EA - Would it make sense for EA funding to be not so much focused on top talent? by Franziska Fischer

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Would it make sense for EA funding to be not so much focused on top talent?, published by Franziska Fischer on June 7, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Across loads of EA project, career development services and organisations in general there's a strong sentiment towards focusing on 'top talent'. For example in AI safety there are a few very well funded but extremely competitive programmes for graduates who want to do research in the field. Naturally their output is then limited to relatively small groups of people. An opposing trend seems to have gained traction in AI capability research as e.g. the "We have no moat" paper argued, where a load of output comes from the sheer mass of people working on the problem with a breadth-first approach. A corresponding opposite strategy for EA funds and career development services could be to spread the limited ressouces they have over a larger amount of people. This concentration of funds on the development on a small group of top talent rather than distributing it over a wider group of people seems to me is a general sentiment quite prominent in the US economy and much less so in EU-countries like Germany, Scandinavia, the netherlands etc. I could imagine that EA origins in US/UK are a major reason for this structural focus. Has anyone pointers to research on effectiveness comparisons between focusing on top talent vs a broader set of people, ideally in the context of EA? Or any personal thoughts/anecdotes to share on this? Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org