I’m pretty excited about a vision of principles-first EAIF that helps drive forward better cause prioritization within EAIF, and resonated with this paragraph:
I think that we could make EA much better than it currently is—particularly on the “beacon for thoughtful, sincere, and selfless” front.
I don’t think EA has done much “noticing what is important to work on” recently.
Historically, EA has many thoughtful people who have discovered or were early adopters of novel and important ideas.
I don’t think many people have recently tried to bring those people together with the express goal of identifying and working on pressing causes.
But I’m not sure how many exciting grants you expect to find within bucket 2 — scanning through the EAIF grants database, I can’t really identify anything within the last year that seems like it would push the frontier of “helping EA notice what it is important to work on”.
How successful do you expect to be at soliciting grants within this area / do you have a plan on how to go about with this? (Feel free to object to the premise too.)
I think the premise of your question is roughly correct: I do think it’s pretty hard to “help EA notice what it is important to work on”, for a bunch of reasons:
It could lead to new, unexpected directions which might be counterintuive / controversial.
it requires the community to have the psychological, financial and intellectual safety to identify / work on causes which may not be promising
It needs a non-trivial number of people to engage with the result of exploration, and act upon it (including people who can direct substantial resources)
It has a very long feedback loop, which can be a) demoralising, and b) difficult to predict if it ever has an impact.
Given those challenges, it’s not suprising to me if we struggle to find many projects in this area. To overcome that I think we would need to take a more active approach (e.g. RFPs, etc). But we are still in the early days of thinking about these kinds of questions
I’m pretty excited about a vision of principles-first EAIF that helps drive forward better cause prioritization within EAIF, and resonated with this paragraph:
But I’m not sure how many exciting grants you expect to find within bucket 2 — scanning through the EAIF grants database, I can’t really identify anything within the last year that seems like it would push the frontier of “helping EA notice what it is important to work on”.
How successful do you expect to be at soliciting grants within this area / do you have a plan on how to go about with this? (Feel free to object to the premise too.)
I think the premise of your question is roughly correct: I do think it’s pretty hard to “help EA notice what it is important to work on”, for a bunch of reasons:
It could lead to new, unexpected directions which might be counterintuive / controversial.
it requires the community to have the psychological, financial and intellectual safety to identify / work on causes which may not be promising
It needs a non-trivial number of people to engage with the result of exploration, and act upon it (including people who can direct substantial resources)
It has a very long feedback loop, which can be a) demoralising, and b) difficult to predict if it ever has an impact.
Given those challenges, it’s not suprising to me if we struggle to find many projects in this area. To overcome that I think we would need to take a more active approach (e.g. RFPs, etc). But we are still in the early days of thinking about these kinds of questions