This isn’t exactly the answer you wanted and is sort of ruthless:
One guess (which is very likely to be off because of lack of context) is that the person(s) who told you to run a fellowship, told you to do this as a way of resolving a problem of not getting funding, and assumed that you >80% resolved to continue.
This is because a fellowship would allow funders to observe inputs and outputs better and know the potential organizer better.
So I’m saying, maybe they viewed successful execution of a fellowship as a potential signal. For example, an organizer could express certain kinds of skill or connections (that is unknowable because the people making decisions are far away). At the same time, the absence of this success, or some other lack of promise for a fellowship (which most of the time doesn’t mean a lack of ability or that someone is a “bad EA”), would prevent a potential organizer from using this signal to show ability. So a fellowship is a filter.
So, I’m basically saying the “fellowship answer” might have been an answer to a specific situation of someone not getting funding, and giving them a potential path to continue.
This answer you are reading might be beneficial, because it points out this advice might be very different than an “instruction” or “robustly good advice with guaranteed reward”.
This isn’t exactly the answer you wanted and is sort of ruthless:
One guess (which is very likely to be off because of lack of context) is that the person(s) who told you to run a fellowship, told you to do this as a way of resolving a problem of not getting funding, and assumed that you >80% resolved to continue.
This is because a fellowship would allow funders to observe inputs and outputs better and know the potential organizer better.
So I’m saying, maybe they viewed successful execution of a fellowship as a potential signal. For example, an organizer could express certain kinds of skill or connections (that is unknowable because the people making decisions are far away). At the same time, the absence of this success, or some other lack of promise for a fellowship (which most of the time doesn’t mean a lack of ability or that someone is a “bad EA”), would prevent a potential organizer from using this signal to show ability. So a fellowship is a filter.
So, I’m basically saying the “fellowship answer” might have been an answer to a specific situation of someone not getting funding, and giving them a potential path to continue.
This answer you are reading might be beneficial, because it points out this advice might be very different than an “instruction” or “robustly good advice with guaranteed reward”.