So I’ll start off by being a jerk and say that it seems there are a lot of spelling things going on in your comment.
These spelling boo-boos are, like, sort of on the nose here, for this particular topic and maybe why it got only a downvote.
What gets under my skin is that I suspect I put even less effort into writing and spelling than you and that my ability isn’t higher. I’m not a better writer or speller. I have tools or something, so my half baked ideas come out pretty smooth.
Like, I’m mansplaining but a trick is to try writing up or copying into Google docs, which fixes up a lot of grammar and writing snags. Also, people are working on more general tools to help spread and replicate principled and clear thought (FTX idea #2 or something) but that takes more time.
If someone had access to DMs, what are possible reasons they would make this message public? Would a reasonable person knowing EA forum norms expect writing this message to help them? What would the actual impact on public perception on the other person be? Why would someone do something like this rhetorically?
By the way, this person obviously speaks a second (or third language). This is close to heroic. Me writing quickly in Swedish would be impossible.
So, if you made it past this far, about grantmaking skill and concentration: I think I’m right, but I could be wrong and it seems good to have the strongest form of this criticism.
But look, especially in this situation, it seems difficult to communicate and explain the topic of grant making skill. There’s a lot of things going on and I’m also sort of dumb. If we don’t agree on the premises it’s hard to make progress.
Because of this, I want to ask, is this really about grant making skill (which I think is extremely, comically demanding) or is it about perceived control, values or fairness, or something else?
Did you see Mackenzie Scott’s “org” distributing 8.6B? She wrote a public letter on medium explaining her views.
After reading this, it “feels” strange to imagine walking into Scott’s office and telling them about democracy or something, even though I don’t agree with all the funding choices.
But certainly this feeling isn’t the same for EA. But why is this?
For EA grantmaking, what’s the “promise”, what is owed, and to whom? I honestly want to learn from you.
There are gaps in the sytem exactly because grantmaking is hard.
No, this is not about grantmakting skills, or at least not directly. But skillsin relationtothe task dificulty is very relevant. But nither is it about fairness. Slowing down to worry about fairness with in EA seems dumb.
This is about not spreading harmfull missleading information to applicants, and other potential donors who are concidering if they want to make thier own donation decition or not.
I’m mostly just trying to say that can we please accknolage that the system is not perfect? How do I say this without anyone feeling attact?
Getting rejected hurts. If you tell everyone that EA has heeps of money and that the grantmakers are perfect, then it hurts about 100x more. This is a real cost. EA is loosing members because of this, and almost no-one talks about it. But it would not be so bad, if we could just agree that grantmaking is hard, and therefor grantmakers makes mistakes sometimes.
My current understanding is that the bigest dificulty in grantmaking is the information bandwith. The text in the application is usually not nearly enough information, which is why grantmakers rely on other channels of information. This information is nesserarly biased by their network, mainly it is much easier to get funded if you know the right people. This is all fine! I want grantmakers to use all the information they can, even if this casues unfairness. All successfull networks rely hevily on personal conections, becasue it’s just more efficient. Personal trust beats formal systems every day. I just wish we could be honest about what is going on.
I don’t expect rich people to deligate their funding decitions to unknown people outside their network, just for fairness. I don’t think that would be a good idea.
But I do want EAs who who happen to have some money to give, and happen to have significantly diffrent networks compared to the super donors, to be aware of this, to be aware of their comparative advantage to donate in their own network, instead of deligating this away to EA Funds.
What is owed is honesty. That is all.
It’s not even the case that the grant makers themsevels exagurate their own infalability, at least not explicitly. But others do, which leads to the same problems. This makes it harder to answer “who owes what”. Fortunatly I don’t care much about blame. I just want to spread more accurate informations becasue I’ve seen the harm of the missinformation. That’s why I decided to argue against your comment. Leaving those claims unchalanged would add to the problems I tried to explain here.
_____________________
Regarding spelling. I usually try harder. But this topic makes me very angry, so I try minimising the time I spend on writing this. Sorry about that.
What you’re saying makes sense and is important to me. In fact it’s mainly what I care about.
In the comment that appeared above your first reply. I said the experts (like take the billions of people in the world, and then take the best in each domain) might be so good that it’s difficult to communicate or understand them.
So my claim was that it is unwieldy for a large group of people to act like grant makers because of the nature of these experts. I left the door open to grantmakers being this good (because that seems positive and it’s strong to say they can’t be?).
I think you believe I’m arguing that current grantmakers are unquestionable. That isn’t what I wrote (you can look again at the top comment, I can’t link, I’m typing on my phone and it’s hard, seriously this physically hurts my thumbs ).
In the other comment chain with you, you replied objecting to the idea of malign behaviour requiring centralization. Here, sort of like above, I find it tempting to see you pushing back against a broader point than I originally made.
I’m not writing this comment, the previous comment or any comment here to you because I want to argue. I didn’t write it because I want to be polite or even strictly because I had a “scout mentality”. I literally don’t have any attachments for or against what you said. I wanted to understand.
You expressed something important to you. I’m sorry you felt the need to write or defend with the effort and emotion you did.
The reason why this is valuable is that most of what I wrote and the top of what you wrote are just arguments.
We can take these arguments and knock them out of someone’s hand, or give better new ones instead. It’s just logic and reasoning.
It’s the values that I care about and wanted to understand. The reasons why you wanted to talk and how you felt. (This wasn’t supposed to be difficult or cause stress either).
Hi,
So I’ll start off by being a jerk and say that it seems there are a lot of spelling things going on in your comment.
These spelling boo-boos are, like, sort of on the nose here, for this particular topic and maybe why it got only a downvote.
What gets under my skin is that I suspect I put even less effort into writing and spelling than you and that my ability isn’t higher. I’m not a better writer or speller. I have tools or something, so my half baked ideas come out pretty smooth.
Like, I’m mansplaining but a trick is to try writing up or copying into Google docs, which fixes up a lot of grammar and writing snags. Also, people are working on more general tools to help spread and replicate principled and clear thought (FTX idea #2 or something) but that takes more time.
This is good advice in the wrong place. DMs exist dude.
If someone had access to DMs, what are possible reasons they would make this message public? Would a reasonable person knowing EA forum norms expect writing this message to help them? What would the actual impact on public perception on the other person be? Why would someone do something like this rhetorically?
By the way, this person obviously speaks a second (or third language). This is close to heroic. Me writing quickly in Swedish would be impossible.
So, if you made it past this far, about grantmaking skill and concentration: I think I’m right, but I could be wrong and it seems good to have the strongest form of this criticism.
But look, especially in this situation, it seems difficult to communicate and explain the topic of grant making skill. There’s a lot of things going on and I’m also sort of dumb. If we don’t agree on the premises it’s hard to make progress.
Because of this, I want to ask, is this really about grant making skill (which I think is extremely, comically demanding) or is it about perceived control, values or fairness, or something else?
Did you see Mackenzie Scott’s “org” distributing 8.6B? She wrote a public letter on medium explaining her views.
https://mackenzie-scott.medium.com/helping-any-of-us-can-help-us-all-f4c7487818d9
After reading this, it “feels” strange to imagine walking into Scott’s office and telling them about democracy or something, even though I don’t agree with all the funding choices.
But certainly this feeling isn’t the same for EA. But why is this?
For EA grantmaking, what’s the “promise”, what is owed, and to whom? I honestly want to learn from you.
I agree that grantmaking is hard!
There are gaps in the sytem exactly because grantmaking is hard.
No, this is not about grantmakting skills, or at least not directly. But skills in relation to the task dificulty is very relevant. But nither is it about fairness. Slowing down to worry about fairness with in EA seems dumb.
This is about not spreading harmfull missleading information to applicants, and other potential donors who are concidering if they want to make thier own donation decition or not.
I’m mostly just trying to say that can we please accknolage that the system is not perfect? How do I say this without anyone feeling attact?
Getting rejected hurts. If you tell everyone that EA has heeps of money and that the grantmakers are perfect, then it hurts about 100x more. This is a real cost. EA is loosing members because of this, and almost no-one talks about it. But it would not be so bad, if we could just agree that grantmaking is hard, and therefor grantmakers makes mistakes sometimes.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Khon9Bhmad7v4dNKe/the-cost-of-rejection
My current understanding is that the bigest dificulty in grantmaking is the information bandwith. The text in the application is usually not nearly enough information, which is why grantmakers rely on other channels of information. This information is nesserarly biased by their network, mainly it is much easier to get funded if you know the right people. This is all fine! I want grantmakers to use all the information they can, even if this casues unfairness. All successfull networks rely hevily on personal conections, becasue it’s just more efficient. Personal trust beats formal systems every day. I just wish we could be honest about what is going on.
I don’t expect rich people to deligate their funding decitions to unknown people outside their network, just for fairness. I don’t think that would be a good idea.
But I do want EAs who who happen to have some money to give, and happen to have significantly diffrent networks compared to the super donors, to be aware of this, to be aware of their comparative advantage to donate in their own network, instead of deligating this away to EA Funds.
What is owed is honesty. That is all.
It’s not even the case that the grant makers themsevels exagurate their own infalability, at least not explicitly. But others do, which leads to the same problems. This makes it harder to answer “who owes what”. Fortunatly I don’t care much about blame. I just want to spread more accurate informations becasue I’ve seen the harm of the missinformation. That’s why I decided to argue against your comment. Leaving those claims unchalanged would add to the problems I tried to explain here.
_____________________
Regarding spelling. I usually try harder. But this topic makes me very angry, so I try minimising the time I spend on writing this. Sorry about that.
What you’re saying makes sense and is important to me. In fact it’s mainly what I care about.
In the comment that appeared above your first reply. I said the experts (like take the billions of people in the world, and then take the best in each domain) might be so good that it’s difficult to communicate or understand them.
So my claim was that it is unwieldy for a large group of people to act like grant makers because of the nature of these experts. I left the door open to grantmakers being this good (because that seems positive and it’s strong to say they can’t be?).
I think you believe I’m arguing that current grantmakers are unquestionable. That isn’t what I wrote (you can look again at the top comment, I can’t link, I’m typing on my phone and it’s hard, seriously this physically hurts my thumbs ).
In the other comment chain with you, you replied objecting to the idea of malign behaviour requiring centralization. Here, sort of like above, I find it tempting to see you pushing back against a broader point than I originally made.
You did this because it was important to you.
I’m not writing this comment, the previous comment or any comment here to you because I want to argue. I didn’t write it because I want to be polite or even strictly because I had a “scout mentality”. I literally don’t have any attachments for or against what you said. I wanted to understand.
You expressed something important to you. I’m sorry you felt the need to write or defend with the effort and emotion you did.
The reason why this is valuable is that most of what I wrote and the top of what you wrote are just arguments.
We can take these arguments and knock them out of someone’s hand, or give better new ones instead. It’s just logic and reasoning.
It’s the values that I care about and wanted to understand. The reasons why you wanted to talk and how you felt. (This wasn’t supposed to be difficult or cause stress either).