This is about intangible characteristics that seem really important in a grantee.
To give intuition, I guess one analogy is hiring. You wouldn’t hire someone off a LinkedIn profile, there’s just so much “latent” or unknown information and fit that matters. To solve this problem, people often have pretty deep networks and do reference checks on people.
This is important because if you went in big for another CSET, or something that had to start in the millions, you better know the people, the space super well.
I think this means you need to communicate well with other grant makers. For any given major grant, this might be a lot easier with 3-5 close colleagues, versus a group of 100 people.
I see! Interestingly there are organizations, like DAOs, that do hiring in a decentralized manner (lots of people deciding on one candidate). There probably isn’t much efficacy data on that compared to more centralized hiring, but it’s something I’m interested in knowing.
I think there are ways to assess candidates that can be less centralized, like work samples, rather than reference checks. I mainly use that when hiring, given it seems some of the best correlates of future work performance are present and past work performance on related tasks.
If sensitive info matters, I can see smaller groups being more helpful, I guess I’m not sure the degree to which that’s necessary. Basically I think that public info can also have pretty good signal.
So it doesn’t matter how large your team is, there’s no value getting 1000 grantmakers if you only need to know 200 experts in the space.
That’s a good point! Hmm, I think that does go into interesting and harder to answer questions like whether experts are needed/how useful they are, whether having people ask a bunch of different subject matter experts that they are connected with (easier with a more decentralized model) is better than asking a few that a funder has vetted (common with centralized models), whether an expert interview that can be recorded and shared is as good as interviewing the expert yourself, etc., some of which may be field-by-field.
Someone has to kibosh this, and a set of unified grant makers could do this.
Is there a reason a decentralized network couldn’t also do this? If it turns out that there are differing views, it seems that might be a hard judgement to make, whether in a centralized model or not.
Is there a reason a decentralized network couldn’t also do this? If it turns out that there are differing views, it seems that might be a hard judgement to make, whether in a centralized model or not.
So this is borderline politics as this point, but I would expect that a malign agent could capture or entrench in some sort of voting/decentralized network more easily than any high quality implementation of an EA grant making system (E.g, see politicians/posturing).
(So this is a little spicy and there’s maybe some inferential leaps here? but ) a good comment related to the need for centralization comes from what I think are very good inside views on ETH development.
In ETH development, it’s clear how centralized decision-making de-facto occurs, for all important development and functionality. This is made by a central leadership, despite there technically being voting and decentralization in a mechanical sense.
That’s pretty telling since this is like the canonical decentralized thing.
Your comments are really interesting and important.
I guess that public demand for my own personal comments is low, and I’ll probably no longer reply, feel free to PM!
I see! Interestingly there are organizations, like DAOs, that do hiring in a decentralized manner (lots of people deciding on one candidate). There probably isn’t much efficacy data on that compared to more centralized hiring, but it’s something I’m interested in knowing.
I think there are ways to assess candidates that can be less centralized, like work samples, rather than reference checks. I mainly use that when hiring, given it seems some of the best correlates of future work performance are present and past work performance on related tasks.
If sensitive info matters, I can see smaller groups being more helpful, I guess I’m not sure the degree to which that’s necessary. Basically I think that public info can also have pretty good signal.
That’s a good point! Hmm, I think that does go into interesting and harder to answer questions like whether experts are needed/how useful they are, whether having people ask a bunch of different subject matter experts that they are connected with (easier with a more decentralized model) is better than asking a few that a funder has vetted (common with centralized models), whether an expert interview that can be recorded and shared is as good as interviewing the expert yourself, etc., some of which may be field-by-field.
Is there a reason a decentralized network couldn’t also do this? If it turns out that there are differing views, it seems that might be a hard judgement to make, whether in a centralized model or not.
So this is borderline politics as this point, but I would expect that a malign agent could capture or entrench in some sort of voting/decentralized network more easily than any high quality implementation of an EA grant making system (E.g, see politicians/posturing).
(So this is a little spicy and there’s maybe some inferential leaps here? but ) a good comment related to the need for centralization comes from what I think are very good inside views on ETH development.
In ETH development, it’s clear how centralized decision-making de-facto occurs, for all important development and functionality. This is made by a central leadership, despite there technically being voting and decentralization in a mechanical sense.
That’s pretty telling since this is like the canonical decentralized thing.
Your comments are really interesting and important.
I guess that public demand for my own personal comments is low, and I’ll probably no longer reply, feel free to PM!