Thanks for writing this up, I think you make some useful points here.
Based on my experience doing some EA grantmaking at Open Phil, my impression is that the bottleneck isn’t in vetting precisely, though that’s somewhat directionally correct. It’s more like there’s a distribution of projects, and we’ve picked some of the low-hanging fruit, and on the current margin, grantmaking in this space requires more effort per grant to feel comfortable with, either to vet (e.g. because the case is confusing, we don’t know the people involved), to advise (e.g. the team is inexperienced), to refocus (e.g. we think they aren’t focusing on interventions that would meet our goals, and so we need to work on sharing models until one of us is moved), or to find.
Often I feel like it’s an inchoate combination of something like “a person has a vague idea they need help sharpening, they need some advice about structuring the project, they need help finding a team, the case is hard to understand and think about”.
Importantly, I suspect it’d be bad for the world if we lowered our bar, though unfortunately I don’t think I want to or easily can articulate why I think that now.
Overall, I think generating more experienced grantmakers/mentors for new projects is a priority for the movement.
Importantly, I suspect it’d be bad for the world if we lowered our bar, though unfortunately I don’t think I want to or easily can articulate why I think that now.
Do you think it is bad that other pools of EA capital exist, with perhaps lower thresholds, who presumably sometimes fund things that OP has deliberately passed on?
Overall, I think generating more experienced grantmakers/mentors for new projects is a priority for the movement.
Do you have any thoughts on how to best do this, and on who is in a position to do this? For example, my own weakly held guess is that I could have substantially more impact in a “grantmaker/mentor for new projects” role than in my current role, but I have a poor sense of how I could go about getting more information on whether that guess is correct; and if it was correct, I wouldn’t know if this means I should actively try to get into such a role or if the bottleneck is elsewhere (e.g. it could be that there are many people who have the skills to be a good grantmaker/mentor but that actors who hold other required resources such as funding or trust don’t have the capacity to utilize more grantmakers/mentors). (My current guess is the second, which is why I’m not actively pursuing this.)
I would guess the bottleneck is elsewhere too, think the bottleneck is something like managerial capacity/trust/mentorship/vetting of grantmakers. I recently started thinking about this a bit, but am still in the very early stages.
(Just saw this via Rob’s post on Facebook) :)
Thanks for writing this up, I think you make some useful points here.
Based on my experience doing some EA grantmaking at Open Phil, my impression is that the bottleneck isn’t in vetting precisely, though that’s somewhat directionally correct. It’s more like there’s a distribution of projects, and we’ve picked some of the low-hanging fruit, and on the current margin, grantmaking in this space requires more effort per grant to feel comfortable with, either to vet (e.g. because the case is confusing, we don’t know the people involved), to advise (e.g. the team is inexperienced), to refocus (e.g. we think they aren’t focusing on interventions that would meet our goals, and so we need to work on sharing models until one of us is moved), or to find.
Often I feel like it’s an inchoate combination of something like “a person has a vague idea they need help sharpening, they need some advice about structuring the project, they need help finding a team, the case is hard to understand and think about”.
Importantly, I suspect it’d be bad for the world if we lowered our bar, though unfortunately I don’t think I want to or easily can articulate why I think that now.
Overall, I think generating more experienced grantmakers/mentors for new projects is a priority for the movement.
Do you think it is bad that other pools of EA capital exist, with perhaps lower thresholds, who presumably sometimes fund things that OP has deliberately passed on?
Do you have any thoughts on how to best do this, and on who is in a position to do this? For example, my own weakly held guess is that I could have substantially more impact in a “grantmaker/mentor for new projects” role than in my current role, but I have a poor sense of how I could go about getting more information on whether that guess is correct; and if it was correct, I wouldn’t know if this means I should actively try to get into such a role or if the bottleneck is elsewhere (e.g. it could be that there are many people who have the skills to be a good grantmaker/mentor but that actors who hold other required resources such as funding or trust don’t have the capacity to utilize more grantmakers/mentors). (My current guess is the second, which is why I’m not actively pursuing this.)
I would guess the bottleneck is elsewhere too, think the bottleneck is something like managerial capacity/trust/mentorship/vetting of grantmakers. I recently started thinking about this a bit, but am still in the very early stages.