Hey Charles! Glad to see that you’re still around.
It seems we can immediately evaluate “earning to give” and the purchasing of labor for EA
I don’t think OpenPhil or the EA Funds are particularly funding constrained, so this seems to suggest that “people who can do useful things with money” is more of a bottleneck than money itself.
It seems easy to construct EA projects that benefit from monies and purchasable talent
I think I disagree about the quality of execution one is likely to get by purchasing talent. I agree that in areas like global health, it’s likely possible to construct scalable projects.
I am pessimistic about applying “standard skills” to projects in the EA space for reasons related to Goodhart’s Law.
It seems implausible that market forces are ineffective
I think my take is “money can coordinate activity around a broad set of things, but EA is bottlenecked by things that are outside this set.”
I also don’t get this section “Talent is very desirable”:
I don’t think this section is very important. It is arguing that paying people less than market rate means they’re effectively “donating their time”. If those people were earning money, they would be donating money instead. In both cases, the amount of donations is roughly constant, assuming some market efficiently. Note that this argument is probably false because the efficiency assumption doesn’t hold in practice.
What is Mark’s model for talent?
I think your guesses are mostly right. Perhaps one analogy is that I think EA is trying to do something similar to “come up with revolutionary insights into fundamental physics”, although that’s not quite right because money can be used to build large measuring instruments, which has no obvious backwards analogue.
However, in either of these cases, it seems that special organizations can find ways to motivate, mentor or cultivate these people, or the environment they grow up in. These organizations can be funded for money.
I agree this is true, but I claim that the current bottleneck by far the organizations/mentors not yet existing. I would much rather someone become a mentor than earn money and try to hire a mentor.
Hey Charles! Glad to see that you’re still around.
I don’t think OpenPhil or the EA Funds are particularly funding constrained, so this seems to suggest that “people who can do useful things with money” is more of a bottleneck than money itself.
I think I disagree about the quality of execution one is likely to get by purchasing talent. I agree that in areas like global health, it’s likely possible to construct scalable projects.
I am pessimistic about applying “standard skills” to projects in the EA space for reasons related to Goodhart’s Law.
I think my take is “money can coordinate activity around a broad set of things, but EA is bottlenecked by things that are outside this set.”
I don’t think this section is very important. It is arguing that paying people less than market rate means they’re effectively “donating their time”. If those people were earning money, they would be donating money instead. In both cases, the amount of donations is roughly constant, assuming some market efficiently. Note that this argument is probably false because the efficiency assumption doesn’t hold in practice.
I think your guesses are mostly right. Perhaps one analogy is that I think EA is trying to do something similar to “come up with revolutionary insights into fundamental physics”, although that’s not quite right because money can be used to build large measuring instruments, which has no obvious backwards analogue.
I agree this is true, but I claim that the current bottleneck by far the organizations/mentors not yet existing. I would much rather someone become a mentor than earn money and try to hire a mentor.