The fellowship’s $50k to 100 fellows, a total of $5.5mil.
2. The money’s not described by AF as “no strings attached.” From their FAQ:
Scholarship money should be treated as “professional development funding” for award winners. This means the funds could be spent on things like professional travel, textbooks, technology, college tuition, supplementing unpaid internships, and more.
Students will receive ongoing guidance to manage and effectively spend their scholarship funds.
For Fellows ($50,000), a (taxed) amount is placed in a trust fund managed by the Atlas Fellowship team. Once the student turns 18, they have two options:
1.Submit an award disbursement request every year, indicating the amount of scholarship the student would like to withdraw for what purposes. Post-undergrad, the remainder of the funds are sent to the student. This helps avoid scholarship displacement.
2. Receive the scholarship funds as a lump-sum payment sent directly to the student.
You’re wanting transparency about this fellowship’s strategy for attracting applicants, and how it’ll get objective information on whether or not this is an effective use of funds.
Glancing over the FAQ, the AF seems to be trying to identify high-school-age altruistically-minded geniuses, and introduce them to the ideas of Effective Altruism. I can construct an argument in favor of this being a good-but-hard-to-measure idea in line with the concept of hits-based investment, but I don’t see one on their web page. In this case, I think the feedback loop for evaluating if this was a good idea or not involves looking at how these young people spend their money, and what they accomplish over the next 10 years.
It also seems to me that if, as you say, we’re still funding constrained in an important way, then experimenting with ways to increase our donor base (as by sharing our ideas with smart young people likely to be high earners) and make more efficient use of our funds (by experimenting with low-cost and potentially very impactful hits-based approaches like this) is the right choice.
I could easily be persuaded that this program or general approach is too flawed, but I’d want to see a careful analysis that looks at both sides of the issue.
Thanks for the corrections, fixed. I agree that the hits-based justification could work out, just would like to see more public analysis of this and other FTX initiatives.
Two factual nitpicks:
The fellowship’s $50k to 100 fellows, a total of $5.5mil.
2. The money’s not described by AF as “no strings attached.” From their FAQ:
You’re wanting transparency about this fellowship’s strategy for attracting applicants, and how it’ll get objective information on whether or not this is an effective use of funds.
Glancing over the FAQ, the AF seems to be trying to identify high-school-age altruistically-minded geniuses, and introduce them to the ideas of Effective Altruism. I can construct an argument in favor of this being a good-but-hard-to-measure idea in line with the concept of hits-based investment, but I don’t see one on their web page. In this case, I think the feedback loop for evaluating if this was a good idea or not involves looking at how these young people spend their money, and what they accomplish over the next 10 years.
It also seems to me that if, as you say, we’re still funding constrained in an important way, then experimenting with ways to increase our donor base (as by sharing our ideas with smart young people likely to be high earners) and make more efficient use of our funds (by experimenting with low-cost and potentially very impactful hits-based approaches like this) is the right choice.
I could easily be persuaded that this program or general approach is too flawed, but I’d want to see a careful analysis that looks at both sides of the issue.
Thanks for the corrections, fixed. I agree that the hits-based justification could work out, just would like to see more public analysis of this and other FTX initiatives.