The “ideas” were listed more to break down possible implementations than to propose executing all of them in their exact forms. 1 could be incorporated into the new EA Hub perhaps, and I am aware Dony Christie is exploring EA Peer Funding, but perhaps you are referring to other people. I am not familiar with anyone that is working on 2 but I’m happy to hear that this is being worked on in some capacity. Yeah, I agree that improving EA Grants would be a good way to make something like 3 possible, and will likely end up happening.
I believe the exact forms of each listed idea contain problems, and my intended proposal is an attempt to fuse all of the ideas and eliminate weaknesses of implementing an listed idea on its own. I don’t know of any attempts to do a fused approach, but please correct me if I’m wrong. For example, regarding the issue of implementing all three listed ideas in their exact form, centralizing this sort of grant funding much like EA Grants has done could cause many problems. There is currently no grant transparency. A lot of possibly useful projects may have applied, not gotten funded, and then given up, or as Remmelt mentioned, other donors may not support a project because it was not funded by CEA. There is no way for other donors in the community uniquely equipped to evaluate, contribute to, or fund projects to actually see what projects exist in EA and evaluate, contribute to, or fund them. Basically, not only is centralization potentially inefficient, it may have already led to a large number of project failures, some of which may have evolved to become successful, high impact projects with a different grantmaking model.
Seconding alexherwix, unless there are privacy concerns, sharing information about other people working in this space and their ideas would be useful for coordination purposes. Also, early stage projects often don’t work out, so if the project is important enough, then coordinating efforts or perhaps even building the same broad idea with different teams with very different implementations is a good idea in case one team-implementation pairing would succeed, but other team-implementation pairings would not fare well or be highly suboptimal.
I agree collaboration between the various implementations of the different ideas is valuable and it can be good to help out technically. I’m less convinced of starting a fused approach as an outsider. As Ryan Carey said, most important for good work in this field is i) having people good at grantmaking i.e. making funding decisions ii) the actual money.
Thinking about approaches how to ideally handle grantmaking without having either strikes me as putting the cart before the horse. While it might be great to have a fused approach, I think this will largely be up to the projects who have i) and ii) whether they wish to collaborate further, though other people might be able to help with technical aspects.
Thanks for the information.
The “ideas” were listed more to break down possible implementations than to propose executing all of them in their exact forms. 1 could be incorporated into the new EA Hub perhaps, and I am aware Dony Christie is exploring EA Peer Funding, but perhaps you are referring to other people. I am not familiar with anyone that is working on 2 but I’m happy to hear that this is being worked on in some capacity. Yeah, I agree that improving EA Grants would be a good way to make something like 3 possible, and will likely end up happening.
I believe the exact forms of each listed idea contain problems, and my intended proposal is an attempt to fuse all of the ideas and eliminate weaknesses of implementing an listed idea on its own. I don’t know of any attempts to do a fused approach, but please correct me if I’m wrong. For example, regarding the issue of implementing all three listed ideas in their exact form, centralizing this sort of grant funding much like EA Grants has done could cause many problems. There is currently no grant transparency. A lot of possibly useful projects may have applied, not gotten funded, and then given up, or as Remmelt mentioned, other donors may not support a project because it was not funded by CEA. There is no way for other donors in the community uniquely equipped to evaluate, contribute to, or fund projects to actually see what projects exist in EA and evaluate, contribute to, or fund them. Basically, not only is centralization potentially inefficient, it may have already led to a large number of project failures, some of which may have evolved to become successful, high impact projects with a different grantmaking model.
Seconding alexherwix, unless there are privacy concerns, sharing information about other people working in this space and their ideas would be useful for coordination purposes. Also, early stage projects often don’t work out, so if the project is important enough, then coordinating efforts or perhaps even building the same broad idea with different teams with very different implementations is a good idea in case one team-implementation pairing would succeed, but other team-implementation pairings would not fare well or be highly suboptimal.
I agree collaboration between the various implementations of the different ideas is valuable and it can be good to help out technically. I’m less convinced of starting a fused approach as an outsider. As Ryan Carey said, most important for good work in this field is i) having people good at grantmaking i.e. making funding decisions ii) the actual money.
Thinking about approaches how to ideally handle grantmaking without having either strikes me as putting the cart before the horse. While it might be great to have a fused approach, I think this will largely be up to the projects who have i) and ii) whether they wish to collaborate further, though other people might be able to help with technical aspects.