The way I see it, if you successfully get a grant in Year N, then that should be strong evidence that you can successfully get a grant in Year N+1. After all, you’ll now have an extra year of highly-relevant experience, plus better connections etc. Right? (Well, unless you waste the grant money and get a bad reputation.) (Or unless the cause area funding situation gets worse in general, but that would equally be a concern as an employee at big nonprofit too, and anyway seems unlikely for major EA cause areas in the near future.)
I think this is true overall but it’s overstated for initial grants (e.g. Year 0 or Year 1). Often funders might be excited to fund someone to help them “test their fit” for work in a new domain, and it’s positive EV to do such a test even if someone only has a 20% of being amazing. I don’t know what the empirical situation looks like for how often grantees get renewed, but I’d strongly encourage one-year or three-month grantees to not think of their grants as roughly as high job security as that of working normal jobs in the corporate sector or academia, unless they’ve explicitly been assured of this by their grantmakers.
That said, I think it’s broadly true that most independent EA work, particularly in longtermism, selects from and/or trains skillsets that are quite lucratively outside of EA, so I expect most EA (e.g.) independent researchers to have reasonable “exit options” outside of their granted work.
(speaking for myself, not my employers)
I think this is true overall but it’s overstated for initial grants (e.g. Year 0 or Year 1). Often funders might be excited to fund someone to help them “test their fit” for work in a new domain, and it’s positive EV to do such a test even if someone only has a 20% of being amazing. I don’t know what the empirical situation looks like for how often grantees get renewed, but I’d strongly encourage one-year or three-month grantees to not think of their grants as roughly as high job security as that of working normal jobs in the corporate sector or academia, unless they’ve explicitly been assured of this by their grantmakers.
That said, I think it’s broadly true that most independent EA work, particularly in longtermism, selects from and/or trains skillsets that are quite lucratively outside of EA, so I expect most EA (e.g.) independent researchers to have reasonable “exit options” outside of their granted work.