This seems excellent and I learned a lot from this comment and your post.
I agree with the impactfulness argument you have made and its potential. It seems important in being much larger scale. It might even ease other types of giving into the community somehow (because you might develop a competent, strong institution). It’s also impactful, by design.
Also, as you suggest, finding very valuable, non-EA people to execute causes seems like a pure win [1].
Now, it seems I have a grant by a major funder of EA longtermism projects. Related to this, I am researching (or really just talking about) a financial aid project to what you described.
This isn’t approved or even asked for by the grant maker, but there seems to be some possibility it will happen. (But not more than a 50% chance though).
Your thoughts would be valuable and I might contact you.
I might copy and paste some content from the document into the above comment to get feedback and ideas.
[1] But finding and funding such people also seems difficult. My guess that people who do this well (e.g. Peter Thiel of Thiel Fellows) are established in related activities or connected, to an extraordinary degree. My guess is that this activity of finding and choosing people seems structurally similar to grant making, such as GiveWell. I think that successive grantmakers for alternate causes in EA have a mixed track record compared to the original. Maybe this is because the inputs are deceptively hard and somewhat illegible from the outside.
Hi Ozzie,
This seems excellent and I learned a lot from this comment and your post.
I agree with the impactfulness argument you have made and its potential. It seems important in being much larger scale. It might even ease other types of giving into the community somehow (because you might develop a competent, strong institution). It’s also impactful, by design.
Also, as you suggest, finding very valuable, non-EA people to execute causes seems like a pure win [1].
Now, it seems I have a grant by a major funder of EA longtermism projects. Related to this, I am researching (or really just talking about) a financial aid project to what you described.
This isn’t approved or even asked for by the grant maker, but there seems to be some possibility it will happen. (But not more than a 50% chance though).
Your thoughts would be valuable and I might contact you.
I might copy and paste some content from the document into the above comment to get feedback and ideas.
[1] But finding and funding such people also seems difficult. My guess that people who do this well (e.g. Peter Thiel of Thiel Fellows) are established in related activities or connected, to an extraordinary degree. My guess is that this activity of finding and choosing people seems structurally similar to grant making, such as GiveWell. I think that successive grantmakers for alternate causes in EA have a mixed track record compared to the original. Maybe this is because the inputs are deceptively hard and somewhat illegible from the outside.
I’d be very keen to hear what you’re planning/provide feedback.