Startup founders are one possible reference class, but another possible reference class is researchers. People have proposed random funding for research proposals above a certain quality threshold:
Science is expensive, and since we can’t fund every scientist, we need some way of deciding whose research deserves a chance. So, how do we pick? At the moment, expert reviewers spend a lot of time allocating grant money by trying to identify the best work. But the truth is that they’re not very good at it, and that the process is a huge waste of time. It would be better to do away with the search for excellence, and to fund science by lottery.
People like Nick Bostrom and Eric Drexler are late in their careers, and they’ve had a lot of time to earn your respect and accumulate professional accolades. They find it easy to get funding and paying high rent is not a big issue for them. Given the amount of influence they have, it’s probably worthwhile for them to live in a major intellectual hub and take advantage of the networking opportunities that come with it.
I think a focus on funding established researchers can impede progress. Max Planck said that science advances one funeral at a time. I happen to think Nick Bostrom is wrong about some important stuff, but I’m not nearly as established as Bostrom and I don’t have the stature for people to take me as seriously when I make that claim.
Also, if donors fund any charity that has a good idea, I’m a bit concerned that that will attract a larger number of low-quality projects, much like the quality of startups declined near the peak of the dot-com bubble, when investors threw money at startups without much regard for competence.
Throwing small amounts of money at loads of startups is Y Combinator’s business model.
I think part of why Y Combinator is so successful is because funding so many startups has allowed them to build a big dataset for what factors do & don’t predict success. Maybe this could become part of the EA Hotel’s mission as well.
I’m unimpressed by the arguments for random funding of research proposals. The problems with research funding are mostly due to poor incentives, rather than people being unable to do much better than random guessing. EA organizations don’t have ideal incentives, and may be on the path to unreasonable risk-aversion, but they still have a fairly sophisticated set of donors setting their incentives, and don’t yet appear to be particularly risk-averse or credential-oriented.
Unless something has changed in the last few years, there are still plenty of startups with plausible ideas that don’t get funded by Y Combinator or anything similar. Y Combinator clearly evaluates a lot more startups than I’m willing or able to evaluate, but it’s not obvious that they’re being less selective than I am about which ones they fund.
I mentioned Nick Bostrom and Eric Drexler because they’re widely recognized as competent. I didn’t mean to imply that we should focus more funding on people who are that well known—they do not seem to be funding constrained now.
Let me add some examples of funding I’ve done that better characterize what I’m aiming for in charitable donations (at the cost of being harder for many people to evaluate):
My largest donations so far have been to CFAR, starting in early 2013, when their track record was rather weak, and almost unknown outside of people who had attended their workshops. That was based largely on impressions of Anna Salamon that I got by interacting with her (for reasons that were only marginally related to EA goals).
Another example is Aubrey de Grey. I donated to the Methuselah Mouse Prize for several years starting in 2003, when Aubrey had approximately no relevant credentials beyond having given a good speech at the Foresight Institute and a similar paper on his little-known website.
Also, I respected Nick Bostrom and Eric Drexler fairly early in their careers. Not enough to donate to their charitable organizations at their very beginning (I wasn’t actively looking for effective charities before I heard of GiveWell). But enough that I bought and read their first books, primarily because I expected them to be thoughtful writers.
Unless something has changed in the last few years, there are still plenty of startups with plausible ideas that don’t get funded by Y Combinator or anything similar. Y Combinator clearly evaluates a lot more startups than I’m willing or able to evaluate, but it’s not obvious that they’re being less selective than I am about which ones they fund.
I think the EA hotel is trying to do something different from Y-Combinator—Y-Combinator is much more like EA grants, and the EA hotel is doing something different. Y-Combinator basically plays the game of get status and connections, increase deal-flow, and then choose from the cream of the crop.
It’s useful to have something like that, but a game of “use tight feedback loops to find diamonds in the rough” seems to be useful as well. Using both strategies is more effective than just one.
I think part of why Y Combinator is so successful is because funding so many startups has allowed them to build a big dataset for what factors do & don’t predict success. Maybe this could become part of the EA Hotel’s mission as well.
Good idea. It will be somewhat tricky since we don’t have the luxury of measuring success in monetary terms, but we should certainly brainstorm about this at some point.
Startup founders are one possible reference class, but another possible reference class is researchers. People have proposed random funding for research proposals above a certain quality threshold:
People like Nick Bostrom and Eric Drexler are late in their careers, and they’ve had a lot of time to earn your respect and accumulate professional accolades. They find it easy to get funding and paying high rent is not a big issue for them. Given the amount of influence they have, it’s probably worthwhile for them to live in a major intellectual hub and take advantage of the networking opportunities that come with it.
I think a focus on funding established researchers can impede progress. Max Planck said that science advances one funeral at a time. I happen to think Nick Bostrom is wrong about some important stuff, but I’m not nearly as established as Bostrom and I don’t have the stature for people to take me as seriously when I make that claim.
Throwing small amounts of money at loads of startups is Y Combinator’s business model.
I think part of why Y Combinator is so successful is because funding so many startups has allowed them to build a big dataset for what factors do & don’t predict success. Maybe this could become part of the EA Hotel’s mission as well.
I’m unimpressed by the arguments for random funding of research proposals. The problems with research funding are mostly due to poor incentives, rather than people being unable to do much better than random guessing. EA organizations don’t have ideal incentives, and may be on the path to unreasonable risk-aversion, but they still have a fairly sophisticated set of donors setting their incentives, and don’t yet appear to be particularly risk-averse or credential-oriented.
Unless something has changed in the last few years, there are still plenty of startups with plausible ideas that don’t get funded by Y Combinator or anything similar. Y Combinator clearly evaluates a lot more startups than I’m willing or able to evaluate, but it’s not obvious that they’re being less selective than I am about which ones they fund.
I mentioned Nick Bostrom and Eric Drexler because they’re widely recognized as competent. I didn’t mean to imply that we should focus more funding on people who are that well known—they do not seem to be funding constrained now.
Let me add some examples of funding I’ve done that better characterize what I’m aiming for in charitable donations (at the cost of being harder for many people to evaluate):
My largest donations so far have been to CFAR, starting in early 2013, when their track record was rather weak, and almost unknown outside of people who had attended their workshops. That was based largely on impressions of Anna Salamon that I got by interacting with her (for reasons that were only marginally related to EA goals).
Another example is Aubrey de Grey. I donated to the Methuselah Mouse Prize for several years starting in 2003, when Aubrey had approximately no relevant credentials beyond having given a good speech at the Foresight Institute and a similar paper on his little-known website.
Also, I respected Nick Bostrom and Eric Drexler fairly early in their careers. Not enough to donate to their charitable organizations at their very beginning (I wasn’t actively looking for effective charities before I heard of GiveWell). But enough that I bought and read their first books, primarily because I expected them to be thoughtful writers.
I think the EA hotel is trying to do something different from Y-Combinator—Y-Combinator is much more like EA grants, and the EA hotel is doing something different. Y-Combinator basically plays the game of get status and connections, increase deal-flow, and then choose from the cream of the crop.
It’s useful to have something like that, but a game of “use tight feedback loops to find diamonds in the rough” seems to be useful as well. Using both strategies is more effective than just one.
Relevant: When should EAs allocate funding randomly? An inconclusive literature review.
Good idea. It will be somewhat tricky since we don’t have the luxury of measuring success in monetary terms, but we should certainly brainstorm about this at some point.