Distributing money is hard and we should not expect to have a good solution anytime soon. But it would be helpful if people where aware of how inadequate our current funding ecosystem is. Even though money supposedly exists, funding is still the main bottleneck for most new EA initiatives.
My current analysis is that grant evaluation is hard becasue is inherently low bandwidth. I would therefore recommend that people donate though their own personal networks rather than giving to one of the EA Funds. I’d also expect that we’ll see a greater and healthier diversity of projects this way.
I know the argument for having centralized funding. We pool all the money and all the applications in one place, and then let some trusted people sort it out. In theory this both saves time and optimize money distribution. But in practice it has a lot of problems. It’s slow, it’s low bandwidth, and the biases of a few will effect everyone.
I’ve personally lost a lot of time to grant agencies. Waiting for answers what where late. Or waiting for a promised application opening, that where canceled. If you have not experienced these things yourself, it’s hard for me to describe how much it can mess up everything. And that’s just one of the problems.
Dealing with individual funders has been sooooo much easier, and just overall a much nicer and more supportive experience.
I have a lot more to say about this, but I have not found the best way to express it yet. But feel free to reach out for more of my thoughts.
(An alternative hypotheses, is that EA is cash constrained. I.e. the bottle neck is not around distributing the money, it’s about there not being enough of it. In that case we should upgrade the importance of earning to give.)
That is indeed a problem, I also saw signs of this several times. Thank you for that comment. At least for initial funding lotteries might be a good idea, as they would allow much quicker grant applications and would remove bias. I recently asked a questions about this here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XtxnLERQfampY7dhh/lotteries-for-everything
While I do think that lotteries have some flaws, they still seem pretty good to me when it comes to initial funding.
An aspect of the funding problem is that money allocation is bad everywhere. (On a larger scale, the market mostly woks, but if you get into the details of being a human wanting to trade your time for money, most things around job applications and grant applications, is more or less terrible.) If we design a system that don’t suck, over time EA will attract people who are here for the money not for the mission.
A solution should have the feature: 1) It don’t suck if you are EA aligned 2) If you are not EA aligned it should not be easier to get money from us than from other places. (It is possible to get non EA aligned people to do EA aligned actions. But that require an very different level of oversight.)
I think a grant lottery, where the barrier to entry is to have done some significant amount of EA volunteer work or EA donation or similar, would be an awesome experiment.
Funding is a mess.
Distributing money is hard and we should not expect to have a good solution anytime soon. But it would be helpful if people where aware of how inadequate our current funding ecosystem is. Even though money supposedly exists, funding is still the main bottleneck for most new EA initiatives.
My current analysis is that grant evaluation is hard becasue is inherently low bandwidth. I would therefore recommend that people donate though their own personal networks rather than giving to one of the EA Funds. I’d also expect that we’ll see a greater and healthier diversity of projects this way.
I know the argument for having centralized funding. We pool all the money and all the applications in one place, and then let some trusted people sort it out. In theory this both saves time and optimize money distribution. But in practice it has a lot of problems. It’s slow, it’s low bandwidth, and the biases of a few will effect everyone.
I’ve personally lost a lot of time to grant agencies. Waiting for answers what where late. Or waiting for a promised application opening, that where canceled. If you have not experienced these things yourself, it’s hard for me to describe how much it can mess up everything. And that’s just one of the problems.
Dealing with individual funders has been sooooo much easier, and just overall a much nicer and more supportive experience.
I have a lot more to say about this, but I have not found the best way to express it yet. But feel free to reach out for more of my thoughts.
(An alternative hypotheses, is that EA is cash constrained. I.e. the bottle neck is not around distributing the money, it’s about there not being enough of it. In that case we should upgrade the importance of earning to give.)
That is indeed a problem, I also saw signs of this several times. Thank you for that comment. At least for initial funding lotteries might be a good idea, as they would allow much quicker grant applications and would remove bias. I recently asked a questions about this here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XtxnLERQfampY7dhh/lotteries-for-everything
While I do think that lotteries have some flaws, they still seem pretty good to me when it comes to initial funding.
An aspect of the funding problem is that money allocation is bad everywhere. (On a larger scale, the market mostly woks, but if you get into the details of being a human wanting to trade your time for money, most things around job applications and grant applications, is more or less terrible.) If we design a system that don’t suck, over time EA will attract people who are here for the money not for the mission.
A solution should have the feature:
1) It don’t suck if you are EA aligned
2) If you are not EA aligned it should not be easier to get money from us than from other places. (It is possible to get non EA aligned people to do EA aligned actions. But that require an very different level of oversight.)
I think a grant lottery, where the barrier to entry is to have done some significant amount of EA volunteer work or EA donation or similar, would be an awesome experiment.