For example, when we fund e.g. 80,000 Hours, we (amongst other activities) support their full-time advisors to advise interested people about how to have more impactful careers. With our scholarship programs, we’re also trying to cause people to spend more time on more impactful activities. But rather than do this via the 80k advisors, our scholarship programs use money “directly” (without much intermediating EA labor) to try to make impactful careers more accessible and attractive. In general, we think we get less impact per dollar from interventions that consume money “directly” like this. Since EA labor is the scarcer resource in many contexts, these types of interventions can make sense for grantmakers to prioritize.
I think you’re saying that your scholarships seem good to you, and that this has something to do with the value of your time versus the value of 80k staff time, but I’m not quite sure how you’re connecting these variables, and exactly whose time you’re saving with the scholarships (I imagine it takes you a lot of time to make the scholarship decisions, but maybe not).
I actually wasn’t trying to stake out a position about the relative value of 80k vs. our time. I was saying that with 80k advising, the basic inputs per career shift are a moderate amount of funding from us and a little bit of our time and a lot of 80k advisor time, while with scholarships, the inputs per career shift are a lot of funding and a moderate amount of our time, and no 80k time. So the scholarship model is, according to me, more expensive in dollars per career shift, but less time-consuming of dedicated longtermist time per career shift.
I think the scholarships are more time-consuming for us per dollar disbursed than giving grants to 80k, but less time-consuming in aggregate because there’s effectively no grantee “middle man” also spending time.
Of course, some of the scholarships directly fund people to do object-level valuable things, this argument just concerns their role in making certain career paths more attractive and accessible.
Thanks! The core thing I’m hearing you say is that the scholarships are the sort of thing you wouldn’t fund on a cost-effectiveness metric and 80k is, but that on a time-effectiveness metric that changes it so that the scholarships are now competitive.
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.
Great post.
I didn’t quite parse this paragraph:
I think you’re saying that your scholarships seem good to you, and that this has something to do with the value of your time versus the value of 80k staff time, but I’m not quite sure how you’re connecting these variables, and exactly whose time you’re saving with the scholarships (I imagine it takes you a lot of time to make the scholarship decisions, but maybe not).
Hm yeah, I can see how this was confusing, sorry!
I actually wasn’t trying to stake out a position about the relative value of 80k vs. our time. I was saying that with 80k advising, the basic inputs per career shift are a moderate amount of funding from us and a little bit of our time and a lot of 80k advisor time, while with scholarships, the inputs per career shift are a lot of funding and a moderate amount of our time, and no 80k time. So the scholarship model is, according to me, more expensive in dollars per career shift, but less time-consuming of dedicated longtermist time per career shift.
I think the scholarships are more time-consuming for us per dollar disbursed than giving grants to 80k, but less time-consuming in aggregate because there’s effectively no grantee “middle man” also spending time.
Of course, some of the scholarships directly fund people to do object-level valuable things, this argument just concerns their role in making certain career paths more attractive and accessible.
Does that make more sense?
Thanks! The core thing I’m hearing you say is that the scholarships are the sort of thing you wouldn’t fund on a cost-effectiveness metric and 80k is, but that on a time-effectiveness metric that changes it so that the scholarships are now competitive.
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.
My personal reading of the post is that they think the scholarship decisions don’t take up a lot of time, relative to 80k advisory stuff.