What are the arguments/evidence for low social recognition of work outside of EA orgs?
I don’t have any data. But anecdotally:
* When I think of “famous EAs”, I tend to think of people who are running/working in EA orgs to the extent that it is difficult to think of people who are not.
* Going to an EAGx, I found that most people that I talked to were connected to an EA org.
Do you think orgs do not bring some evidence to grantmakers in order to gain funding and this would resolve the issue?
Yes, I would expect that orgs bring evidence to grantmakers to gain funding. However, the orgs know the evaluation process after having already participated in it, and know how to optimise their reporting, which puts the grantmakers at a disadvantage.
Depending on the jurisdiction, there may be laws associated with laying off employees, which include salary for several months to enable the person to find employment or government unemployment schemes
There are generally options in these systems to be engaged on fixed-term contracts.
Do you think grantmakers make decisions based on perceived employee insecurity rather than cost-effectiveness?
Not necessarily grantmakers, but quite potentially in the case of individuals within organisations. Ethically, I shouldn’t care about my friends’ wellbeing more than that of strangers on the other side of the world, but there’s not really a switch in my head that I can turn off to make me behave in this manner. Also, with EA being a community, there are social repercussions that can come from making a decision to cut funding to $liked_person that do not come from cutting funding to $bednet_distribution_zone_92.
What are the decisionmaking processes that make it so that relatively cost-ineffective projects continue to be funded?
This could probably be another post, and I’d have to do more research to get a complete response. For this post, the main concern was that grantmakers have inaccurate information because people are not incentivised to give it to them. The culture of tying prestige to the idea of receiving a grant (and with the greater the size of the grant, the greater the prestige) pushes the incentives further in the wrong direction.
Should employees of EA-related orgs that do not provide funding and government funding is not available be encouraged to have several months of savings around grant renewal decision times?
Yes, everyone should be encouraged to do this if they have the means to do so regardless of whether they are an EA or not.
Yeah, I mean long-term employment in movement EA as a whole, not in any particular org.