I think a disadvantage of bounties is that multiple people may do the same thing, and depending on the task that could be quite good or a lot of wasted effort, so I think in most cases I would prefer grants.
Can you see suggestions that were made to EA funds somewhere?
It seems to me as if you still kind of need to specify who should get the funding when you suggest a grant. I think it would be very good if you could just submit a suggestion for a task that someone should do and we had an overview of suggested tasks or projects that people could see and then quickly apply for funding to do that task. (Maybe you could fund a bounty or grant for someone who creates such a matching-people-and-funding-to-tasks-system, or perhaps EAFunds should just integrate it.)
(Thinking even bigger, it would probably be nice if you had a good overview what ideas in AI safety had already been tried and what ideas haven’t been tried yet but seem promising. Though I’m not sure if that would really be helpful, you should probably ask AI safety researchers how to best improve coordination in AI safety research.)
The suggestions are visible to EA Funds staff in a spreadsheet, but I don’t think they’re visible to other people.
Suggesting a person to implement an idea is good but not necessary—definitely people should feel free to submit grant ideas without having a person in mind (and conversely should also feel free to submit ideas for people to fund for something or some vague thing [e.g., “more writing”] rather than specific things, if the person seems quite promising or whatever).
I personally do think better ways of easily seeing, filtering, searching, compiling info on, etc. a whole bunch of ideas that have been proposed (and maybe also tried) seems good, but I’m not very optimistic about attempts to do that, largely because many proposals or attempts have been made and none seems to have properly caught on. It’s probably best if that’s done by an actor like CEA who has the resources to do it really well and maintain it and the status/prominence to make it the central thing. See some further thoughts here and in the links (that focuses on research ideas, but similar points apply more generally): Proposal: A central, editable database to help people choose and do research projects [draft]
[Caveat: I wrote this comment quickly and don’t represent anyone but myself]
Thanks, I think I will suggest some grants sometime the next days. :)
I agree that it is probably hard create such a database in a way that it would be really useful and continuously used and that it may should be implemented by CEA.
(If CEA decides not to create something like that, it would still be interesting for people like me to see the suggestions, even if it is not for the purpose of task-people-matching. ^^)
And thanks for sharing the draft! I think it is helpful input, because I had some similar ideas, I will look into it more thoroughly later.
Thanks for pointing that out!
I think a disadvantage of bounties is that multiple people may do the same thing, and depending on the task that could be quite good or a lot of wasted effort, so I think in most cases I would prefer grants.
Can you see suggestions that were made to EA funds somewhere?
It seems to me as if you still kind of need to specify who should get the funding when you suggest a grant. I think it would be very good if you could just submit a suggestion for a task that someone should do and we had an overview of suggested tasks or projects that people could see and then quickly apply for funding to do that task. (Maybe you could fund a bounty or grant for someone who creates such a matching-people-and-funding-to-tasks-system, or perhaps EAFunds should just integrate it.)
(Thinking even bigger, it would probably be nice if you had a good overview what ideas in AI safety had already been tried and what ideas haven’t been tried yet but seem promising. Though I’m not sure if that would really be helpful, you should probably ask AI safety researchers how to best improve coordination in AI safety research.)
The suggestions are visible to EA Funds staff in a spreadsheet, but I don’t think they’re visible to other people.
Suggesting a person to implement an idea is good but not necessary—definitely people should feel free to submit grant ideas without having a person in mind (and conversely should also feel free to submit ideas for people to fund for something or some vague thing [e.g., “more writing”] rather than specific things, if the person seems quite promising or whatever).
I personally do think better ways of easily seeing, filtering, searching, compiling info on, etc. a whole bunch of ideas that have been proposed (and maybe also tried) seems good, but I’m not very optimistic about attempts to do that, largely because many proposals or attempts have been made and none seems to have properly caught on. It’s probably best if that’s done by an actor like CEA who has the resources to do it really well and maintain it and the status/prominence to make it the central thing. See some further thoughts here and in the links (that focuses on research ideas, but similar points apply more generally): Proposal: A central, editable database to help people choose and do research projects [draft]
[Caveat: I wrote this comment quickly and don’t represent anyone but myself]
Thanks, I think I will suggest some grants sometime the next days. :)
I agree that it is probably hard create such a database in a way that it would be really useful and continuously used and that it may should be implemented by CEA.
(If CEA decides not to create something like that, it would still be interesting for people like me to see the suggestions, even if it is not for the purpose of task-people-matching. ^^)
And thanks for sharing the draft! I think it is helpful input, because I had some similar ideas, I will look into it more thoroughly later.