In the absence of longer-term security, it would be nice to have more foresight about income.
I can tolerate quite a lot of variance on the 6+ month timescale if I know it’s coming. If I know I’m not going to get another grant in 6 months, there are things I can do to compensate.
A mistake I made recently is applying relatively late due to an incorrect understanding of the funding situation, getting rejected, and now I’m temporarily unable to continue safety research. (Don’t worry, I’m no danger of going homeless or starving, just lowered productivity.)
Applying for grants sooner would help mitigate this, but there are presumably limits. I would guess that grantmaking organizations would rather not commit funds to a project that won’t start for another 2 years, for example.
If there was a magic way to get an informed probability on future grant funding, that would help a lot. I’m not sure how realistic this is; a lot of options seem pretty high overhead for grantmakers and/or involve some sort of fancy prediction markets with tons of transparency and market subsidies. Having continuous updates about some smaller pieces of the puzzle could help.
In the absence of longer-term security, it would be nice to have more foresight about income.
I can tolerate quite a lot of variance on the 6+ month timescale if I know it’s coming. If I know I’m not going to get another grant in 6 months, there are things I can do to compensate.
A mistake I made recently is applying relatively late due to an incorrect understanding of the funding situation, getting rejected, and now I’m temporarily unable to continue safety research. (Don’t worry, I’m no danger of going homeless or starving, just lowered productivity.)
Applying for grants sooner would help mitigate this, but there are presumably limits. I would guess that grantmaking organizations would rather not commit funds to a project that won’t start for another 2 years, for example.
If there was a magic way to get an informed probability on future grant funding, that would help a lot. I’m not sure how realistic this is; a lot of options seem pretty high overhead for grantmakers and/or involve some sort of fancy prediction markets with tons of transparency and market subsidies. Having continuous updates about some smaller pieces of the puzzle could help.