EA - What Does a Marginal Grant at LTFF Look Like? Funding Priorities and Grantmaking Thresholds at the Long-Term Future Fund by Linch

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: What Does a Marginal Grant at LTFF Look Like? Funding Priorities and Grantmaking Thresholds at the Long-Term Future Fund, published by Linch on August 10, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.The Long-Term Future Fund (LTFF) makes small, targeted grants with the aim of improving the long-term trajectory of humanity. We are currently fundraising to cover our grantmaking budget for the next 6 months. We would like to give donors more insight into how we prioritize different projects, so they have a better sense of how we plan to spend their marginal dollar. Below, we've compiled fictional but representative grants to illustrate what sort of projects we might fund depending on how much we raise for the next 6 months, assuming we receive grant applications at a similar rate and quality to the recent past.Our motivations for presenting this information are a) to provide transparency about how the LTFF works, and b) to move the EA and longtermist donor communities towards a more accurate understanding of what their donations are used for. Sometimes, when people donate to charities (EA or otherwise), they may wrongly assume that their donations go towards funding the average, or even more optimistically, the best work of those charities. However, it is usually more useful to consider the marginal impact for the world that additional dollars would buy. By offering illustrative examples of the sort of projects we might fund at different levels of funding, we hope to give potential donors a better sense of what their donations might buy, depending on how much funding has already been committed. We hope that this post will help improve the quality of thinking and discussions about charities in the EA and longtermist communities.For donors who believe that the current marginal LTFF grants are better than marginal funding of all other organizations, please consider donating! Compared to the last 3 years, we now have both a) unusually high quality and quantity of applications and b) unusually low amount of donations, which means we'll have to raise our bar substantially if we do not receive additional donations. This is an especially good time to donate, as donations are matched 2:1 by Open Philanthropy (OP donates $2 for every $1 you donate). That said, if you instead believe that marginal funding of another organization is (between 1x and 3x, depending on how you view marginal OP money) better than current marginal LTFF grants, then please do not donate to us, and instead donate to them and/or save the money for later.Background on the LTFFWe are committed to improving the long-term trajectory of civilization, with a particular focus on reducing global catastrophic risks.We specialize in funding early stage projects rather than established organizations.From March 2022 to March 2023, we received 878 applications and funded 263 as grants, worth ~$9.1M dollars total (average $34.6k/grant). To our knowledge, we have made more small grants in this time period than any other longtermist- or EA- motivated funder.Other funders in this space include Open Philanthropy, Survival and Flourishing Fund, and recently Lightspeed Grants and Manifund.Historically, ~40% of our funding has come from Open Phil. However, we are trying to become more independent of Open Phil. As a temporary stopgap measure, Open Phil is matching donations to LTFF 2:1 instead of granting to us directly.100% of money we fundraise for LTFF qua LTFF goes to grantees; we fundraise separately and privately for operational costs.We try to be very willing to fund weird things that the grantmakers' inside views believe are really impactful for the long-term future.You can read more about our work at our website here, or in our accompanying payout report here.Methodology for this analysisAt the LTFF, we assign ea...