I've had very good results from offering unsolicited no-strings $X,000 gifts to friends who were financially struggling while doing important work. Some people have accepted, and it took serious pressure off them while they laid the foundations for what's become impressive careers. Some turned me down, although I like to imagine that knowing they had backup available made them feel like they had more slack. It's a great way to turn local social knowledge into impact. The opportunities to do this aren't super frequent, but when it arises the per-dollar impact is absolutely insane.

Some advice for anyone who's thinking of doing this:

—Don't mention it to anyone else. This is sensitive personal stuff. Your friend doesn't want some thirdhand acquaintance knowing about their financial hardship. Talking about it in general terms without identifying information is fine.

—Make gifts, not loans. Loans often put strain on relationships and generally make things weird. People sometimes make "loans" they can't afford to lose without realizing what they're doing, but you're not gonna give away money without understanding the consequences. Hold fast to this; if the recipient comes back three years later when they're doing better and offers to pay it back (this has happened to me), tell them to pay it forward instead.

—The results will only be as good as your judgements of character and ability. Everyone makes mistakes, but if you make *big* mistakes on either of those, then this probably isn't your comparative advantage.

Organizations becoming flush with cash makes them a target for bad actors and those with personality disorders. This is also a problem for individuals, but small grants or tenure are less likely to cause it (though it will happen to the one doing the granting)

The person-first approach is an effective diversification strategy.

Bear in mind that some people think you shouldn't diversify [EA · GW].

Disclaimer: I am not an EA or a utilitarian and don't endorse the reasoning in that link.

I think this largely depends on the area to which you're donating. Donating money to individual researchers probably is more efficient than donating to research organisations, and the same can be said for certain businesses.

But you mentioned that the scale of outcomes plays a big role in deciding on whether to donate to companies or to individuals. And in some areas, such as health, donating to individuals is almost never as efficient as donating to an organization. Yes, funding a "help Jake battle cancer" GoFundMe page provides stronger feedback, but is it really as useful as helping many starving or ill children?

I think there's a lot of variety in the capabilities, resources, and amount of effort that people have to put into "trying to improve the world via philanthropy".    This advice is excellent for a someone who's better at identifying excellent performers than most "normal" donation targets AND has the right mix of time available to find/evaluate recipients but not to do direct work.  I suspect that's a pretty small number of philanthropists.

There is a common belief in AI alignment that most do worse research if they’re independent rather than in an organization (academic lab, nonprofit lab, or for-profit company). Based on your arguments, you probably disagree. Why? And if you agree, why isn’t this strong evidence against the personal-first strategy?

This sounds like a good introduction to a greater debate about when it is better to support individuals and when organizations. Examples from real life (for both sides) would be great to have. But because the existing standard is to support organizations, it seems very useful to remind people that supporting individuals is also an option.

My intuition is that organizations have a lot of overhead. They need to register as a legal entity, do accounting, rent an office space, make themselves visible and legible for potential donors. If something can be done by a single person, sponsoring that person directly saves these costs. Sponsoring an organization might actually encourage mission creep.

Organizations are probably better when the specific person is easy to replace. If you sponsor the organization, then if the person doing the task quits / gets hit by a car / joins a religious cult and stops caring about research, they will be replaced by someone else, and the project will continue.

So, it seems like good questions are: Can it be done by one person? Is the specific person replaceable?

I’m not sure I understand how funding an individual, rather than a small team, solves the feedback loop problem. No one person can do it all. What is the mechanism that yields alpha when funding an individual over funding a small team, for example?

As someone with unusual ideas and an allergy to organizational drift, I approve of this message.

I don't think we currently have organizational patterns capable of fully empowering individual choicemaking. Any organization comes with narrowing of purpose, implicitly or explicitly, and this particularly detrimental to most out-there ideas. Not all out-there ideas are good but those that are should be pursued with full flexibility.