More on Deferral

And we're hiring

I’m looking for people with technical backgrounds in ML, hardware, or information security to join the AI Governance and Policy team at Coefficient Giving. If you¹ have such a background, and you’ve never seriously considered grantmaking, or if your instinct is that your technical skills wouldn’t be especially helpful, this post is an attempt to change your mind. We’re also hiring for a wide variety of other grantmaker and generalist roles across our Global Catastrophic Risks (GCR) teams.

We expect to move around $1 billion in GCR grants this year, a significant step up from last year, and we expect that figure to keep growing. Trying to make sure this happens has prompted big internal changes aimed at helping us get faster, be less bureaucratic, and push for more ambition on individual grants. I felt the effects of this viscerally² on returning from parental leave a few weeks ago.

But however good we get on speed and ambition, we can only say “yes” to what comes in. And a lot of what I think matters most – work where currently the world is completely dropping the ball – isn’t coming in. We have to go out and create those opportunities. That takes a lot more time and deeper understanding to prioritise.

Which means our team is much more capacity-constrained than funding-constrained. And we’re particularly constrained on technical capacity.

A few months ago I wrote Deferral is a skill, because I thought people were underrating how much serious thinking is involved in working out what’s true even if your sources are other people rather than original research. A lot of that thinking is involved in grantmaking, and helped by the kinds of background I’m looking for, which I’ll try to articulate below.

I’m never going to be the world’s top expert on the thing I’m funding, but I’m usually going to have access to people who are.

Unfortunately, there often isn’t an obvious person to ask, and sometimes there isn’t an obvious question. Even when an expert can give you a clear answer on the technical point, it’s on you to work out what that means for the actual decision you’re facing.

I’ve had questions where tens of millions of dollars were on the line, I asked two of the world’s top ~five experts in the relevant domain, and I then got contradictory answers. You can’t just shrug, pick the expert you like most, and move on. You have to actually try to develop a view. Listen to the mechanistic arguments people give, evaluate whether those arguments hold up, push back where they don’t, and then evaluate the responses to your pushback. All of that is far easier to do when you’re fluent in the material.

Even if there’s a clear consensus, or a single best-placed expert who you can ask questions of³, you have to be able to notice when an expert has answered a nearby question rather than the one you needed⁴.

Holding the map

To the extent that grantmakers do end up “world class” in some technical domain, it’s in something like “holding a detailed, opinionated map of a field”. People working on one part of the terrain will know that part much better than I ever will. But it’s not their job to track every adjacent effort, notice persistent gaps, compare five proposals trying to solve nearby problems, or work out which two groups should probably be talking to each other.

The best grantmakers will have a live, gears-level model of the area they work in, against which any specific project can be evaluated, and within which gaps can be noticed and filled. This is a hard thing to do, and without enough depth, you risk just tracking the legible social surface instead. Sometimes that’s useful. Often it isn’t enough.

With a detailed map, deferral itself gets easier. If I understand an area well, I can get more out of a half-hour call with someone working in it, and form a better view of how good a project’s outputs actually are. If I’m really engaging with the views of the experts I call on, I can quickly build a picture of when and how I should just fully take their answer as gospel.

If you like learning across a range of different areas, including by literally talking to some of the world’s foremost experts about the questions you most want answered – this role gives you an unusual amount of that. You get to speedrun learning something up to near expert level, and then move on to something else.

I find this very much my thing. Most of the people I know who are good at it find it very much theirs. But not everyone is going to have a good time with it.

If you love going as deep as possible into one specific technical area, and you’d hate spending much of your time one step removed from the object-level work, you probably wouldn’t like this role. If jumping between topics, and spending nearly all of your time talking to people about stuff that they’ve spent way longer thinking about than you sounds hard, or frustrating, or stressful, you aren’t going to have a good time.

Similarly, if your reaction to noticing that there are a bunch of things which need to happen is “I’m going to pick one of those things, and fix it myself”, the kind of gap-filling we’re likely to do is probably not going to appeal. We want to make things happen, and that involves a lot more agency than one might expect, but it’s still going to look more like scoping a project, finding someone to run it, and then giving them a ton of resources, than taking on the project yourself.

If you’re on the fence, apply. When I was advising at 80,000 Hours I’d often tell people that application processes are a great way to get information about whether a role is right for you, and I think ours is a very good simulation of (parts of) the job. If you get through the early stages, I’d be excited to talk through what the work tests do and don’t capture, and help you figure out fit. I’m worried that we won’t fill these roles, and I want to find great people for them, but we’re all on the same team, and if you’d do more good elsewhere, I’d rather help you figure that out than hire you.

Round closes 11:59pm Pacific Time, 17 May 2026. Apply here.

1. If this doesn’t describe you, but does describe someone you know, please send them this post and encourage them to apply! If you refer someone who we end up hiring, we offer a $5k bonus.

2. I'd been on parental leave for two months, and don't know how much of the shift I felt on returning was that the effort had really kicked up while I was off, or just two months of steady improvement landing all at once, but the difference was striking.

3. Often you actually can ask such an expert, which I think is a massive perk of the job! Lots of parts of my life feel weird and cool, but one of the coolest is that we can have a heuristic of “if it’s a big/important decision, we should get a take from one of the best-placed experts in the world”, and then actually follow it.

4. I say ‘needed’ rather than ‘asked’ here deliberately. Asking the right question isn’t sufficient to ensure that the answer you get is about precisely the thing you wanted, but it’s pretty much always necessary!