4. I haven’t investigated this much myself, I was relaying what I know from donors (I don’t donate myself). I’ve heard a few times that OpenPhil and some of the donors behind EA Funds are quite worried about negative effects. My impression is that the reason for some of this is simple, but there are some more complicated reasons that go into the thinking here that haven’t been written up fully. I think Oliver Habryka has a bunch of views here.
5-6. I didn’t mean to imply that junior researchers are “rare”, just that they are limited in number (which is obvious). My impression is that there’s currently a bottleneck to give the very junior researchers experience and reputability, which is unfortunate. This is evidenced by Rethink’s round. I think there may be a fair amount of variation in these researchers though; that only a few are really the kinds who could pioneer a new area (this requires a lot of skills and special career risks).
7. I’m also really unsure about this. Though to be fair, I’m unsure about a lot of things. To be clear though, I think that there are probably rather few people this would be a good fit for.
I’m really curious just how impressive the original EA founders were compared to all the new EAs. There are way more young EAs now than there were in the early days, so theoretically we should expect that some will be in many ways more competent than the original EA founders, minus in experience of course.
Part of me wonders: if we don’t see a few obvious candidates for young EA researchers as influential as the founders were, in the next few years, maybe something is going quite wrong. My guess is that we should aim to resemble other groups that are very meritocratic in terms of general leadership and research.
8. Happy to discuss in person. They would take a while to organize and write up.
The very simple thing here is that to me, we really could use “funding work” of all types. OpenPhil still employs a very limited headcount given their resources, and EA Funds is mostly made up of volunteers. Distributing money well is a lot of work, and there currently aren’t many resources going into this.
One big challenge is that not many people are trusted to do this work, in part because of the expected negative impacts of funding bad things. So there’s a small group trusted to do this work, and a smaller subset of them interested in spending time doing it.
I would love to see more groups help coordinate, especially if they could be accepted by the major donors and community. I think there’s a high bar here, but if you can be over it, it can be very valuable.
I’d also recommend talking to the team at EA Funds, which is currently growing.
9. This could be worth discussing more further. RP is still quite early and developing. If you have suggestions about how it could improve, I’d be excited to have discussions on that. I could imagine us helping change it in positive directions going forward.
Thanks for the response!
Quick responses:
4. I haven’t investigated this much myself, I was relaying what I know from donors (I don’t donate myself). I’ve heard a few times that OpenPhil and some of the donors behind EA Funds are quite worried about negative effects. My impression is that the reason for some of this is simple, but there are some more complicated reasons that go into the thinking here that haven’t been written up fully. I think Oliver Habryka has a bunch of views here.
5-6. I didn’t mean to imply that junior researchers are “rare”, just that they are limited in number (which is obvious). My impression is that there’s currently a bottleneck to give the very junior researchers experience and reputability, which is unfortunate. This is evidenced by Rethink’s round. I think there may be a fair amount of variation in these researchers though; that only a few are really the kinds who could pioneer a new area (this requires a lot of skills and special career risks).
7. I’m also really unsure about this. Though to be fair, I’m unsure about a lot of things. To be clear though, I think that there are probably rather few people this would be a good fit for.
I’m really curious just how impressive the original EA founders were compared to all the new EAs. There are way more young EAs now than there were in the early days, so theoretically we should expect that some will be in many ways more competent than the original EA founders, minus in experience of course.
Part of me wonders: if we don’t see a few obvious candidates for young EA researchers as influential as the founders were, in the next few years, maybe something is going quite wrong. My guess is that we should aim to resemble other groups that are very meritocratic in terms of general leadership and research.
8. Happy to discuss in person. They would take a while to organize and write up.
The very simple thing here is that to me, we really could use “funding work” of all types. OpenPhil still employs a very limited headcount given their resources, and EA Funds is mostly made up of volunteers. Distributing money well is a lot of work, and there currently aren’t many resources going into this.
One big challenge is that not many people are trusted to do this work, in part because of the expected negative impacts of funding bad things. So there’s a small group trusted to do this work, and a smaller subset of them interested in spending time doing it.
I would love to see more groups help coordinate, especially if they could be accepted by the major donors and community. I think there’s a high bar here, but if you can be over it, it can be very valuable.
I’d also recommend talking to the team at EA Funds, which is currently growing.
9. This could be worth discussing more further. RP is still quite early and developing. If you have suggestions about how it could improve, I’d be excited to have discussions on that. I could imagine us helping change it in positive directions going forward.
10. Thanks!