I think Ryan is probably overall right that it would be better to fund people for longer at a time. One counter-consideration that hasn’t been mentioned yet: longer contracts implicitly and explicitly push people to keep doing something — that may be sub-optimal — because they drive up switching costs.
If you have to apply for funding once a year no matter what you’re working on, the “switching costs” of doing the same thing you’ve been doing are similar to the cost of switching (of course they aren’t in general, but with regard to funding they might be). I think it’s unlikely but not crazy that the effects of status quo bias might be severe enough that funders artificially imposing switching costs on “continuing/non-switching” results in net better results. I expect that in the world where grants usually last 1 year, people switch what they’re doing more than the world where grants are 3 years, and it’s plausible these changes are good for impact.
Some factors that seem cruxy here:
how much can be gained through realistic switching (how bad is current allocation of people, how much better are the things people would do if switching costs were relatively zero as they sorta are, how much worse of things would people be doing if continuing-costs were low).
it seems very likely that this consideration should affect grants to junior and early-career people that are bouncing around more but it probably doesn’t apply much to more senior folks who have been working on a project for awhile (on the other hand, maybe you want the junior people investing more in long term career plans, thus switching less, it depends on the person).
Could relatively-zero switching costs actually hurt things because people switch too much due to over-correcting (e.g., holden karnofsky gets excited about AI evaluations so a bunch of people work on it and then governance gets big so people switch to that, and then etc.)
How much does it help to have people with a lot of experience on particular things (narrow experts vs. generalists)
If grants were more flexible (or grant-makers communicated better and the social norms were clearer; in fact people sometimes do return grants or change what they’re working on mid-grant) maybe you could fund people for 3 years while giving them affordance to switch so you still capture the value from people switching to more impactful things.
Personally, I’ve found that being funded by a grant at all makes me less likely to switch what I’m doing. I expect the amount I “want” (not upon reflection/hindsight) to switch what I’m doing is too much, so for me this effect might be net positive, but there are probably also some times where this gets in the way of me making impactful switches. If grant-makers were more accessible to talk about this, i.e., not significantly time constrained, they could probably cause a better allocation of resources. Overall, I’m not sure how compelling this counter-consideration is, but it seems worth mulling over.
I agree. Early-career EAs are more likely to need to switch projects, less likely to merit multi-year funding, and have—on average—less need for job-security. Single-year funding seems OK for those cases.
For people and orgs with significant track records, however, it seems hard to justify.
I think Ryan is probably overall right that it would be better to fund people for longer at a time. One counter-consideration that hasn’t been mentioned yet: longer contracts implicitly and explicitly push people to keep doing something — that may be sub-optimal — because they drive up switching costs.
If you have to apply for funding once a year no matter what you’re working on, the “switching costs” of doing the same thing you’ve been doing are similar to the cost of switching (of course they aren’t in general, but with regard to funding they might be). I think it’s unlikely but not crazy that the effects of status quo bias might be severe enough that funders artificially imposing switching costs on “continuing/non-switching” results in net better results. I expect that in the world where grants usually last 1 year, people switch what they’re doing more than the world where grants are 3 years, and it’s plausible these changes are good for impact.
Some factors that seem cruxy here:
how much can be gained through realistic switching (how bad is current allocation of people, how much better are the things people would do if switching costs were relatively zero as they sorta are, how much worse of things would people be doing if continuing-costs were low).
it seems very likely that this consideration should affect grants to junior and early-career people that are bouncing around more but it probably doesn’t apply much to more senior folks who have been working on a project for awhile (on the other hand, maybe you want the junior people investing more in long term career plans, thus switching less, it depends on the person).
Could relatively-zero switching costs actually hurt things because people switch too much due to over-correcting (e.g., holden karnofsky gets excited about AI evaluations so a bunch of people work on it and then governance gets big so people switch to that, and then etc.)
How much does it help to have people with a lot of experience on particular things (narrow experts vs. generalists)
If grants were more flexible (or grant-makers communicated better and the social norms were clearer; in fact people sometimes do return grants or change what they’re working on mid-grant) maybe you could fund people for 3 years while giving them affordance to switch so you still capture the value from people switching to more impactful things.
Personally, I’ve found that being funded by a grant at all makes me less likely to switch what I’m doing. I expect the amount I “want” (not upon reflection/hindsight) to switch what I’m doing is too much, so for me this effect might be net positive, but there are probably also some times where this gets in the way of me making impactful switches. If grant-makers were more accessible to talk about this, i.e., not significantly time constrained, they could probably cause a better allocation of resources. Overall, I’m not sure how compelling this counter-consideration is, but it seems worth mulling over.
I agree. Early-career EAs are more likely to need to switch projects, less likely to merit multi-year funding, and have—on average—less need for job-security. Single-year funding seems OK for those cases.
For people and orgs with significant track records, however, it seems hard to justify.