Guidance

For one example of what an excellent submission might look like, see our colleague Lauren Gilbert’s shallow investigation on civil conflict reduction. It demonstrates reasoning transparency, considers uncertainty, and looks at quantitative measures of importance, tractability, and neglectedness. It also examines actions Open Philanthropy might want to take as a grantmaker.

You should assume that your reader is the CEO of Open Philanthropy, who is smart and has a baseline knowledge of the field, but is otherwise relying on your work to understand why this cause area makes sense for grantmaking (open prompt) or to understand the details of your chosen research question (the health, development, and worldview prompts).

We often use simple “back of the envelope” calculations to estimate cost-effectiveness. For more details, see Lauren’s shallow investigation and this blog post on our system for comparing interventions that save lives or increase income. (We expect these materials to be helpful for some authors, but you aren’t required to use them.)

It’s fine to use bullet points and informal language. The work should not be "salesy" or promotional; we are looking for you to convey your thinking with epistemic clarity and humility, and focus on the most important considerations. You may find it helpful to call out explicitly where you think the evidence and/or your analysis is weakest.

We do not expect you to be able to answer every question of relevance to your research topic. You should prioritize what you think is most important. At the end of your write-up, we suggest listing your remaining open questions, and topics on which you would want to spend additional research time.

It’s important for us to be able to follow your reasoning and your sources, but you don’t need to use a particular citation format or house style. Link to your sources, but don’t spend time standardizing or reformatting your work.

We are conducting research to guide our funding decisions. Please keep this action-oriented frame in mind.

Please do not contact anyone in the field for more information; desk research is sufficient.

If you have any questions, you can contact hello@causeexplorationprizes.com.