First want to say that I was also pretty uncomfortable about this, and initially told Austin I didn’t want to do it—you’re right that I am not qualified to be a grant maker, at least in the sense that I would not be hired as one in another context. I don’t deserve whatever status that role happens to bestow upon me, and I don’t particularly want the power.
That said, me being a regrantor has made the UX much better, since I’m basically the sole person pushing code and dogfooding is so powerful: it’s changed the prompting questions on write-ups, the way projects in need of more funding are displayed, the way funding targets are specified, and lots of other tiny things that were a bit uglier or higher friction or simply broken before. Less concretely, my model of what it feels like to write a publicly visible grant writeup, to search for giving opportunities, to select grant amounts, etc. has become more vivid, which I expect to be strategically useful going forward. And it’s only been a few weeks so far.
So, I agree it’s bad optically (I agree-voted your comment), but ultimately think this was a good call. Especially because the counterfactual of having not given me the $50k is not that it would be going to some better-evaluated grants than the ones I’ve made, but that it would be sitting in a bank account, and (obviously) I think the grants I’ve made are better than that.
First want to say that I was also pretty uncomfortable about this, and initially told Austin I didn’t want to do it—you’re right that I am not qualified to be a grant maker, at least in the sense that I would not be hired as one in another context. I don’t deserve whatever status that role happens to bestow upon me, and I don’t particularly want the power.
That said, me being a regrantor has made the UX much better, since I’m basically the sole person pushing code and dogfooding is so powerful: it’s changed the prompting questions on write-ups, the way projects in need of more funding are displayed, the way funding targets are specified, and lots of other tiny things that were a bit uglier or higher friction or simply broken before. Less concretely, my model of what it feels like to write a publicly visible grant writeup, to search for giving opportunities, to select grant amounts, etc. has become more vivid, which I expect to be strategically useful going forward. And it’s only been a few weeks so far.
So, I agree it’s bad optically (I agree-voted your comment), but ultimately think this was a good call. Especially because the counterfactual of having not given me the $50k is not that it would be going to some better-evaluated grants than the ones I’ve made, but that it would be sitting in a bank account, and (obviously) I think the grants I’ve made are better than that.