A solution that doesn’t actually work but might be slightly useful: Slow the lemons by making EA-related Funding things less appealing than the alternative.
One specific way to do this is to pay less than industry pays for similar positions: altruistic pay cut. Lightcone, the org Habryka runs, does this: “Our current salary policy is to pay rates competitive with industry salary minus 30%.” At a full-time employment level, this seems like one way to dissuade people who are interested in money, at least assuming they are qualified and hard working enough to get a job in industry with similar ease.
Additionally, it might help to frame university group organizing grants in the big scheme of the world. For instance, as I was talking to somebody group organizing grants I reminded them that the amount of money they would be making (which I probably estimated at a couple thousand dollars per month), is peanuts compared to what they’ll be earning in a year or two when they graduate from a top university with a median salary of ~80k. It also seems relevant to emphasize that you actually have to put in the time and effort into organizing a group for a grant like this; it’s not free money – it’s money in exchange for time/labor. Technically it’s possible to do nothing and pretty much be a scam artist, but I didn’t want to say that.
This solution doesn’t work for a few reasons. One is that it only focuses on one issue – the people who are actually in it for themselves. I expect we will also have problems of well-intending people who just aren’t very good at stuff. Unfortunately, this seems really hard to evaluate, and many of us deal with imposter syndrome, so self-evaluation/selection seems bad.
This solution also doesn’t work because it’s hard to assess somebody’s fit for a grant, meaning it might remain easier to get EA-related money than other money. I claim that it is hard to evaluate somebody’s fit for a grant in large part because feedback loops are terrible. Say you give somebody some money to do some project. Many grants have some product or deliverable that you can judge for its output quality, like a research paper. Some EA-related grants have this, but many don’t (e.g., paying somebody to skill up might have deliverables like a test score but might not). Without some form of deliverable or something, how do you know if your grant was any good? Idk maybe somebody who does grantmaking has an idea on this. More importantly, a lot of the bets people in this community are taking are low chance of success, high EV. If you expect projects to fail a lot, then failure on past projects is not necessarily a good indicator of somebody’s fit for new grants (in fact it’s likely good to keep funding high EV, low P(success) projects, depending on your risk tolerance). So this makes it difficult to actually make EA-related money harder to get than other money.
A solution that doesn’t actually work but might be slightly useful: Slow the lemons by making EA-related Funding things less appealing than the alternative.
One specific way to do this is to pay less than industry pays for similar positions: altruistic pay cut. Lightcone, the org Habryka runs, does this: “Our current salary policy is to pay rates competitive with industry salary minus 30%.” At a full-time employment level, this seems like one way to dissuade people who are interested in money, at least assuming they are qualified and hard working enough to get a job in industry with similar ease.
Additionally, it might help to frame university group organizing grants in the big scheme of the world. For instance, as I was talking to somebody group organizing grants I reminded them that the amount of money they would be making (which I probably estimated at a couple thousand dollars per month), is peanuts compared to what they’ll be earning in a year or two when they graduate from a top university with a median salary of ~80k. It also seems relevant to emphasize that you actually have to put in the time and effort into organizing a group for a grant like this; it’s not free money – it’s money in exchange for time/labor. Technically it’s possible to do nothing and pretty much be a scam artist, but I didn’t want to say that.
This solution doesn’t work for a few reasons. One is that it only focuses on one issue – the people who are actually in it for themselves. I expect we will also have problems of well-intending people who just aren’t very good at stuff. Unfortunately, this seems really hard to evaluate, and many of us deal with imposter syndrome, so self-evaluation/selection seems bad.
This solution also doesn’t work because it’s hard to assess somebody’s fit for a grant, meaning it might remain easier to get EA-related money than other money. I claim that it is hard to evaluate somebody’s fit for a grant in large part because feedback loops are terrible. Say you give somebody some money to do some project. Many grants have some product or deliverable that you can judge for its output quality, like a research paper. Some EA-related grants have this, but many don’t (e.g., paying somebody to skill up might have deliverables like a test score but might not). Without some form of deliverable or something, how do you know if your grant was any good? Idk maybe somebody who does grantmaking has an idea on this. More importantly, a lot of the bets people in this community are taking are low chance of success, high EV. If you expect projects to fail a lot, then failure on past projects is not necessarily a good indicator of somebody’s fit for new grants (in fact it’s likely good to keep funding high EV, low P(success) projects, depending on your risk tolerance). So this makes it difficult to actually make EA-related money harder to get than other money.