Thoughts/comments on potential new series of posts (“Gates are Open, Come In”)?
Someone I know has benefited a lot from interactions with major EA funders (for reasons that aren’t clear, the funders just seem communicative and benevolent).
This person is thinking of writing up a series of posts about their experiences, in a positive, personally generous way, to provide value and insight to others.
They would share actual documents (they wrote) as well as describing their views of communications and key points that seem important to their interactions.
This series seems potentially popular and interesting. It tries to use this interest to achieve three prosocial purposes:
By illustrating experiences, the series tries to reduce friction and increase access to these channels, which in theory improves the supply of proposals, and happiness and impact overall.
There is currently one “live” proposal or project that may need a founder. This only exists as a private document, and it seems worth showing this publicly as part of this series.
In addition to the above, the series might actively promote certain patterns and virtues that are robustly good (like “intellectual honesty”) and certain limited insights to grant making. While the writer is uncertain, the very best outcome from this would be to create a new set of actions or patterns that most people can explore at low risk, that has low negative externalities and produces value and gives feedback [1].
These positives seem pretty large.
I think the downsides are important. Here are some downsides that have been thought about:
One downside is misleading people. One way this might happen is by giving a false sense of the bar of a proposal being accepted (too easy or too hard). This is hard to completely avoid, because the writer is in no position to state the bar. The writer will try to give some sense of their qualifications, as well as tying these to the mechanics of the project and impact, which seems to be what is important.
Another downside is having readers “over index” on the content. For example, someone might rigidly use a proposal in a post they see, as a template in future proposals. To partially address this, without distorting the content, the writer can focus on traits about the process that seem robustly good (calibration, and examples of “reasoning transparency”).
I’m writing this to get any feedback on the above, especially any objections for any reason, covered or not covered above.
In particular, for this “pattern”, I’m thinking about the process of people finding specific talented individuals, who are not inside EA, and bringing them to EA, and with the bar of interesting funders. This pattern seems fairly safe for most people to explore, develops skills that seem universally useful, and touches on key traits useful for grant making.
Thoughts/comments on potential new series of posts (“Gates are Open, Come In”)?
Someone I know has benefited a lot from interactions with major EA funders (for reasons that aren’t clear, the funders just seem communicative and benevolent).
This person is thinking of writing up a series of posts about their experiences, in a positive, personally generous way, to provide value and insight to others.
They would share actual documents (they wrote) as well as describing their views of communications and key points that seem important to their interactions.
This series seems potentially popular and interesting. It tries to use this interest to achieve three prosocial purposes:
By illustrating experiences, the series tries to reduce friction and increase access to these channels, which in theory improves the supply of proposals, and happiness and impact overall.
There is currently one “live” proposal or project that may need a founder. This only exists as a private document, and it seems worth showing this publicly as part of this series.
In addition to the above, the series might actively promote certain patterns and virtues that are robustly good (like “intellectual honesty”) and certain limited insights to grant making. While the writer is uncertain, the very best outcome from this would be to create a new set of actions or patterns that most people can explore at low risk, that has low negative externalities and produces value and gives feedback [1].
These positives seem pretty large.
I think the downsides are important. Here are some downsides that have been thought about:
One downside is misleading people. One way this might happen is by giving a false sense of the bar of a proposal being accepted (too easy or too hard). This is hard to completely avoid, because the writer is in no position to state the bar. The writer will try to give some sense of their qualifications, as well as tying these to the mechanics of the project and impact, which seems to be what is important.
Another downside is having readers “over index” on the content. For example, someone might rigidly use a proposal in a post they see, as a template in future proposals. To partially address this, without distorting the content, the writer can focus on traits about the process that seem robustly good (calibration, and examples of “reasoning transparency”).
I’m writing this to get any feedback on the above, especially any objections for any reason, covered or not covered above.
In particular, for this “pattern”, I’m thinking about the process of people finding specific talented individuals, who are not inside EA, and bringing them to EA, and with the bar of interesting funders. This pattern seems fairly safe for most people to explore, develops skills that seem universally useful, and touches on key traits useful for grant making.
This looks like a great idea!