Who will make grant decisions?
A panel of biomedical scientists will make funding recommendations to Emergent Ventures.
The Fast Grants website does not mention Cowen, and his level of involvement is unclear to me. Some of the phrasing in your post like “Funded By Blogger’s Personal Fund” gave me the impression that Cowen was more involved in the decision-making process than I can find evidence for. I’m curious if you have more information on this.
It is funded by Emergent Ventures, which was founded with the purpose of being a one-man shop. I’m pretty sure he still makes the final decisions, but is that the same thing? As you say, contra Zvi’s claim, Emergent Ventures has grown into a bureaucracy. What’s wrong with bureaucracies? Cowen appears to have solid control over EV. If the bureaucracy fails at the legible goal of being fast, he will simply fire it. But it is doing some filtering that he used to do, which is harder to police.
According to Tyler Cowen’s blog post about the saliva test, this grant was made via Fast Grants. From the Fast Grants homepage:
The Fast Grants website does not mention Cowen, and his level of involvement is unclear to me. Some of the phrasing in your post like “Funded By Blogger’s Personal Fund” gave me the impression that Cowen was more involved in the decision-making process than I can find evidence for. I’m curious if you have more information on this.
It is funded by Emergent Ventures, which was founded with the purpose of being a one-man shop. I’m pretty sure he still makes the final decisions, but is that the same thing? As you say, contra Zvi’s claim, Emergent Ventures has grown into a bureaucracy. What’s wrong with bureaucracies? Cowen appears to have solid control over EV. If the bureaucracy fails at the legible goal of being fast, he will simply fire it. But it is doing some filtering that he used to do, which is harder to police.