In general, for donating to alignment work, I think that the best approach is to focus on local grants, because those are the ones that won’t be picked up by bigger funders, who have a lot of money right now. By “local” I mean things like: if you meet someone who seems promising, fund their flights to visit an alignment hub; or fund them buying textbooks, getting tutoring in ML; etc.
Couldn’t these people just apply to the long-term future fund for those kinds of things and the LTFF could be better at recognising who is promising amongst the people who apply?
Grantmakers aren’t always “better at recognising who is promising,” mostly because you sometimes have important information they don’t, like knowing that someone is smart and knowledgeable and altruistic beyond what that person can make legible to time-constrained grantmakers. If you don’t have relevant information, e.g. because you don’t know any promising people-who-need-funding, donating to LTFF is great.
(I have donated to LTFF. I have never made a “local grant,” but I would consider it if I had more money and I knew promising people-who-need-funding.)
In general, for donating to alignment work, I think that the best approach is to focus on local grants, because those are the ones that won’t be picked up by bigger funders, who have a lot of money right now. By “local” I mean things like: if you meet someone who seems promising, fund their flights to visit an alignment hub; or fund them buying textbooks, getting tutoring in ML; etc.
Couldn’t these people just apply to the long-term future fund for those kinds of things and the LTFF could be better at recognising who is promising amongst the people who apply?
Grantmakers aren’t always “better at recognising who is promising,” mostly because you sometimes have important information they don’t, like knowing that someone is smart and knowledgeable and altruistic beyond what that person can make legible to time-constrained grantmakers. If you don’t have relevant information, e.g. because you don’t know any promising people-who-need-funding, donating to LTFF is great.
(I have donated to LTFF. I have never made a “local grant,” but I would consider it if I had more money and I knew promising people-who-need-funding.)
I agree with this, but I think the main bottleneck here is just that those people often don’t apply to the LTFF.