I’m not particularly familiar with the positive impact of the Thiel Fellowship. If your argument is “the Thiel Fellowship was very effective, therefore, setting up an EA equivalent could be a good idea” that makes sense, though I wouldn’t be able to personally get behind it without more detail on the results of the Thiel Fellowship and/or theoretical reasons to expect it to yield good returns.
It also seems like there’s more track record for a fund tilted more towards being a seed accelerator / angel investor for new projects, so we should do that first.
I would weaken “effective” to “had impacts that we might want to replicate”, but yes. I actually think it operates quite similarly to an angel investor for projects (applicants are generally expected to come with an idea for what they’d work on), so we may be thinking of mostly the same thing!
I was taking the difference to be that scholarships are more about funding individuals rather than organisations, and perhaps even individuals without a project in mind.
I agree that a decent-sized fund that awards seed grants + expansion grants to EA projects is a good idea, as per my comment.
I’m less sure about funding individuals, though I could see myself being persuaded. Funding individuals might be better for high-variance long-shots e.g. see this for a little evidence:
http://pazoulay.scripts.mit.edu/docs/hhmi.pdf
Also it’s plausible there’s people out there who we trust due to their participation in the community, but who can’t get funded by existing mechanisms (because those existing mechanisms don’t trust them), so are funding-constrained. e.g. paying for someone in the community to do some valuable self-development or training.
Finally, if made high-prestige enough, it could be a good way to generate career capital for people we want to back.
Though, for all of this, you’d need a good mechanism for selecting the right people!
I’m not particularly familiar with the positive impact of the Thiel Fellowship. If your argument is “the Thiel Fellowship was very effective, therefore, setting up an EA equivalent could be a good idea” that makes sense, though I wouldn’t be able to personally get behind it without more detail on the results of the Thiel Fellowship and/or theoretical reasons to expect it to yield good returns.
It also seems like there’s more track record for a fund tilted more towards being a seed accelerator / angel investor for new projects, so we should do that first.
I would weaken “effective” to “had impacts that we might want to replicate”, but yes. I actually think it operates quite similarly to an angel investor for projects (applicants are generally expected to come with an idea for what they’d work on), so we may be thinking of mostly the same thing!
I was taking the difference to be that scholarships are more about funding individuals rather than organisations, and perhaps even individuals without a project in mind.
I agree that a decent-sized fund that awards seed grants + expansion grants to EA projects is a good idea, as per my comment.
I’m less sure about funding individuals, though I could see myself being persuaded. Funding individuals might be better for high-variance long-shots e.g. see this for a little evidence: http://pazoulay.scripts.mit.edu/docs/hhmi.pdf Also it’s plausible there’s people out there who we trust due to their participation in the community, but who can’t get funded by existing mechanisms (because those existing mechanisms don’t trust them), so are funding-constrained. e.g. paying for someone in the community to do some valuable self-development or training. Finally, if made high-prestige enough, it could be a good way to generate career capital for people we want to back. Though, for all of this, you’d need a good mechanism for selecting the right people!