No, that’s not what I’d say (and again, sorry that I’m finding it hard to communicate about this clearly). This isn’t necessarily making a clear material difference in what we’re willing to fund in many cases (though it could in some), it’s more about what metrics we hold ourselves to and how that leads us to prioritize.
I think we’d fund at least many of the scholarships from a pure cost-effectiveness perspective. We think they meet the bar of beating the last dollar, despite being on average less cost-effective than 80k advising, because 80k advising doesn’t have enough room for funding. If 80k advising could absorb a bunch more orders of magnitude of funding with no diminishing returns, then I could imagine us not wanting to fund these scholarships from a cost-effectiveness perspective but wanting to fund them from a time-effectiveness perspective.
A place where it could make a material difference is if I imagine a hypothetical generalist EA asking what they should work on. I can imagine them noting that a given intervention (e.g. mentoring a few promising people while taking a low salary) is more cost-effective (and I think cost-effectiveness is often the default frame EAs think in), and me encouraging them to investigation whether a different intervention allows them to accomplish more with their time while being less cost-effective (e.g. setting up a ton of digital advertising of a given piece of written work), and saying that right now, the second intervention might be better.
No, that’s not what I’d say (and again, sorry that I’m finding it hard to communicate about this clearly). This isn’t necessarily making a clear material difference in what we’re willing to fund in many cases (though it could in some), it’s more about what metrics we hold ourselves to and how that leads us to prioritize.
I think we’d fund at least many of the scholarships from a pure cost-effectiveness perspective. We think they meet the bar of beating the last dollar, despite being on average less cost-effective than 80k advising, because 80k advising doesn’t have enough room for funding. If 80k advising could absorb a bunch more orders of magnitude of funding with no diminishing returns, then I could imagine us not wanting to fund these scholarships from a cost-effectiveness perspective but wanting to fund them from a time-effectiveness perspective.
A place where it could make a material difference is if I imagine a hypothetical generalist EA asking what they should work on. I can imagine them noting that a given intervention (e.g. mentoring a few promising people while taking a low salary) is more cost-effective (and I think cost-effectiveness is often the default frame EAs think in), and me encouraging them to investigation whether a different intervention allows them to accomplish more with their time while being less cost-effective (e.g. setting up a ton of digital advertising of a given piece of written work), and saying that right now, the second intervention might be better.