I’ve also had this thought (though wouldn’t necessarily have thought of it as an outside view argument). I’m not convinced by counterarguments here in the thread so far.
Quoting from a reply below that argues for deferring to grantmakers (and thereby increasing their overhead with them getting more applications):
>You may also be unaware of ways it would backfire, and the reason something doesn’t get funded is because others judge it to be net negative.
I mean, that’s true in theory, but giving people who you know well (so have a comparative advantage at evaluating their character and competence) some extra resources isn’t usually a high-variance decision. Sure, if one of your friends had a grand plan for having impact in the category of “tread carefully,” then you probably want to consult experts to make sure it doesn’t backfire. But you also want to talk to your friend/acquaintance to slow down in general, in that case, so it isn’t a concept that only or particularly applies to whether to give them resources. And for many or even most people who work on EA topics, their work/activities don’t come with high backfiring risks (at least I tentatively think so, even though I might agree with the statement “probably >10% of people in EA have predictably negative impact.” Most people who have negative impact have low negative impact.)
>This would be like the opposite of the donor lottery, which exists to incentivize fewer deeper independent investigations over more shallow investigations.
I think both things are valuable. You can focus on comparative advantages and reducing overhead, or you can focus on benefits from scale and deep immersion.
One more thought on this: If someone is inexperienced with EA and feels unsuited for any grantmaking decisions, even in areas where they have local information that grantmakers lack, it makes more sense for them to defer. However, it gets tricky. They’ll also tend to be bad at deciding who to defer to. So, yeah, they can reduce variance and go with something broadly accepted within the community. But that still covers a lot of things – it applies to longtermism as well as neartermism. Many funds in the community rely on quite specific normative views (and empirical one, but deference makes sense there more straightforwardly), and the person we’re now talking about will be more poorly positioned to decide on this. So they’re generally in a tricky situation and probably benefit from gaining a better understanding of several things. To summarize, I think if someone knows where and when to defer, they’re probably also in a good enough position to decide that there’s a particular person in their social environment who’d do good things if they had more money. (And the idea/proposal here is to only give money to people locally if you actually feel convinced by it, rather than doing it as a general policy. The original comment could maybe be interpreted as supporting a general policy or giving out money to less affluant acquaintances, whereas my stance is more like “Do it if it seems compellingly impactful to you!”)
I’ve also had this thought (though wouldn’t necessarily have thought of it as an outside view argument). I’m not convinced by counterarguments here in the thread so far.
Quoting from a reply below that argues for deferring to grantmakers (and thereby increasing their overhead with them getting more applications):
>You may also be unaware of ways it would backfire, and the reason something doesn’t get funded is because others judge it to be net negative.
I mean, that’s true in theory, but giving people who you know well (so have a comparative advantage at evaluating their character and competence) some extra resources isn’t usually a high-variance decision. Sure, if one of your friends had a grand plan for having impact in the category of “tread carefully,” then you probably want to consult experts to make sure it doesn’t backfire. But you also want to talk to your friend/acquaintance to slow down in general, in that case, so it isn’t a concept that only or particularly applies to whether to give them resources. And for many or even most people who work on EA topics, their work/activities don’t come with high backfiring risks (at least I tentatively think so, even though I might agree with the statement “probably >10% of people in EA have predictably negative impact.” Most people who have negative impact have low negative impact.)
>This would be like the opposite of the donor lottery, which exists to incentivize fewer deeper independent investigations over more shallow investigations.
I think both things are valuable. You can focus on comparative advantages and reducing overhead, or you can focus on benefits from scale and deep immersion.
One more thought on this: If someone is inexperienced with EA and feels unsuited for any grantmaking decisions, even in areas where they have local information that grantmakers lack, it makes more sense for them to defer. However, it gets tricky. They’ll also tend to be bad at deciding who to defer to. So, yeah, they can reduce variance and go with something broadly accepted within the community. But that still covers a lot of things – it applies to longtermism as well as neartermism. Many funds in the community rely on quite specific normative views (and empirical one, but deference makes sense there more straightforwardly), and the person we’re now talking about will be more poorly positioned to decide on this. So they’re generally in a tricky situation and probably benefit from gaining a better understanding of several things. To summarize, I think if someone knows where and when to defer, they’re probably also in a good enough position to decide that there’s a particular person in their social environment who’d do good things if they had more money. (And the idea/proposal here is to only give money to people locally if you actually feel convinced by it, rather than doing it as a general policy. The original comment could maybe be interpreted as supporting a general policy or giving out money to less affluant acquaintances, whereas my stance is more like “Do it if it seems compellingly impactful to you!”)