Have you considered providing small pools of money to people who express potential interest in trying out grantmaking and who you have some reason to believe might be good at it? This could be people the fund manager’s already know well, people who narrowly missed out on being appointed as full fund managers, or people who go through a short application process for these small pools specifically.
Potential benefits:
That could directly increase the diversity of perspectives represented in total in “EA infrastructure” funding decisions
That could help with people testing their fit for grantmaking, building their knowledge and skills and credentials for that, and perhaps being vetted by the EAIF for that (kind of like a work trial)
(This is more important the more it’s the case that the EA infrastructure space is vetting-constrained, and I’m not sure how strongly that’s the case; see one of my other questions)
Possible downsides:
Takes time to implement
These people’s decision-making would presumably be lower-quality on average than the current fund manager’s decisions
Maybe the pools of funding would be so small as to not really warrant much time on grantmaking by these regranters, in which case the benefits would be more limited
Having “guest managers” already captures some of these benefits, so the marginal benefits of doing this additional thing may be low
(Really those last two points are “reasons the benefits may be small”, rather than “downsides”.)
(To be clear, I’m not necessarily saying I think you should do this.)
I have a pretty strong view that I don’t fully trust any single person’s judgment (including my own), and that aggregating judgments (through discussion and voting) has been super helpful for the EAIF’s, Animal Welfare Fund’s (AWF’s), and especially the Long-Term Future Fund’s (LTFF’s) overall judgment ability in the past. E.g., I can recall a bunch of (in my view) net-negative grants that didn’t end up being made thanks to this sort of aggregation, and also some that did end up happening – where it ultimately turned out that I was wrong.
I have also heard through the grapevine that previous experiments in this direction didn’t go very well (mostly in that the ‘potential benefits’ you listed didn’t really materialize; I don’t think anything bad happened). Edit: I don’t give a lot of weight to this though; I think perhaps there’s a model that works better than what has been tried in the past.
I also think that having more discussion between grantmakers seems useful for improving judgment over the longer term. I think the LTFF partly has good judgment because it has discussed a lot of disagreements that generalize to other cases, has exchanged a lot of models/gears, etc.
For this reason, I’m fairly skeptical of any approach that gives a single person full discretion over some funding, and would prefer a process with more engagement with a broader range of opinions of other grantmakers. (Edit: Though others disagree somewhat, and will hopefully share their views as well.)
Appointing guest managers takes quite a lot of time, so I’m not sure how many we will have in the future.
Another idea that I think would be interesting is to implement your suggestion with teams of potential grantmakers (rather than individuals), like the Oxford Prioritisation Project. Again it would take some capacity to oversee, but could be quite promising. If someone applied for a grant for a project like this, I’d be quite interested in funding it.
Have you considered providing small pools of money to people who express potential interest in trying out grantmaking and who you have some reason to believe might be good at it? This could be people the fund manager’s already know well, people who narrowly missed out on being appointed as full fund managers, or people who go through a short application process for these small pools specifically.
Potential benefits:
That could directly increase the diversity of perspectives represented in total in “EA infrastructure” funding decisions
That could help with people testing their fit for grantmaking, building their knowledge and skills and credentials for that, and perhaps being vetted by the EAIF for that (kind of like a work trial)
(This is more important the more it’s the case that the EA infrastructure space is vetting-constrained, and I’m not sure how strongly that’s the case; see one of my other questions)
Possible downsides:
Takes time to implement
These people’s decision-making would presumably be lower-quality on average than the current fund manager’s decisions
Maybe the pools of funding would be so small as to not really warrant much time on grantmaking by these regranters, in which case the benefits would be more limited
Having “guest managers” already captures some of these benefits, so the marginal benefits of doing this additional thing may be low
(Really those last two points are “reasons the benefits may be small”, rather than “downsides”.)
(To be clear, I’m not necessarily saying I think you should do this.)
I have a pretty strong view that I don’t fully trust any single person’s judgment (including my own), and that aggregating judgments (through discussion and voting) has been super helpful for the EAIF’s, Animal Welfare Fund’s (AWF’s), and especially the Long-Term Future Fund’s (LTFF’s) overall judgment ability in the past. E.g., I can recall a bunch of (in my view) net-negative grants that didn’t end up being made thanks to this sort of aggregation, and also some that did end up happening – where it ultimately turned out that I was wrong.
I have also heard through the grapevine that previous experiments in this direction didn’t go very well (mostly in that the ‘potential benefits’ you listed didn’t really materialize; I don’t think anything bad happened). Edit: I don’t give a lot of weight to this though; I think perhaps there’s a model that works better than what has been tried in the past.
I also think that having more discussion between grantmakers seems useful for improving judgment over the longer term. I think the LTFF partly has good judgment because it has discussed a lot of disagreements that generalize to other cases, has exchanged a lot of models/gears, etc.
For this reason, I’m fairly skeptical of any approach that gives a single person full discretion over some funding, and would prefer a process with more engagement with a broader range of opinions of other grantmakers. (Edit: Though others disagree somewhat, and will hopefully share their views as well.)
Our current solution is to appoint guest managers instead, as elaborated on here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ek5ZctFxwh4QFigN7/ea-funds-has-appointed-new-fund-managers
Appointing guest managers takes quite a lot of time, so I’m not sure how many we will have in the future.
Another idea that I think would be interesting is to implement your suggestion with teams of potential grantmakers (rather than individuals), like the Oxford Prioritisation Project. Again it would take some capacity to oversee, but could be quite promising. If someone applied for a grant for a project like this, I’d be quite interested in funding it.
I don’t think this has much of an advantage over other related things that I do, like
telling people that they should definitely tell me if they know about projects that they think I should fund, and asking them why
asking people for their thoughts on grant applications that I’ve been given
asking people for ideas for active grantmaking strategies