I think it is fair to say you expected very low risk from creating an open platform where people would just post projects and seek volunteers and funding, while I expected with minimum curation this creates significant risk (even if the risk is coming from small fraction of projects). Sorry if I rounded off suggestions like “let’s make an open platform without careful evaluation and see” and “based on the project ideas lists which existed several years ago the amount of harmful projects seems low” to “worrying about them is premature”.
The community has already had many instances of openly writing about ideas, seeking funding on the EA Forum, Patreon, and elsewhere, and posting projects in places like the .impact hackpad and the currently active EA Work Club. Since posting about projects and making them known to community members seems to be a norm, I am curious about your assessment of the risk and what, if anything, can be done about it.
Do you propose that all EA project leaders seek approval from a central evaluation committee or something before talking with others about and publicizing the existence of their project? This would highly concern me because I think it’s very challenging to predict the outcomes of a project, which is evidenced by the fact that people have wildly different opinions on how good of an idea or how good of a startup something is. Such a system could be very negative EV by greatly reducing the number of projects being pursued by providing initial negative feedback that doesn’t reflect how the project would have turned out or decreasing the success of projects because other people are afraid to support a project that did not get backing from an evaluation system. I expect significant inaccuracy from my own project evaluation system as well as the project evaluation systems of other people and evaluation groups.
Thanks—both of that happened after I posted my comment, and also I still do not see the numbers which would help me estimate the ratio of projects which applied and which got funded. I take as mildly negative signal that someone had to ask, and this info was not included in the post, which solicits project proposals and volunteer work.
In my model it seems possible you have something like chicken-and-egg problem, not getting many great proposals, and the group of unnamed angels not funding many proposals coming via that pipeline.
If this is the case and the actual number of successfully funded projects is low, I think it is necessary to state this clearly before inviting people to work on proposals. My vague impression was we may disagree on this, which seems to indicate some quite deep disagreement about how funders should treat projects.
I wrote about the chicken and the egg problem here. As noted in my comments on the announcement post, the angels have significant amounts of funding available. Other funders do not disclose some of these statistics, and while we may do so in the future, I do not think it is necessary before soliciting proposals. The time cost of applying is pretty low, particularly if people are recycling content they have already written. I think we are the first grantmaking group to give all applicants feedback on their application which I think is valuable even if people do not get funded.
The whole context was, Ryan suggested I should have sought some feedback from you. I actually did that, and your co-founder noted that he will try to write the feedback on this today or tomorrow, on 11th of Mar—which did not happen. I don’t think this is large problem, as we had already discussed the topic extensively.
Ben commented on your Google Document that was seeking feedback. I wouldn’t say we’ve discussed the topic “extensively” in the brief call that we had. The devil is in the details, as they say.
The community has already had many instances of openly writing about ideas, seeking funding on the EA Forum, Patreon, and elsewhere, and posting projects in places like the .impact hackpad and the currently active EA Work Club. Since posting about projects and making them known to community members seems to be a norm, I am curious about your assessment of the risk and what, if anything, can be done about it.
Do you propose that all EA project leaders seek approval from a central evaluation committee or something before talking with others about and publicizing the existence of their project? This would highly concern me because I think it’s very challenging to predict the outcomes of a project, which is evidenced by the fact that people have wildly different opinions on how good of an idea or how good of a startup something is. Such a system could be very negative EV by greatly reducing the number of projects being pursued by providing initial negative feedback that doesn’t reflect how the project would have turned out or decreasing the success of projects because other people are afraid to support a project that did not get backing from an evaluation system. I expect significant inaccuracy from my own project evaluation system as well as the project evaluation systems of other people and evaluation groups.
I wrote about the chicken and the egg problem here. As noted in my comments on the announcement post, the angels have significant amounts of funding available. Other funders do not disclose some of these statistics, and while we may do so in the future, I do not think it is necessary before soliciting proposals. The time cost of applying is pretty low, particularly if people are recycling content they have already written. I think we are the first grantmaking group to give all applicants feedback on their application which I think is valuable even if people do not get funded.
Ben commented on your Google Document that was seeking feedback. I wouldn’t say we’ve discussed the topic “extensively” in the brief call that we had. The devil is in the details, as they say.