Which countries are at the top/bottom of the priority list to be funded? [And why?]
I think this is a great question, and I suspect it’s somewhat under-considered. I looked into this a couple years ago as a short research project, and I’ve heard there hasn’t been a ton more work on it since then. So my guess is that the reasoning might be somewhat ad-hoc or intuitive, but tries to take into account important factors like “size / important-seemingness of country for EA causes”, talent pool for EA, and ease of movement-building (e.g. do we already have high-quality content in the relevant language).
My guess is that:
There are some valuable nuances that could be included in assessments of countries, but are either not included or are done so inconsistently.
For example, for a small-medium country like Romania it might be more useful to think of a national group as similar to a city group for the country’s largest city, and Bucharest looks pretty promising to me based on a quick glance at its Wiki page—but I wouldn’t have guessed that if I hadn’t thought to look it up. Whereas e.g. Singapore benefits from being a well-known world-class city.
Similarly, it looks like Romania has a decent share of English-speakers (~30% or ~6 million) and they tend to be pretty fluent, but again I wouldn’t have really known that beforehand. Someone making an ad-hoc assessment may not have thought to check those data sources, + might not have context on how to compare different countries (is 30% high? low?) .
The skills / personality of group members and leaders probably make up a large part of funders’ assessments, but are kinda hard to assess if they don’t have a long track record. But they probably need funding to get a track record in the first place!
And intuitive assessments of leaders are probably somewhat biased against people who don’t come from the assessor’s context (e.g. have a different accent), though I hope and assume people at least try to notice & counteract that.
Sorry to hear about your experience!
I think this is a great question, and I suspect it’s somewhat under-considered. I looked into this a couple years ago as a short research project, and I’ve heard there hasn’t been a ton more work on it since then. So my guess is that the reasoning might be somewhat ad-hoc or intuitive, but tries to take into account important factors like “size / important-seemingness of country for EA causes”, talent pool for EA, and ease of movement-building (e.g. do we already have high-quality content in the relevant language).
My guess is that:
There are some valuable nuances that could be included in assessments of countries, but are either not included or are done so inconsistently.
For example, for a small-medium country like Romania it might be more useful to think of a national group as similar to a city group for the country’s largest city, and Bucharest looks pretty promising to me based on a quick glance at its Wiki page—but I wouldn’t have guessed that if I hadn’t thought to look it up. Whereas e.g. Singapore benefits from being a well-known world-class city.
Similarly, it looks like Romania has a decent share of English-speakers (~30% or ~6 million) and they tend to be pretty fluent, but again I wouldn’t have really known that beforehand. Someone making an ad-hoc assessment may not have thought to check those data sources, + might not have context on how to compare different countries (is 30% high? low?) .
The skills / personality of group members and leaders probably make up a large part of funders’ assessments, but are kinda hard to assess if they don’t have a long track record. But they probably need funding to get a track record in the first place!
And intuitive assessments of leaders are probably somewhat biased against people who don’t come from the assessor’s context (e.g. have a different accent), though I hope and assume people at least try to notice & counteract that.