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’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.