You could offer scholarships! As Jess Whittlestone remarked, as a community we’re quite good at recognizing and putting down ineffective altruism, and not so good at recognizing when our own community members do awesome stuff. Awards or scholarships to EA community members could be a great way to balance that out.
Taking people who are thinking about going into programming and funding their way through a coding bootcamp (or making it possible in other ways, like paying their rent for two months) would be one possible scholarship.
I’m not sure I fully see the upsides of this idea. What are the reasons you’d expect it to be able to absorb a large amount of money at a high return? Having some token awards as a way to give recognition to people seems useful, but after that you’re basically just transferring money between EAs. What are the advantages of that as opposed to trying to fund specific projects or giving it to GiveWell?
Even if it’s only a small amount of funding, small funders probably won’t want to do it (because it would take their entire budget and it’s high-variance).
I think you can give away an awful lot of money before hitting diminishing returns, either by providing more scholarships or by increasing the amount. The ultimate win condition for a scholarship might look something like the Thiel Fellowship, for instance, which can absorb a ton of money.
If you give people non-token sums of money it can also change their behavior. Again, the Thiel Fellowship is a good example of this. If someone had awarded me $100k over two years during college, I would probably be doing something pretty different (and maybe more awesome, though of course that’s hard to tell) right now.
I agree it has large room for more funding, but I’m still not sure why you’d expect the average returns to be that high. Why do you expect individual EAs to be a highly capital constrained in a way that can’t be addressed by (i) founding a new organisation (ii) other existing mechanisms (student loans, friends + family, app academy’s learn now pay later model, doing a part-time job on the side)?
It seems like there could be a few good cases e.g. you know an EA who you think is really awesome, they want to do something that doesn’t fit into an org (e.g. teach themselves marketing) and they’re having to waste a lot of time earning money, and you can free them up by giving them 10-20k. But after that, the benefits seem modest. (though perhaps still worth doing).
$10-$100k is a lot. For context, 80k’s cost per historical significant plan change is a couple of thousand dollars.
Perhaps you could tilt it more towards being a high-prestige fellowship style thing, and then hopefully (i) alter incentives (ii) give career capital to the most promising young EAs. This will require good branding though, and more effort selecting applications.
What do you think is the relevant disanalogy between a hypothetical EA fellowship and the Thiel Fellowship? Most Thiel Fellows have access to the same funding sources as EAs (perhaps more, because VC funding is so abundant). But it seems pretty clear to me that the Thiel Fellowship has accomplished things that Thiel couldn’t have done without spending as much money.
Has 80k convinced anyone to try high-variance things using these other sources you listed as financing, other than starting a startup (which is easier to get funding for than lots of other good EA ideas)? If not, it seems like 80k plan changes aren’t a good benchmark here, since they accomplish different things.
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!
You could offer scholarships! As Jess Whittlestone remarked, as a community we’re quite good at recognizing and putting down ineffective altruism, and not so good at recognizing when our own community members do awesome stuff. Awards or scholarships to EA community members could be a great way to balance that out.
Taking people who are thinking about going into programming and funding their way through a coding bootcamp (or making it possible in other ways, like paying their rent for two months) would be one possible scholarship.
I’m not sure I fully see the upsides of this idea. What are the reasons you’d expect it to be able to absorb a large amount of money at a high return? Having some token awards as a way to give recognition to people seems useful, but after that you’re basically just transferring money between EAs. What are the advantages of that as opposed to trying to fund specific projects or giving it to GiveWell?
Even if it’s only a small amount of funding, small funders probably won’t want to do it (because it would take their entire budget and it’s high-variance).
I think you can give away an awful lot of money before hitting diminishing returns, either by providing more scholarships or by increasing the amount. The ultimate win condition for a scholarship might look something like the Thiel Fellowship, for instance, which can absorb a ton of money.
If you give people non-token sums of money it can also change their behavior. Again, the Thiel Fellowship is a good example of this. If someone had awarded me $100k over two years during college, I would probably be doing something pretty different (and maybe more awesome, though of course that’s hard to tell) right now.
EDIT: Downvoter, care to explain?
(I didn’t downvote!)
I agree it has large room for more funding, but I’m still not sure why you’d expect the average returns to be that high. Why do you expect individual EAs to be a highly capital constrained in a way that can’t be addressed by (i) founding a new organisation (ii) other existing mechanisms (student loans, friends + family, app academy’s learn now pay later model, doing a part-time job on the side)?
It seems like there could be a few good cases e.g. you know an EA who you think is really awesome, they want to do something that doesn’t fit into an org (e.g. teach themselves marketing) and they’re having to waste a lot of time earning money, and you can free them up by giving them 10-20k. But after that, the benefits seem modest. (though perhaps still worth doing).
$10-$100k is a lot. For context, 80k’s cost per historical significant plan change is a couple of thousand dollars.
Perhaps you could tilt it more towards being a high-prestige fellowship style thing, and then hopefully (i) alter incentives (ii) give career capital to the most promising young EAs. This will require good branding though, and more effort selecting applications.
What do you think is the relevant disanalogy between a hypothetical EA fellowship and the Thiel Fellowship? Most Thiel Fellows have access to the same funding sources as EAs (perhaps more, because VC funding is so abundant). But it seems pretty clear to me that the Thiel Fellowship has accomplished things that Thiel couldn’t have done without spending as much money.
Has 80k convinced anyone to try high-variance things using these other sources you listed as financing, other than starting a startup (which is easier to get funding for than lots of other good EA ideas)? If not, it seems like 80k plan changes aren’t a good benchmark here, since they accomplish different things.
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!
Ben Kuhn is on fire! Again, yes, I’d fund this in a couple years when I can donate more flexibly.