Thanks Nick, and great take as usual (for others’ convenience, here it is)
I myself work at a CE-incubated charity, so I’m of course inclined to agree with you on the reasons you listed as to how CE’s approach mitigates the disadvantages smaller orgs and individuals have vs larger ones.
(As a tangent this is also why I have incredible respect for what you’ve managed to build at OneDay Health, AFAICT you don’t have any of those advantages we benefit from! Seriously: since 2017, 53(!) nurse-led health centers launched leading to 340k patients treated, >$600k saved by patients, 165k malaria cases treated, 125k under-5s treated is phenomenal. I wish you gave a talk at EAG on how you and the team did this, lots of lessons for aspiring “moral entrepreneurs” I’m sure. Sorry btw if this makes you feel awkward I’ve always wanted to express this)
That said I do think Scott is pointing to a slightly different thing than big vs small orgs, which is traditionally impressive credentials and ways of working vs non-traditional credentials or the lack thereof. I took Scott’s hope (which I shared) to be that there are a lot more people than we think who are “diamonds in the rough” — they may not have gone to Oxbridge / Ivy etc or have training & experience in medicine / law / consulting / tech / whatever prestigious career, and their ideas for making the world better may not be the usual ideas everyone agrees is “best” but oddball ones that make you go ”… huh?”, and most talent-spotters filter for these kinds of markers and would exclude them — but Scott (who doesn’t have a traditionally-impressive background himself) would see their potential and give them a shot, and the follow-up would hopefully prove him right. He’s disappointed that this doesn’t seem to be true, which suggests that those traditionally impressive credentials really do give a lot of hard-to-fake signal of your projects panning out. I mean I don’t think this is all that surprising, but also this is grist for the mill of the discussion around EA feeling elitist and exclusive to people with more “relatable” or less privileged backgrounds who nevertheless really want to contribute meaningfully to the whole “doing good better” project.
Yeah I think he might be combining/ conflating both the elitism and the bigger org issues actually. Based on “grants to legibly-credentialled people operating in high-status ways usually did better than betting on small scrappy startups” and “there were a lot of promising ACX community members with interesting ideas who were going to turn them into startups any day now, but who ended up kind of floundering”.
It makes me sad too, but I do agree on the traditionally impressive credentials front. There are definitely diamonds in the rough but they ain’t so easy to find!
Fantastic summary love it!
Made some comments on the small org vs. Big org thing, was going to reply here but it became a mini essay so put it on my quicktakes lol.
Thanks Nick, and great take as usual (for others’ convenience, here it is)
I myself work at a CE-incubated charity, so I’m of course inclined to agree with you on the reasons you listed as to how CE’s approach mitigates the disadvantages smaller orgs and individuals have vs larger ones.
(As a tangent this is also why I have incredible respect for what you’ve managed to build at OneDay Health, AFAICT you don’t have any of those advantages we benefit from! Seriously: since 2017, 53(!) nurse-led health centers launched leading to 340k patients treated, >$600k saved by patients, 165k malaria cases treated, 125k under-5s treated is phenomenal. I wish you gave a talk at EAG on how you and the team did this, lots of lessons for aspiring “moral entrepreneurs” I’m sure. Sorry btw if this makes you feel awkward I’ve always wanted to express this)
That said I do think Scott is pointing to a slightly different thing than big vs small orgs, which is traditionally impressive credentials and ways of working vs non-traditional credentials or the lack thereof. I took Scott’s hope (which I shared) to be that there are a lot more people than we think who are “diamonds in the rough” — they may not have gone to Oxbridge / Ivy etc or have training & experience in medicine / law / consulting / tech / whatever prestigious career, and their ideas for making the world better may not be the usual ideas everyone agrees is “best” but oddball ones that make you go ”… huh?”, and most talent-spotters filter for these kinds of markers and would exclude them — but Scott (who doesn’t have a traditionally-impressive background himself) would see their potential and give them a shot, and the follow-up would hopefully prove him right. He’s disappointed that this doesn’t seem to be true, which suggests that those traditionally impressive credentials really do give a lot of hard-to-fake signal of your projects panning out. I mean I don’t think this is all that surprising, but also this is grist for the mill of the discussion around EA feeling elitist and exclusive to people with more “relatable” or less privileged backgrounds who nevertheless really want to contribute meaningfully to the whole “doing good better” project.
Yeah I think he might be combining/ conflating both the elitism and the bigger org issues actually. Based on “grants to legibly-credentialled people operating in high-status ways usually did better than betting on small scrappy startups” and “there were a lot of promising ACX community members with interesting ideas who were going to turn them into startups any day now, but who ended up kind of floundering”.
It makes me sad too, but I do agree on the traditionally impressive credentials front. There are definitely diamonds in the rough but they ain’t so easy to find!