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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: Some unfun lessons I learned as a junior grantmaker, published by Linch on May 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I’ve been a part-time grantmaker since January 15th or so, first (and currently) as a guest manager on the Long-Term Future Fund, and more recently did non-trivial other grantmaking as well. In doing so, I learned a number of useful but not fun lessons, some of which may be useful to others on this forum. I mostly learned these lessons through consulting more senior grantmakers and other advisors, and secondarily from thinking through these problems abstractly, rather than independently learning them the hard way from contact with reality with my own grants. Standard disclaimers apply: all views are my own. I do not speak for any of the people who advised me on grantmaking. I do not speak for the Long-Term Future Fund, other grantmakers, or my full-time employer (Rethink Priorities). I believe my points are more true for the longtermist and meta spaces (I have zero experience with animal or global health grantmaking), and more true for longtermism than meta (in particular, I think the points about feedback especially are directionally true for meta but less so than in longtermist grantmaking). Most of my actual grants have been in forecasting, but I actually do not believe my points below are more true for forecasting grants than for other subfields of longtermist grantmaking. In this article, I tried my best to convey knowledge that is both true and at least somewhat novel to me/this Forum. In doing so, I may say things that are systematically not-yet-said because others believe that these messages are difficult to hear and convey publicly with the appropriate level of care and nuance. I tried my best to be both honest and kind, but I likely still screwed up the balance at various parts. I ask for your patience. Summary Important lessons (Refresher) The top grants are much much better than the marginal grants, even ex ante. All of the grantmakers are extremely busy Most (within-scope) projects are usually rejected for personal factors or person-project fit reasons Some of your most impactful work in grantmaking won’t look like evaluating grants Most grantmakers don’t (and shouldn’t) spend a lot of time on evaluating any given grant. It’s rarely worth your time to give detailed feedback Less Important Lessons The value of time for people in EA is incredibly high The direct counterfactual impact of grant evaluation is lower than I initially would have guessed People are often grateful to you for granting them money. This is a mistake. Conflicts of Interests are unavoidable if you want to maximize impact as a grantmaker in EA. Acceptance/Rejection rates can easily be extremely misleading (Refresher) The top grants are much much better than the marginal grants, even ex ante. I think it’s well understood in EA that for most important values of X in the EA space (charitable interventions, organizations, careers, etc,), the best X are much more impactful than the marginal X. I think I have internalized this more after I started grantmaking than before. In particular, I now understood that (from the perspective of many grantmakers), their top grants are ex ante much more impactful than their marginal grants. This lesson has publicly been discussed by other grantmakers, see e.g. I think the top decile is at least an order of magnitude more impactful (per dollar) than the bottom decile grantmaking that we’re doing Claire I think that more than half of the impact I have via my EAIF grantmaking is through the top 25% of the grants I make. And I am able to spend more time on making those best grants go better, by working on active grantmaking or by advising grantees in various ways. Buck In practice, this often means that your highest impact actions as a grant...