You could do unconditional basic income but why would you start with that when we haven’t even created a facility for people to fund credible proposals yet? Seems better to reboot EA Ventures or Impact Certificates first (given that the EA community is a bit bigger, and that some of the reasons for previous failure were related to circumstance).
I guess another important next step would be learning from why similar things like EA Ventures, Impact Certificates, and the Pareto Fellowship didn’t get more traction and were shut down.
We do not plan to continue the Pareto Fellowship in its current form this year. While we thought that it was a valuable experiment, the cost per participant was too high relative to the magnitude of plan changes made by the fellows. We might consider running a much shorter version of the program, without the project period, in the future. The Pareto Fellowship did, however, make us more excited about doing other high-touch mentoring and training with promising members of the effective altruism community.
I’m sympathetic to this view, though I think the EA funds have some EA-Ventures-like properties; charities in each of the fund areas presumably can pitch themselves to the people running the funds if they so choose.
One difference that has been pointed out to me in the past is that for (e.g.) EA Ventures you have to put a lot of up-front work into your actual proposal. That’s time-consuming and costly if you don’t get anything out of it. That’s somewhat different to handing some trustworthy EA an unconditional income and saying ‘I trust your commitment and your judgment, go and do whatever seems most worthwhile for 6/12/24 months’. It’s plausible to me that the latter involves less work on both donor and recipient side for some (small) set of potential recipients.
With that all said, better communication of credible proposals still feels like the relatively higher priority to me.
One important thing to remember is that important projects may not look very credible initially. Any early-stage EA funding body needs to ask itself “would we fund an early-stage 80k?”.
Bear in mind that before we spent any money we had: been involved in 10-20 important plan changes that would already justify significant funding; built a website with thousands of views per month; and received top level press coverage.
I think I’m thinking of funding even earlier than 80k got money, though. 80k had presumably had very many hours of volunteer labour before it got to that point—we might want to fund things earlier than that.
You could do unconditional basic income but why would you start with that when we haven’t even created a facility for people to fund credible proposals yet? Seems better to reboot EA Ventures or Impact Certificates first (given that the EA community is a bit bigger, and that some of the reasons for previous failure were related to circumstance).
I guess another important next step would be learning from why similar things like EA Ventures, Impact Certificates, and the Pareto Fellowship didn’t get more traction and were shut down.
Pareto Fellowship was shut down? When? What happened?
From CEA’s 2017 Fundraising Report.
I’m sympathetic to this view, though I think the EA funds have some EA-Ventures-like properties; charities in each of the fund areas presumably can pitch themselves to the people running the funds if they so choose.
One difference that has been pointed out to me in the past is that for (e.g.) EA Ventures you have to put a lot of up-front work into your actual proposal. That’s time-consuming and costly if you don’t get anything out of it. That’s somewhat different to handing some trustworthy EA an unconditional income and saying ‘I trust your commitment and your judgment, go and do whatever seems most worthwhile for 6/12/24 months’. It’s plausible to me that the latter involves less work on both donor and recipient side for some (small) set of potential recipients.
With that all said, better communication of credible proposals still feels like the relatively higher priority to me.
Agreed!
One important thing to remember is that important projects may not look very credible initially. Any early-stage EA funding body needs to ask itself “would we fund an early-stage 80k?”.
Bear in mind that before we spent any money we had: been involved in 10-20 important plan changes that would already justify significant funding; built a website with thousands of views per month; and received top level press coverage.
Fair!
I think I’m thinking of funding even earlier than 80k got money, though. 80k had presumably had very many hours of volunteer labour before it got to that point—we might want to fund things earlier than that.