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).
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).