Asking people who specialise in working on early-stage and risky projects to take-care of themselves with runway may be a bit unreasonable. Even if a truly risky project (in the low-probability of a high-return sense) is well executed, we should still expect it to have an a priori success rate of 1 in 10 or lower. Assuming that it takes six months or so to test the feasibility of a project, then people would need save several years worth of runway if they wanted to be financially comfortable while continuing to pursue projects until one worked out (of course, lots of failed projects may be an indication that they’re not executing well, but lets be charitable and assume they are). This would probably limit serious self-supported EA entrepreneurship to an activity one takes on at a mid-career or later stage (also noted by OPP in relation to charity foundation):
Starting a new company is generally associated with high (financial) risk and high potential reward. But without a solid source of funding, starting a nonprofit means taking high financial risk without high potential reward. Furthermore, some nonprofits (like some for-profits) are best suited to be started by people relatively late in their careers; the difference is that late-career people in the for-profit sector seem more likely to have built up significant savings that they can use as a cushion. This is another reason that funder interest can be the key factor in what nonprofits get started.
Sure, I agree that unvetted UBI for all EAs probably would not be a good use of resources. But I also think there are cases where an UBI-like scheme that funded people to do self directed work on high-risk projects could be a good alternative to providing grants to fund projects, particularly at the early-stage.
Yep, I’d be on board with providing specific people with funding to work on whatever projects they find most valuable. But I’d only be likely to provide that to ~10 people and see what happens, as opposed to what I felt this article was suggesting.
Agree. The interesting question for me is where we expect the cutoff to be—what (personal, not project dependent) conditions make it highly effective to give income to an individual.
This framing makes me notice that it would probably be far from realistic right now, as small initiatives in EA are funding constrained. But this still might be misleading.
Asking people who specialise in working on early-stage and risky projects to take-care of themselves with runway may be a bit unreasonable. Even if a truly risky project (in the low-probability of a high-return sense) is well executed, we should still expect it to have an a priori success rate of 1 in 10 or lower. Assuming that it takes six months or so to test the feasibility of a project, then people would need save several years worth of runway if they wanted to be financially comfortable while continuing to pursue projects until one worked out (of course, lots of failed projects may be an indication that they’re not executing well, but lets be charitable and assume they are). This would probably limit serious self-supported EA entrepreneurship to an activity one takes on at a mid-career or later stage (also noted by OPP in relation to charity foundation):
Yes, to be clear, I’m arguing that we should have a robust funding ecosystem. I am opposed to “UBI for EAs”
Sure, I agree that unvetted UBI for all EAs probably would not be a good use of resources. But I also think there are cases where an UBI-like scheme that funded people to do self directed work on high-risk projects could be a good alternative to providing grants to fund projects, particularly at the early-stage.
Yep, I’d be on board with providing specific people with funding to work on whatever projects they find most valuable. But I’d only be likely to provide that to ~10 people and see what happens, as opposed to what I felt this article was suggesting.
Agree. The interesting question for me is where we expect the cutoff to be—what (personal, not project dependent) conditions make it highly effective to give income to an individual.
This framing makes me notice that it would probably be far from realistic right now, as small initiatives in EA are funding constrained. But this still might be misleading.