Grant-making in EA should consider peer-reviewing grant applications along the public-sector model

post by Ben Smith (ben-smith) · 2023-01-24T15:01:22.110Z · LW · GW · 3 comments

3 comments

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comment by Raemon · 2023-01-24T21:49:06.745Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm on the fence about whether I want this sort of thing on LessWrong. 

I've had mixed feelings about the crossposting feature since it went live. I do think the object level of this post is pretty reasonable for LessWrong – coordination schemes for grantmaking seems like an important topic, but it looks crossposted without much thought to the different cultural context. 

On the EA Forum, it's sort of taken as a given that what we're doing is doing effective altruism, and "building the EA community". I think this comes with some subtle baggage / social implications which is totally reasonable for the EA forum, but which would nudge LessWrong in a direction that makes it feel less like the place that is just about thinking. (Some of these nudging-forces affect LessWrong regardless of whether we get crossposts with this sort of intro-paragraph and title, i.e. grantmaking in the surrounding ecosystem definitely affects LW. But, I'm worried about having even more of that nudging on the margin)

I'd have felt totally fine if this got a different title and somewhat different intro paragraph, that put the post in a context for LW readers that didn't just assume the EA frame.

Replies from: jkaufman
comment by jefftk (jkaufman) · 2023-01-24T23:23:14.070Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Crossposting in general is tricky: ideally people would tweak their writing for their audience (ex: focusing on the coordination problem in the LW version) but that's a lot of work people are mostly not up for. The ability to add a venue-specific intro could help, but I bet people mostly wouldn't use it...

Replies from: Raemon
comment by Raemon · 2023-01-24T23:24:58.619Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I mostly think in cases like this, it just makes sense to manually crosspost with some tweaks, rather than write more code.