsored project of Effective Ventures Foundation (UK) (EV UK) and Effective Ventures Foundation USA Inc. (EV US). Donations to the Long-Term Future Fund are donations to EV US or EV UK.))A brief history of my time on the Long-Term Future FundI joined the Long-Term Future Fund as a fund manager in June 2020. At the time, it was chaired by Matt Wage, had five fund managers (including me), and ran three rounds per year, with order ~50 applications per round, giving away an average of ~$450K per round in both 2019 and 2020, for a total of ~$1.35M per year.Matt Wage left the fund, and I was appointed the new chair in February 2021. We also hired a number of new fund managers, and decided to try out a guest manager system where we had more temporary fund managers work with the fund. (We're still doing that today.)The biggest change that I pushed for during my time as chair (which I believe was originally suggested by Ozzie Goeen, thanks Ozzie) was switching from three fixed rounds a year to a rolling application system, where anyone could apply to the fund at any time. My current guess is that this was a pretty big boost to the fund's impact, via giving us access to a bunch of counterfactual grant opportunities that other funders (who either didn't have rolling applications, or were funding a more constrained set of things) didn't have access to. I also pushed for a switch away from mandatory public reporting for our grant applicants (which I discuss somewhat below), which I also think gave us access to better grant opportunities, and which I also overall still endorse.At a high-level, the fund consists of a number of fund managers who work a relatively low number of hours per week (generally 3 - 10, though I think it might be trending even lower recently). EA Funds itself only has one full-time employee - Caleb Parikh. There's been significant fund manager turnover since I joined the fund, generally because relevant fund managers have wanted to prioritize their other work - since I joined the fund, Matt Wage and Helen Toner have left, Adam Gleave, Evan Hubinger, and Becca Kagan have joined as permanent fund managers and then left, Linchuan Zhang has joined as a permanent fund manager, and we've had a number of guest managers join and leave the fund.Also during my time on the fund, the volume of our grantmaking work has scaled significantly - whereas in 2020, we received 211 applications and funded 34 as grants, worth ~$1.3M dollars total, from March 2022 to March 2023, we received 878 applications and funded 263 as grants, worth ~$9.1M dollars total.The fund's impactMy reflections below focus on ways I think the Long-Term Future Fund has been suboptimal over my time as chair, and I got feedback on my original draft of this post that this made it seem like my view of the fund was negative overall, which wasn't my intention. For clarity, my best guess is that overall, the Long-Term Future Fund has been, and continues to b...