On (1): Have you encouraged any of these people to apply for existing sources of funding within EA? Did any of them do so successfully?
On (3): The most prominent EA-run “major achievement prize” is the Future of Life Award, which has been won by people well outside of EA. That’s one way to avoid bad press — and perhaps some extremely impactful people would become more interested in EA as a result of winning a prize? (Though I expect you’d want to target mid-career people, rather than people who have already done their life’s work in the style of the FLA.)
In some cases yes, but only when they were working on specific projects that I expected to be legible and palatable to EA funders. Are there places I should be sending people who I think are very promising to be considered for very low strings personal development / freedom-to-explore type funding?
The Infrastructure and LTF Funds have both (I think) made grants of the “help someone develop/save money” variety, mostly for students and new academics, but also in a couple of cases for people who were trying to pick up particular skills.
I also think it’s perfectly valid for people to post questions about this kind of thing on the Forum — “I’m doing work X, which I think is very valuable, but I don’t see an obvious way to get it funded to the point where I’d be financially secure — any suggestions?”
On (1): Have you encouraged any of these people to apply for existing sources of funding within EA? Did any of them do so successfully?
On (3): The most prominent EA-run “major achievement prize” is the Future of Life Award, which has been won by people well outside of EA. That’s one way to avoid bad press — and perhaps some extremely impactful people would become more interested in EA as a result of winning a prize? (Though I expect you’d want to target mid-career people, rather than people who have already done their life’s work in the style of the FLA.)
In some cases yes, but only when they were working on specific projects that I expected to be legible and palatable to EA funders. Are there places I should be sending people who I think are very promising to be considered for very low strings personal development / freedom-to-explore type funding?
The Infrastructure and LTF Funds have both (I think) made grants of the “help someone develop/save money” variety, mostly for students and new academics, but also in a couple of cases for people who were trying to pick up particular skills.
I also think it’s perfectly valid for people to post questions about this kind of thing on the Forum — “I’m doing work X, which I think is very valuable, but I don’t see an obvious way to get it funded to the point where I’d be financially secure — any suggestions?”