Answering these thoroughly would be really tricky, but here are a few off-the-cuff thoughts:
1. Tough to tell. My intuition is ‘the same amount as I did’ because I was happy with the amount I could grant to each of the recipients I granted to, and I didn’t have time to look at more applications than I did. Otoh I could imagine if we the fund had significantly more funding that would seem to provide a stronger mandate for trying things out and taking risks, so maybe that would have inclined me to spend less time evaluating each grant and use some money to do active grant making, or maybe would have inclined me to have funded one or two of the grants that I turned down. I also expect to be less time constrained in future because we won’t be doing an entire quarter’s grants in one round, and because there will be less ‘getting up to speed’.
2. Probably most of these are some bottleneck, and also they interact: - I had pretty limited capacity this round, and hope to have more in future. Some of that was also to do with not knowing much about some particular space and the plausible interventions in that space, so was a knowledge constraint. Some was to do with finding the most efficient way to come to an answer. - It felt to me like there was some bottleneck of great applicants with great proposals. Some proposals stood out fairly quickly as being worth funding to me, so I expect to have been able to fund more grants had there been more of these. It’s possible some grants we didn’t fund would have seemed worth funding had the proposal been clearer / more specific. - There were macrostrategic questions the grant makers disagreed over—for example, the extent to which people working in academia should focus on doing good research of their own versus encourage others to do relevant research. There are also such questions that I think didn’t affect any of our grants this time but I expect to in future, such as how to prioritise spreading ideas like ‘you can donate extremely cost-effectively to these global health charities’ versus more generalised EA principles.
3. The proportion of good applications was fairly high compared to my expectation (though ofc the fewer applications we reject the faster we can give out grants, so until we’re granting to everyone who applies, there’s always a sense in which the proportion of good applications is bottlenecking us). The proportion of applications that seemed pretty clearly great, well thought through and ready to go as initially proposed, and which the committee agreed on, seemed maybe lower than I might have expected.
4. I think I noticed some of each of these, and it’s a little tough to say because the better the applicant, the more likely they are to come up with good ideas and also to be well calibrated on their fit with the idea. If I could dial up just one of these, probably it would be quality of idea.
5. One worry I have is that many people who do well early in life are encouraged to do fairly traditional things—for example they get offered good jobs and scholarships to go down set career tracks. By comparison, people who come into their own later on (eg late in university) are more in a position to be thinking independently about what to work on. Therefore my sense is that community building in general is systematically missing out on some of the people who would be best at it because it’s a kind of weird, non-standard thing to work on. So I guess I lean on the side of too few people interested in EA infrastructure stuff.
Answering these thoroughly would be really tricky, but here are a few off-the-cuff thoughts:
1. Tough to tell. My intuition is ‘the same amount as I did’ because I was happy with the amount I could grant to each of the recipients I granted to, and I didn’t have time to look at more applications than I did. Otoh I could imagine if we the fund had significantly more funding that would seem to provide a stronger mandate for trying things out and taking risks, so maybe that would have inclined me to spend less time evaluating each grant and use some money to do active grant making, or maybe would have inclined me to have funded one or two of the grants that I turned down. I also expect to be less time constrained in future because we won’t be doing an entire quarter’s grants in one round, and because there will be less ‘getting up to speed’.
2. Probably most of these are some bottleneck, and also they interact:
- I had pretty limited capacity this round, and hope to have more in future. Some of that was also to do with not knowing much about some particular space and the plausible interventions in that space, so was a knowledge constraint. Some was to do with finding the most efficient way to come to an answer.
- It felt to me like there was some bottleneck of great applicants with great proposals. Some proposals stood out fairly quickly as being worth funding to me, so I expect to have been able to fund more grants had there been more of these. It’s possible some grants we didn’t fund would have seemed worth funding had the proposal been clearer / more specific.
- There were macrostrategic questions the grant makers disagreed over—for example, the extent to which people working in academia should focus on doing good research of their own versus encourage others to do relevant research. There are also such questions that I think didn’t affect any of our grants this time but I expect to in future, such as how to prioritise spreading ideas like ‘you can donate extremely cost-effectively to these global health charities’ versus more generalised EA principles.
3. The proportion of good applications was fairly high compared to my expectation (though ofc the fewer applications we reject the faster we can give out grants, so until we’re granting to everyone who applies, there’s always a sense in which the proportion of good applications is bottlenecking us). The proportion of applications that seemed pretty clearly great, well thought through and ready to go as initially proposed, and which the committee agreed on, seemed maybe lower than I might have expected.
4. I think I noticed some of each of these, and it’s a little tough to say because the better the applicant, the more likely they are to come up with good ideas and also to be well calibrated on their fit with the idea. If I could dial up just one of these, probably it would be quality of idea.
5. One worry I have is that many people who do well early in life are encouraged to do fairly traditional things—for example they get offered good jobs and scholarships to go down set career tracks. By comparison, people who come into their own later on (eg late in university) are more in a position to be thinking independently about what to work on. Therefore my sense is that community building in general is systematically missing out on some of the people who would be best at it because it’s a kind of weird, non-standard thing to work on. So I guess I lean on the side of too few people interested in EA infrastructure stuff.
(Just wanted to say that I agree with Michelle.)