I agree it’s pointing at something – in the penultimate paragraph I say:
Given all this, is there a sensible interpretation of the term ‘funding overhang’? You could use it to label situations where a sudden increase in funding has driven the bar down; or perhaps for situations where skill-sets that are complementary with spending money have become a lot more valuable. But overall I think it’s better to avoid the term altogether – it’s so easy to start thinking in black and whites and get confused.
That said, I think it’s usually better to describe this as “becoming less funding constrained” rather than “there’s a funding overhang”, because it makes it sound more like a continuum.
(Or even better “less funding constrained and more constrained by X”.)
So I’ve made some edits to the original post to suggest replace funding overhang with either (i) talking about the bar changing or (ii) talking about becoming more or less funding constrained. Thank you for the prompt!
So I think the state of affairs right now for some key work is “barely funding constrained at all”. I think that’s helpful to be able to talk about, and it doesn’t seem egregious to me if people round it off as “not funding constrained”. But I’m worried that that has more (incorrect) connotations of “extra money isn’t helpful” than “funding overhang”.
The issue is that we need to be able to talk about two different things:
The value of deploying funding now for getting marginal work to happen right now;
The all-things-considered value of funding.
These are obviously related, but they can vary separately. I want to be able to express that #1 is very low (where it’s unproblematic if people approximate it as zero), but I’m definitely not OK with people approximating #2 as zero. In a different world #1 could be high while #2 was relatively low (in this case borrowing-to-give would be a good strategy).
[A very rough figure I’d be OK with people using for #2 is 100 nanodooms averted /$M (for funding that isn’t significantly correlated with other future EA funding sources; lower if correlated).]
I’m now noticing I’m unsure whether you disagree that it’s okay to approximate #1 as zero. I read your post as arguing against approximating #2 as zero, but maybe that’s just because that’s something I agree with, and you actually intended to cover both 1+2.
I agree it’s pointing at something – in the penultimate paragraph I say:
That said, I think it’s usually better to describe this as “becoming less funding constrained” rather than “there’s a funding overhang”, because it makes it sound more like a continuum.
(Or even better “less funding constrained and more constrained by X”.)
So I’ve made some edits to the original post to suggest replace funding overhang with either (i) talking about the bar changing or (ii) talking about becoming more or less funding constrained. Thank you for the prompt!
So I think the state of affairs right now for some key work is “barely funding constrained at all”. I think that’s helpful to be able to talk about, and it doesn’t seem egregious to me if people round it off as “not funding constrained”. But I’m worried that that has more (incorrect) connotations of “extra money isn’t helpful” than “funding overhang”.
The issue is that we need to be able to talk about two different things:
The value of deploying funding now for getting marginal work to happen right now;
The all-things-considered value of funding.
These are obviously related, but they can vary separately. I want to be able to express that #1 is very low (where it’s unproblematic if people approximate it as zero), but I’m definitely not OK with people approximating #2 as zero. In a different world #1 could be high while #2 was relatively low (in this case borrowing-to-give would be a good strategy).
[A very rough figure I’d be OK with people using for #2 is 100 nanodooms averted /$M (for funding that isn’t significantly correlated with other future EA funding sources; lower if correlated).]
I’m now noticing I’m unsure whether you disagree that it’s okay to approximate #1 as zero. I read your post as arguing against approximating #2 as zero, but maybe that’s just because that’s something I agree with, and you actually intended to cover both 1+2.