I think this doesn’t really work super well, primarily because knowledge about funding gaps is pretty anti-inductive. While there is some institutional momentum, my current read is that if one of the large funders notices a funding gap in an ontology as simple as the one proposed here, they start moving into the space and will try to close it. E.g. while OpenPhil used to primarily only fund larger organizations, this has now changed, and OpenPhil is making many more grants to individuals and small institutions.
I think there are many funding gaps, but I expect the ontology outlined in this post to not hold up very well at actually describing them. If you can describe funding gaps as simple as this, then I expect this to change quite quickly after someone notices.
Isn’t this fine? It seems like the goal of talking about funding gaps is to have someone fill them, so it’s not a problem if the spreadsheet causes someone to fill them. Or are you saying that the large funders have much better information than someone with a spreadsheet, so the market for funding is basically efficient and the spreadsheet wouldn’t find anything useful?
Yeah, my model is that this ontology already seems very well within the type of consideration that I expect to be covered by existing funders, and that the current frontier of undiscovered considerations looks substantially more messier or counterintuitive than this.
Given that I just got a notification for someone disagree-voting on this:
This is definitely no longer the case in the current EA Funding landscape. It used to be the case, but various changes in the memetic and political landscape have made funding gaps much stickier, and much less anti-inductive (mostly because cost-effectiveness prioritization of the big funders got a lot less comprehensive, so there is low-hanging fruit again).
I think this doesn’t really work super well, primarily because knowledge about funding gaps is pretty anti-inductive. While there is some institutional momentum, my current read is that if one of the large funders notices a funding gap in an ontology as simple as the one proposed here, they start moving into the space and will try to close it. E.g. while OpenPhil used to primarily only fund larger organizations, this has now changed, and OpenPhil is making many more grants to individuals and small institutions.
I think there are many funding gaps, but I expect the ontology outlined in this post to not hold up very well at actually describing them. If you can describe funding gaps as simple as this, then I expect this to change quite quickly after someone notices.
Isn’t this fine? It seems like the goal of talking about funding gaps is to have someone fill them, so it’s not a problem if the spreadsheet causes someone to fill them. Or are you saying that the large funders have much better information than someone with a spreadsheet, so the market for funding is basically efficient and the spreadsheet wouldn’t find anything useful?
Yeah, my model is that this ontology already seems very well within the type of consideration that I expect to be covered by existing funders, and that the current frontier of undiscovered considerations looks substantially more messier or counterintuitive than this.
Given that I just got a notification for someone disagree-voting on this:
This is definitely no longer the case in the current EA Funding landscape. It used to be the case, but various changes in the memetic and political landscape have made funding gaps much stickier, and much less anti-inductive (mostly because cost-effectiveness prioritization of the big funders got a lot less comprehensive, so there is low-hanging fruit again).