Excellent post, although I think about it using a slightly different framing. How vetting-constrained granters are depends a lot on how high their standards are. In the limit of arbitrarily high standards, all the vetting in the world might not be enough. In the limit of arbitrarily low standards, no vetting is required.
If we find that there’s not enough capability to vet, that suggests that either our standards are correct and we need more vetters, or that our standards are too high and we should lower them. I don’t have much inside information, so this is mostly based on my overall worldview, but I broadly think it’s more the latter: that standards are too high, and that worrying too much about protecting EA’s reputation makes it harder for us to innovate.
I think it would be very valuable to have more granters publicly explaining how they make tradeoffs between potential risks, clear benefits, and low-probability extreme successes; if these explanations exist and I’m just not aware of them, I’d appreciate pointers.
Another startup contacted at least 4 grantmaking organisations. Three of them deferred to the fourth.
One “easy fix” would simply be to encourage grantmakers to defer to each other less. Imagine that only one venture capital fund was allowed in Silicon Valley. I claim that’s one of the worst things you could do for entrepreneurship there.
Excellent post, although I think about it using a slightly different framing. How vetting-constrained granters are depends a lot on how high their standards are. In the limit of arbitrarily high standards, all the vetting in the world might not be enough. In the limit of arbitrarily low standards, no vetting is required.
If we find that there’s not enough capability to vet, that suggests that either our standards are correct and we need more vetters, or that our standards are too high and we should lower them. I don’t have much inside information, so this is mostly based on my overall worldview, but I broadly think it’s more the latter: that standards are too high, and that worrying too much about protecting EA’s reputation makes it harder for us to innovate.
I think it would be very valuable to have more granters publicly explaining how they make tradeoffs between potential risks, clear benefits, and low-probability extreme successes; if these explanations exist and I’m just not aware of them, I’d appreciate pointers.
One “easy fix” would simply be to encourage grantmakers to defer to each other less. Imagine that only one venture capital fund was allowed in Silicon Valley. I claim that’s one of the worst things you could do for entrepreneurship there.