Speaking for why I haven’t donated, this is close to the key question:
>Then the question is (roughly) whether, given £60,000, it makes more sense to fund 1 researcher who’s cleared the EA hiring bar, or 10 who haven’t (and are in D).
My intuition has been that if those 10 are chosen at random, then I’m moderately confident that it’s better to fund the 1 well-vetted researcher.
EA is talent-constrained in the sense that it needs more people like Nick Bostrom or Eric Drexler, but much less in the sense of needing more people who are average EAs to do direct EA work.
I’ve done some angel investing in startups. I initially took an approach of trying to fund anyone who has a a good idea. But that worked poorly, and I’ve shifted, as good VCs advise, to looking for signs of unusual competence in founders. (Alas, I still don’t have much reason to think I’m good at angel investing). And evaluating founder’s competence feels harder than evaluating a business idea, so I’m not willing to do it very often.
I use a similar approach with donating to early-stage charities, expecting to see many teams with decent ideas, but expecting the top 5% to be more than 10 times as valuable than the average. And I’m reluctant to evaluate more pre-track-record projects than I’m already doing.
With the hotel, I see a bunch of little hints that it’s not worth my time to attempt an in-depth evaluation of the hotel’s leaders. E.g. the focus on low rent, which seems like a popular meme among average and below average EAs in the bay area, yet the EAs whose judgment I most respect act as if rent is a relatively small issue.
I can imagine that the hotel attracts better than random EAs, but it’s also easy to imagine that it selects mainly for people who aren’t good enough to belong at a top EA organization.
Halffull has produced a better argument for the EA Hotel, but I find it somewhat odd that he starts with arguments that seem weak to me, and only in the middle did he get around to claims that are relevant to whether the hotel is better than a random group of EAs.
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.
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.
the focus on low rent, which seems like a popular meme among average and below average EAs in the bay area, yet the EAs whose judgment I most respect act as if rent is a relatively small issue.
This seems very wrong to me. I work at Founders Pledge in London, and I doubt a single one of the staff there would disagree with a proposition like ‘the magnitude of London rents has a profound effect on my lifestyle’.
They also pay substantially closer to market rate salaries now than they did for the first 2-3 years of existence, during which people no doubt would have been far more sympathetic to the claim.
With the hotel, I see a bunch of little hints that it’s not worth my time to attempt an in-depth evaluation of the hotel’s leaders. E.g. the focus on low rent, which seems like a popular meme among average and below average EAs in the bay area, yet the EAs whose judgment I most respect act as if rent is a relatively small issue.
Your posts suggests that there is some class of EA’s that is a lot more competent than everyone else, which means that what everyone else is doing doesn’t matter all that much. While I haven’t met (or recognized) a lot of people that impress me this much, I still give this idea a lot of credence. I’d like to verify it for myself, to get on the same page with you (and perhaps even change my plans). Could you name some examples, besides Drexler and Bostrom, of EA’s that are on this level of competence?
I’m not looking for credentials, I’m looking for resources that demonstrate how these people are thinking, or stories about impressive feats, so I can convince my S1 to sit down and be humble (and model their minds so I can copy the good bits).
>which means that what everyone else is doing doesn’t matter all that much
Earning to give still matters a moderate amount. That’s mostly what I’m doing. I’m saying that average EA should start with the outside view that they can’t do better than earning to give, and then attempt some more difficult analysis to figure out how they compare to average.
And it’s presumably possible to matter more than the average earning to give EA, by devoting above-average thought to vetting new charities.
but I find it somewhat odd that he starts with arguments that seem weak to me, and only in the middle did he get around to claims that are relevant to whether the hotel is better than a random group of EAs.
The post is organized by dependency not by strength of argument. First people have to convinced that funding projects make sense at all (given that there’s so much grant money already in EA) before we can talk about the way in which to fund them.
Speaking for why I haven’t donated, this is close to the key question:
>Then the question is (roughly) whether, given £60,000, it makes more sense to fund 1 researcher who’s cleared the EA hiring bar, or 10 who haven’t (and are in D).
My intuition has been that if those 10 are chosen at random, then I’m moderately confident that it’s better to fund the 1 well-vetted researcher.
EA is talent-constrained in the sense that it needs more people like Nick Bostrom or Eric Drexler, but much less in the sense of needing more people who are average EAs to do direct EA work.
I’ve done some angel investing in startups. I initially took an approach of trying to fund anyone who has a a good idea. But that worked poorly, and I’ve shifted, as good VCs advise, to looking for signs of unusual competence in founders. (Alas, I still don’t have much reason to think I’m good at angel investing). And evaluating founder’s competence feels harder than evaluating a business idea, so I’m not willing to do it very often.
I use a similar approach with donating to early-stage charities, expecting to see many teams with decent ideas, but expecting the top 5% to be more than 10 times as valuable than the average. And I’m reluctant to evaluate more pre-track-record projects than I’m already doing.
With the hotel, I see a bunch of little hints that it’s not worth my time to attempt an in-depth evaluation of the hotel’s leaders. E.g. the focus on low rent, which seems like a popular meme among average and below average EAs in the bay area, yet the EAs whose judgment I most respect act as if rent is a relatively small issue.
I can imagine that the hotel attracts better than random EAs, but it’s also easy to imagine that it selects mainly for people who aren’t good enough to belong at a top EA organization.
Halffull has produced a better argument for the EA Hotel, but I find it somewhat odd that he starts with arguments that seem weak to me, and only in the middle did he get around to claims that are relevant to whether the hotel is better than a random group of EAs.
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.
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.
This seems very wrong to me. I work at Founders Pledge in London, and I doubt a single one of the staff there would disagree with a proposition like ‘the magnitude of London rents has a profound effect on my lifestyle’.
They also pay substantially closer to market rate salaries now than they did for the first 2-3 years of existence, during which people no doubt would have been far more sympathetic to the claim.
Thank you.
Your posts suggests that there is some class of EA’s that is a lot more competent than everyone else, which means that what everyone else is doing doesn’t matter all that much. While I haven’t met (or recognized) a lot of people that impress me this much, I still give this idea a lot of credence. I’d like to verify it for myself, to get on the same page with you (and perhaps even change my plans). Could you name some examples, besides Drexler and Bostrom, of EA’s that are on this level of competence?
I’m not looking for credentials, I’m looking for resources that demonstrate how these people are thinking, or stories about impressive feats, so I can convince my S1 to sit down and be humble (and model their minds so I can copy the good bits).
Podcasts, maybe?
>which means that what everyone else is doing doesn’t matter all that much
Earning to give still matters a moderate amount. That’s mostly what I’m doing. I’m saying that average EA should start with the outside view that they can’t do better than earning to give, and then attempt some more difficult analysis to figure out how they compare to average.
And it’s presumably possible to matter more than the average earning to give EA, by devoting above-average thought to vetting new charities.
The post is organized by dependency not by strength of argument. First people have to convinced that funding projects make sense at all (given that there’s so much grant money already in EA) before we can talk about the way in which to fund them.