Post which someone should write (but I probably won’t get to soon): there is a lot of potential value in earning-to-give EA’s deeply studying the fields to which they donate. Two underlying ideas here:
The key idea of knowledge bottlenecks is that one cannot distinguish real expertise from fake expertise without sufficient expertise oneself. For instance, it takes a fair bit of understanding of AI X-risk to realize that “open-source AI” is not an obviously-net-useful strategy. Deeper study of the topic yields more such insights into which approaches are probably more (or less) useful to fund. Without any expertise, one is likely to be mislead by arguments which are optimized (whether intentionally or via selection) to sound good to the layperson.
That takes us to the pareto frontier argument. If one learns enough/earns enough that nobody else has both learned and earned more, then there are potentially opportunities which nobody else has both the knowledge to recognize and the resources to fund. Generalized efficient markets (in EA-giving) are thereby circumvented; there’s potential opportunity for unusually high impact.
To really be a compelling post, this needs to walk through at least 3 strong examples, all ideally drawn from different areas, and spell out how the principles apply to each example.
Post which someone should write (but I probably won’t get to soon): there is a lot of potential value in earning-to-give EA’s deeply studying the fields to which they donate. Two underlying ideas here:
When money is abundant, knowledge becomes a bottleneck
Being on a pareto frontier is sufficient to circumvent generalized efficient markets
The key idea of knowledge bottlenecks is that one cannot distinguish real expertise from fake expertise without sufficient expertise oneself. For instance, it takes a fair bit of understanding of AI X-risk to realize that “open-source AI” is not an obviously-net-useful strategy. Deeper study of the topic yields more such insights into which approaches are probably more (or less) useful to fund. Without any expertise, one is likely to be mislead by arguments which are optimized (whether intentionally or via selection) to sound good to the layperson.
That takes us to the pareto frontier argument. If one learns enough/earns enough that nobody else has both learned and earned more, then there are potentially opportunities which nobody else has both the knowledge to recognize and the resources to fund. Generalized efficient markets (in EA-giving) are thereby circumvented; there’s potential opportunity for unusually high impact.
To really be a compelling post, this needs to walk through at least 3 strong examples, all ideally drawn from different areas, and spell out how the principles apply to each example.