Given that Nick has a PhD in Philosophy, and that OpenPhil has funded a large amount of academic research, this explanation seems unlikely.
Disclosure: I am working at OpenPhil over the summer. (I don’t have any particular private information, both of the above facts are publicly available.)
EDIT: I don’t intend to make any statement about whether EA as a whole has an anti-academic bias, just that this particular situation seems unlikely to reflect that.
Thanks for the input! But I didn’t claim that Nick is biased against academia—I just find the lack of clarity on this point and his explanation of why university grants were disqualified simply unsatisfactory.
As for your point that it is unlikely for people with PhDs to be biased, I think ex-academics can easily hold negative attitudes towards academia, especially after exiting the system.
Nevertheless, I am not concluding from this that Nick is biased (nor that he isn’t) - we just don’t have evidence for either of these claims, and at the end of the day, this shouldn’t matter. The procedure for grants awarding should be robust enough to prevent such biases to kick in. I am not sure if any such measures have been undertaken in this case though, which is why I raising this point.
Given that Nick has a PhD in Philosophy, and that OpenPhil has funded a large amount of academic research, this explanation seems unlikely.
Disclosure: I am working at OpenPhil over the summer. (I don’t have any particular private information, both of the above facts are publicly available.)
EDIT: I don’t intend to make any statement about whether EA as a whole has an anti-academic bias, just that this particular situation seems unlikely to reflect that.
Thanks for the input! But I didn’t claim that Nick is biased against academia—I just find the lack of clarity on this point and his explanation of why university grants were disqualified simply unsatisfactory.
As for your point that it is unlikely for people with PhDs to be biased, I think ex-academics can easily hold negative attitudes towards academia, especially after exiting the system.
Nevertheless, I am not concluding from this that Nick is biased (nor that he isn’t) - we just don’t have evidence for either of these claims, and at the end of the day, this shouldn’t matter. The procedure for grants awarding should be robust enough to prevent such biases to kick in. I am not sure if any such measures have been undertaken in this case though, which is why I raising this point.