I’m in no way associated with EA Funds (although I do contract with CEA), but I can take a guess. Several EA orgs pay for assistants and certain other kinds of help for academics directly, which makes me think that the straightforward interpretation of the statement is true: Nick wanted to fund time savings for high impact people, and academics can’t accept money to do that, although they can accept donated labor.
But that’s just not necessarily true: as I said, academics can accept money to cover e.g. teaching duties and hence do more research. If you look at ERC grants, that’s part of their format in case of Consolidator and Advanced grants. So it really depends on who applied for which funds, which is why Nick’s explanation isn’t satisfactory.
I’m in no way associated with EA Funds (although I do contract with CEA), but I can take a guess. Several EA orgs pay for assistants and certain other kinds of help for academics directly, which makes me think that the straightforward interpretation of the statement is true: Nick wanted to fund time savings for high impact people, and academics can’t accept money to do that, although they can accept donated labor.
But that’s just not necessarily true: as I said, academics can accept money to cover e.g. teaching duties and hence do more research. If you look at ERC grants, that’s part of their format in case of Consolidator and Advanced grants. So it really depends on who applied for which funds, which is why Nick’s explanation isn’t satisfactory.