Have you considered / do you plan to consider paying EA Funds grantmakers, so that they’d potentially have more time to consider where to direct grants and give feedback to unsuccessful applicants?
My not very informed guess is that only a minority of fund managers are primarily financially constrained. I think (a) giving detailed feedback is demanding [especially negative feedback]; (b) I expect that most of the fund managers are just very busy.
Yeah, I’d love to see this happen, both because I think that it’s good to pay people for their time, and also because of the incentives it creates. However, as Misha_Yagudin says, I don’t think financial constraints are the main bottleneck on getting good feedback or doing in-depth grant reviews, and time constraints are the bigger factor.
One thing I’ve been mulling over for some time is appointing full-time grantmakers to at least some of the Funds. This isn’t likely to be feasible in the near term (say, at least 6 months), and would depend a lot on how the product evolves, as well as funding constraints, but it’s definitely something we’ve considered.
Thanks for answer! Another option in this vein would be to pay a Secretariat to handle correspondence with grant applicants, collecting grantmakers’ views, giving feedback, writing up the recommendations based on jot notes from the grantmakers, etc. I’m not sure how much time a competent admin person could save Fund grantmakers, but it might be worth trying.
Yeah, this is something that’s definitely been discussed, and I think this would be a logical first step between the current state of the world and hiring grantmakers to specific teams.
Have you considered / do you plan to consider paying EA Funds grantmakers, so that they’d potentially have more time to consider where to direct grants and give feedback to unsuccessful applicants?
My not very informed guess is that only a minority of fund managers are primarily financially constrained. I think (a) giving detailed feedback is demanding [especially negative feedback]; (b) I expect that most of the fund managers are just very busy.
Yeah, I’d love to see this happen, both because I think that it’s good to pay people for their time, and also because of the incentives it creates. However, as Misha_Yagudin says, I don’t think financial constraints are the main bottleneck on getting good feedback or doing in-depth grant reviews, and time constraints are the bigger factor.
One thing I’ve been mulling over for some time is appointing full-time grantmakers to at least some of the Funds. This isn’t likely to be feasible in the near term (say, at least 6 months), and would depend a lot on how the product evolves, as well as funding constraints, but it’s definitely something we’ve considered.
Thanks for answer! Another option in this vein would be to pay a Secretariat to handle correspondence with grant applicants, collecting grantmakers’ views, giving feedback, writing up the recommendations based on jot notes from the grantmakers, etc. I’m not sure how much time a competent admin person could save Fund grantmakers, but it might be worth trying.
Yeah, this is something that’s definitely been discussed, and I think this would be a logical first step between the current state of the world and hiring grantmakers to specific teams.