One key challenge I see is something like ‘grant-making talent constraint’. The skills needed to make good grants (e.g. good judgement, domain knowledge, maybe tacit knowledge, maybe relevant network, possibly commissioning/governance/operations skill) are not commonplace, and hard to explicitly ‘train’ outside i) having a lot of money of your own to practise with, or ii) working in a relevant field (so people might approach you for advice). (Open Philanthropy’s recent hiring round might provide another route, but places were limited and extraordinarily competitive).
Yet the talents needed to end up at (i) or (ii) are somewhat different, as are the skills to acquire: neither (e.g.) having a lot of money and being interested in AI safety, nor being an AI safety researcher oneself, guarantee making good AI safety grants; time one spends doing either of these things is time one cannot dedicate to gaining grant-making experience.
Dividing this labour (as the suggestions in the OP point towards) seem the way to go. Yet this can only get you so far if ‘grantmaking talent’ is not only limited among people with the opportunity to make grants, but limited across the EA population in general. Further, good grant-makers will gravitate to the largest pools of funding (reasonably enough, as this is where their contribution has the greatest leverage). This predictably leads to gaps in the funding ecosystem where ‘good projects from the point of view of the universe’ and ‘good projects from the point of view of the big funders’ subtly differ: I’m not sure I agree with the suggestions in the OP (i.e. upskilling people, new orgs), but I find Carl Shulman’s remarks here persuasive.
+1 I didn’t spell it out this explicitly, but what I found slightly odd about this post is that infrastructure is not the bottleneck on more grant making, but qualified grant makers.
I propose an infrastructure to generate more active qualified grant makers by making people who are close to qualified/good grantmakers (as Gregory says, good judgement, domain knowledge, relevant network, etc) into grantmakers by giving them the ability to recommend grants from a centralized fund that donors can contribute to in order to fund small projects without the hassle of evaluating dozens of projects themselves, and with the possibility of earmarking funds for specific grantmakers.
I also aim to solve the awareness problem of EA projects that are requesting funding, since EA Grants does not at present have a way for non-CEA staff to learn about possible grants, so only a handful of people can actually assess grants and people that might be great grantmakers are left out. This also requires infrastructure.
One key challenge I see is something like ‘grant-making talent constraint’. The skills needed to make good grants (e.g. good judgement, domain knowledge, maybe tacit knowledge, maybe relevant network, possibly commissioning/governance/operations skill) are not commonplace, and hard to explicitly ‘train’ outside i) having a lot of money of your own to practise with, or ii) working in a relevant field (so people might approach you for advice). (Open Philanthropy’s recent hiring round might provide another route, but places were limited and extraordinarily competitive).
Yet the talents needed to end up at (i) or (ii) are somewhat different, as are the skills to acquire: neither (e.g.) having a lot of money and being interested in AI safety, nor being an AI safety researcher oneself, guarantee making good AI safety grants; time one spends doing either of these things is time one cannot dedicate to gaining grant-making experience.
Dividing this labour (as the suggestions in the OP point towards) seem the way to go. Yet this can only get you so far if ‘grantmaking talent’ is not only limited among people with the opportunity to make grants, but limited across the EA population in general. Further, good grant-makers will gravitate to the largest pools of funding (reasonably enough, as this is where their contribution has the greatest leverage). This predictably leads to gaps in the funding ecosystem where ‘good projects from the point of view of the universe’ and ‘good projects from the point of view of the big funders’ subtly differ: I’m not sure I agree with the suggestions in the OP (i.e. upskilling people, new orgs), but I find Carl Shulman’s remarks here persuasive.
+1 I didn’t spell it out this explicitly, but what I found slightly odd about this post is that infrastructure is not the bottleneck on more grant making, but qualified grant makers.
I propose an infrastructure to generate more active qualified grant makers by making people who are close to qualified/good grantmakers (as Gregory says, good judgement, domain knowledge, relevant network, etc) into grantmakers by giving them the ability to recommend grants from a centralized fund that donors can contribute to in order to fund small projects without the hassle of evaluating dozens of projects themselves, and with the possibility of earmarking funds for specific grantmakers.
I also aim to solve the awareness problem of EA projects that are requesting funding, since EA Grants does not at present have a way for non-CEA staff to learn about possible grants, so only a handful of people can actually assess grants and people that might be great grantmakers are left out. This also requires infrastructure.
That’s fair.