One interesting debate would be: what’s the optimal % of funding that should go to prizes? Which parameters would allow us to determine this? One can imagine that the % should be higher in communities that are struggling more to hire enough, or where research agendas are unclear so more coordination is needed, but should be lower in communities with people with low savings, or where the funders have capacity to diversify risks.
One additional consideration is that the coordination benefits from prizes (in raising the salience of memes or the status of the winners) comes at an attention cost, so a large number of prizes may cannibalize on our “common knowledge budget” (if there is a limit to how much common knowledge we can generate)
Is % of funding the right framing? I think it should be evaluated on if a prize is the best mechanism for a particular desired outcome. So work out your outcome, then decide on prize or other alternative.
I agree that it is a decision to be made on a project-by-project basis, but you can still have some prior about what’s roughly the right thing to do in aggregate, and use that prior to assess if you’re clearly missing the mark. This may feel like an artificial or useless exercise, but in general it is how high-level strategy decisions are made. Perhaps we’re just talking around each other because we are on different abstraction levels—you’re perhaps imagining a grant maker asking “how should I achieve this outcome” while I’m imagining “what’s the right strategy for EA as a whole”?
Side note: In this case, 100% prizes would clearly be the wrong percentage. 0% prizes is likely too low, and the realistic range is maybe 1-20%, but I don’t know with higher precision than that. However the movement looks very different with 1% vs. 20%, and getting it right could matter quite a bit.
One interesting debate would be: what’s the optimal % of funding that should go to prizes? Which parameters would allow us to determine this? One can imagine that the % should be higher in communities that are struggling more to hire enough, or where research agendas are unclear so more coordination is needed, but should be lower in communities with people with low savings, or where the funders have capacity to diversify risks.
One additional consideration is that the coordination benefits from prizes (in raising the salience of memes or the status of the winners) comes at an attention cost, so a large number of prizes may cannibalize on our “common knowledge budget” (if there is a limit to how much common knowledge we can generate)
Is % of funding the right framing? I think it should be evaluated on if a prize is the best mechanism for a particular desired outcome. So work out your outcome, then decide on prize or other alternative.
I agree that it is a decision to be made on a project-by-project basis, but you can still have some prior about what’s roughly the right thing to do in aggregate, and use that prior to assess if you’re clearly missing the mark. This may feel like an artificial or useless exercise, but in general it is how high-level strategy decisions are made. Perhaps we’re just talking around each other because we are on different abstraction levels—you’re perhaps imagining a grant maker asking “how should I achieve this outcome” while I’m imagining “what’s the right strategy for EA as a whole”?
Side note: In this case, 100% prizes would clearly be the wrong percentage. 0% prizes is likely too low, and the realistic range is maybe 1-20%, but I don’t know with higher precision than that. However the movement looks very different with 1% vs. 20%, and getting it right could matter quite a bit.