This in particular strikes me as understandable but very unfortunate. I’d strongly prefer a fund where happening to live near or otherwise know a grantmaker is not a key part of getting a grant. Are there any plans or any way progress can be made on this issue?
I agree this creates unfortunate incentives for EAs to burn resources living in high cost-of-living areas (perhaps even while doing independent research which could in theory be done from anywhere!) However, if I was a grantmaker, I can see why this arrangement would be preferable: Evaluating grants feels like work and costs emotional energy. Talking to people at parties feels like play and creates emotional energy. For many grantmakers, I imagine getting to know people in a casual environment is effectively costless, and re-using that knowledge in the service of grantmaking allows more grants to be made.
I suspect there’s low-hanging fruit in having the grantmaking team be geographically distributed. To my knowledge, at least 3 of these 4 grantmakers live in the Bay Area, which means they probably have a lot of overlap in their social network. If the goal is to select the minimum number of supernetworkers to cover as much of the EA social network as possible, I think you’d want each person to be located in a different geographic EA hub. (Perhaps you’d want supernetworkers covering disparate online communities devoted to EA as well.)
This also provides an interesting reframing of all the recent EA Hotel discussion: Instead of “Fund the EA Hotel”, maybe the key intervention is “Locate grantmakers in low cost-of-living locations. Where grant money goes, EAs will follow, and everyone can save on living expenses.” (BTW, the EA Hotel is actually a pretty good place to be if you’re an aspiring EA supernetworker. I met many more EAs during the 6 months I spent there than my previous 6 months in the Bay Area. There are always people passing through for brief stays.)
To my knowledge, at least 3 of these 4 grantmakers live in the Bay Area, which means they probably have a lot of overlap in their social network.
That is incorrect. The current grant team was actually explicitly chosen on the basis of having non-overlapping networks. Besides me nobody lives in the Bay Area (at least full time). Here is where I think everyone is living:
Matt Fallshaw: Australia (but also travels a lot)
Helen Toner: Georgetown (I think)
Alex Zhu: No current permanent living location, travels a lot, might live in Boulder starting a few weeks from now
Matt Wage: New York
I was also partially chosen because I used to live in Europe and still have pretty strong connections to a lot of european communities (plus my work on online communities making my network less geographically centralized).
Evaluating grants feels like work and costs emotional energy. Talking to people at parties feels like play and creates emotional energy. For many grantmakers, I imagine getting to know people in a casual environment is effectively costless, and re-using that knowledge in the service of grantmaking allows more grants to be made.
At least for me this doesn’t really resonate with how I am thinking about grantmaking. The broader EA/Rationality/LTF community is in significant chunks a professional network, and so I’ve worked with a lot of people on a lot of projects over the years. I’ve discussed cause prioritization questions on the EA Forum, worked with many people at CEA, tried to develop the art of human rationality on LessWrong, worked with people at CFAR, discussed many important big picture questions with people at FHI, etc.
The vast majority of my interactions with people do not come from parties, but come from settings where people are trying to solve some kind of problem, and seeing how others solve that problem is significant evidence about whether they can solve similar problems.
It’s not that I hang out with lots of people at parties, make lots of friends and then that is my primary source for evaluating grant candidates. I basically don’t really go to any parties (I actually tend to find them emotionally exhausting, and only go to parties if I have some concrete goal to achieve at one). Instead I work with a lot of people and try to solve problems with them and then that obviously gives me significant evidence about who is good at solving what kinds of problems.
I do find grant interviews more exhausting than other kinds of work, but I think that has to do with the directly adversarial setting in which the applicant is trying their best to seem competent and good, and I am trying my best to get an accurate judgement of their competence, and I think that dynamic usually makes that kind of interview a much worse source of evidence of someone’s competence than having worked with them on some problem for a few hours (which is also why work-tests tend to be much better predictors of future job-performance than interview-performance).
I agree this creates unfortunate incentives for EAs to burn resources living in high cost-of-living areas (perhaps even while doing independent research which could in theory be done from anywhere!) However, if I was a grantmaker, I can see why this arrangement would be preferable: Evaluating grants feels like work and costs emotional energy. Talking to people at parties feels like play and creates emotional energy. For many grantmakers, I imagine getting to know people in a casual environment is effectively costless, and re-using that knowledge in the service of grantmaking allows more grants to be made.
I suspect there’s low-hanging fruit in having the grantmaking team be geographically distributed. To my knowledge, at least 3 of these 4 grantmakers live in the Bay Area, which means they probably have a lot of overlap in their social network. If the goal is to select the minimum number of supernetworkers to cover as much of the EA social network as possible, I think you’d want each person to be located in a different geographic EA hub. (Perhaps you’d want supernetworkers covering disparate online communities devoted to EA as well.)
This also provides an interesting reframing of all the recent EA Hotel discussion: Instead of “Fund the EA Hotel”, maybe the key intervention is “Locate grantmakers in low cost-of-living locations. Where grant money goes, EAs will follow, and everyone can save on living expenses.” (BTW, the EA Hotel is actually a pretty good place to be if you’re an aspiring EA supernetworker. I met many more EAs during the 6 months I spent there than my previous 6 months in the Bay Area. There are always people passing through for brief stays.)
That is incorrect. The current grant team was actually explicitly chosen on the basis of having non-overlapping networks. Besides me nobody lives in the Bay Area (at least full time). Here is where I think everyone is living:
Matt Fallshaw: Australia (but also travels a lot)
Helen Toner: Georgetown (I think)
Alex Zhu: No current permanent living location, travels a lot, might live in Boulder starting a few weeks from now
Matt Wage: New York
I was also partially chosen because I used to live in Europe and still have pretty strong connections to a lot of european communities (plus my work on online communities making my network less geographically centralized).
Good to know!
Isn’t Matt in HK?
He sure was on weird timezones during our meetings, so I think he might be both? (as in, flying between the two places)
Update: I was just wrong, Matt is indeed primarily HK
Boy, there are two Matts in that list.
At least for me this doesn’t really resonate with how I am thinking about grantmaking. The broader EA/Rationality/LTF community is in significant chunks a professional network, and so I’ve worked with a lot of people on a lot of projects over the years. I’ve discussed cause prioritization questions on the EA Forum, worked with many people at CEA, tried to develop the art of human rationality on LessWrong, worked with people at CFAR, discussed many important big picture questions with people at FHI, etc.
The vast majority of my interactions with people do not come from parties, but come from settings where people are trying to solve some kind of problem, and seeing how others solve that problem is significant evidence about whether they can solve similar problems.
It’s not that I hang out with lots of people at parties, make lots of friends and then that is my primary source for evaluating grant candidates. I basically don’t really go to any parties (I actually tend to find them emotionally exhausting, and only go to parties if I have some concrete goal to achieve at one). Instead I work with a lot of people and try to solve problems with them and then that obviously gives me significant evidence about who is good at solving what kinds of problems.
I do find grant interviews more exhausting than other kinds of work, but I think that has to do with the directly adversarial setting in which the applicant is trying their best to seem competent and good, and I am trying my best to get an accurate judgement of their competence, and I think that dynamic usually makes that kind of interview a much worse source of evidence of someone’s competence than having worked with them on some problem for a few hours (which is also why work-tests tend to be much better predictors of future job-performance than interview-performance).