“SFF is very suboptimal” by Zach Stein-Perlman

I recently served as a recommender in SFF's annual funding round (grants will be decided and announced in September). I'm deeply grateful for SFF's funders, and I hope more AI safety donors appear in the future.

Unfortunately, the SFF experience is bad for both applicants and recommenders, it's slow, and it lacks some other desiderata. (The actual funding decisions are moderately good by my lights — probably over half of the value of grants that a better system with the same budget would produce, but substantial room for improvement.) The basic idea of the s-process—several recommenders compete to convince the funders to fund their recommendations each round, and so several different perspectives each get the best things by their lights funded and there's little delegation of power—is attractive. But SFF's implementation is bad.

My experience as a recommender

• Recommenders were told we would only have to spend 30 hours, but the stuff we were required to do took much more than 30 hours, and doing a good job took even longer.[1]
  • [Cherry-picked / unusually legible] example suggesting that the time commitment was more than SFF said: we were asked to spend one hour glancing at the top [...]

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Outline:

(01:00) My experience as a recommender

(05:30) Applicant experience

(06:08) Some desiderata

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
July 6th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/csfTETocJYZe3mNes/sff-is-very-suboptimal

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.