This seems like a good direction to think about, but I’m skeptical it’s more useful to form organizations to do this, rather than just having EA people just coordinate to hire people. For example, Eliezer just hired a community matchmaker for a short period. For this type of idea, if it’s a useful enough service, I suspect there will be a relatively easy to sustain funding model from donors that care and value the service. This model doesn’t do the “brainstorming” phase, but I also think that’s the part which is hardest not to do directly with the funders / people interested, and it makes almost as much sense to have them pay someone to come up with ideas as a separate phase—there is little reason to think the people who are good at figuring out what people want also have the skills to do that thing.
I think that the hiring of the community matchmaker was a good idea. I expect that coordinating funding after this will be at least a bit of a pain though. In my experience, coordinating funding of group things is often fairly painful.
The fact that Eliezer took it on himself to pay for the matchmaker, and I believe has also previously paid for community-wide things, might present some evidence that there’s more opportunity here. One reason Eliezer has been able to do these things is because he probably has more capital than most members in the community (median, not mean), not just because he’s so great at coming up with these ideas. I could imagine cases where other people, if they could pool their money better, could come up with similarly interesting innovations.
Around if the people who come up with the ideas should be separate from the ones that do the thing;
I could imagine CAUMF funds on various places in this area. Many companies have leaders who are more idea-people, and pay a lot of attention to the clients, and then they separately have COOs or similar who are in charge of running things. I’d also say that these funds would ideally not do that much of the work themselves, but instead things like funding.
Around Eliezer’s projects, you could think of one implementation as the following:
Several people in the community contribute money to a fund
The fund has 1-2 part-time or full-time people who are pretty decent at making stuff happen
Every so often Eliezer or anyone else will recommend an idea. The fund will work with the donors to determine interest, and then help either subsidize it or carry it out.
The subsidies will be taken from donors in rough proportion to how valuable the work would be to them (or something like this)
This seems like a good direction to think about, but I’m skeptical it’s more useful to form organizations to do this, rather than just having EA people just coordinate to hire people. For example, Eliezer just hired a community matchmaker for a short period. For this type of idea, if it’s a useful enough service, I suspect there will be a relatively easy to sustain funding model from donors that care and value the service. This model doesn’t do the “brainstorming” phase, but I also think that’s the part which is hardest not to do directly with the funders / people interested, and it makes almost as much sense to have them pay someone to come up with ideas as a separate phase—there is little reason to think the people who are good at figuring out what people want also have the skills to do that thing.
Thanks for the thoughts here!
I think that the hiring of the community matchmaker was a good idea. I expect that coordinating funding after this will be at least a bit of a pain though. In my experience, coordinating funding of group things is often fairly painful.
The fact that Eliezer took it on himself to pay for the matchmaker, and I believe has also previously paid for community-wide things, might present some evidence that there’s more opportunity here. One reason Eliezer has been able to do these things is because he probably has more capital than most members in the community (median, not mean), not just because he’s so great at coming up with these ideas. I could imagine cases where other people, if they could pool their money better, could come up with similarly interesting innovations.
Around if the people who come up with the ideas should be separate from the ones that do the thing;
I could imagine CAUMF funds on various places in this area. Many companies have leaders who are more idea-people, and pay a lot of attention to the clients, and then they separately have COOs or similar who are in charge of running things. I’d also say that these funds would ideally not do that much of the work themselves, but instead things like funding.
Around Eliezer’s projects, you could think of one implementation as the following:
Several people in the community contribute money to a fund
The fund has 1-2 part-time or full-time people who are pretty decent at making stuff happen
Every so often Eliezer or anyone else will recommend an idea. The fund will work with the donors to determine interest, and then help either subsidize it or carry it out.
The subsidies will be taken from donors in rough proportion to how valuable the work would be to them (or something like this)