Comments on: Why you should focus more on talent gaps, not funding gaps

By: Christian Kleineidam

Christian Kleineidam — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 11:54:00 +0000

As far as biomedical research goes, in his [AMA](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/3fri9a/ask_aubrey_de_grey_anything) Aubrey de Grey writes that he considers anti-aging research highly funding constraint and think that it would be possible to advance the field by a decade by spending $1 billion.

While it might be possible for everyone to get funding, they might not get funding to work on the important things.

In current biomedical research there are strong pressures to research in a way that can lead to lucrative patents.

By: Benjamin Todd

Benjamin Todd — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 17:24:00 +0000

In reply to Ben West.

On 1, I plan to write more about this.

On 2, that’s a good question. I think it’s hard to be more specific, but I’ll try to extract more details from people in the future. I’d start by looking at what people look for in for-profit CEOs, e.g. the ‘jobs of the CEO’ section here: http://playbook.samaltman.com/

By: Ben West

Ben West — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 15:07:00 +0000

Thanks Ben for this important post. Two questions:

1. Most EA organizations (correctly) try to keep their team small. As a result, there is a great need for people who are very highly skilled and so, if you are in the top 1% of your field, it probably is better for you to work on direct things than earning to give. But for the other 99% of us: are there really organizations who need our skills more than our money?

2. Could you (or the people you surveyed) elaborate more on what specific skills they’re looking for in entrepreneurial/scaling people? It’s fairly hard to figure out what skills make a good for-profit entrepreneur, and I assume it’s even harder to figure out what skills make a good nonprofit entrepreneur.

By: Benjamin Todd

Benjamin Todd — Mon, 07 Dec 2015 18:24:00 +0000

In reply to David Denkenberger. I think GCR is an area that's both funding and constrained and talent constrained, but maybe a bit more talent constrained than funding constrained, at least in some areas like AI. Good points that other areas are a bit less talent constrained because there's researchers who already have the right skill set.

By: David Denkenberger

David Denkenberger — Sun, 06 Dec 2015 20:07:00 +0000

Thanks for the thoughtful post. Owen’s graph to explain talent versus money constraint was very useful-thanks for the link. I think at least for the case of global catastrophic risks (GCR), if you value the far future, we are under investing by orders of magnitude. If you put a lot more money in, then you would go up to market wage rates, which would generally attract plenty of qualified people (as shown by Owen’s graph).

In the near term, I know many qualified people who would love to have a GCR job.

Even though particular problems could be very challenging, if we had a lot of money and therefore a lot of people working on the problem, we could break the problem into smaller parts that non-geniuses can make progress on. Even in the case of AI, with lots of money, we could attack it from many perspectives: political science, sociology, economics, history, engineering, etc. We could also spend a lot of money raising general awareness. You see this with climate change now that it has gotten a lot of funding.

In my particular field of alternate foods for agricultural catastrophes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeding_Everyone_No_Matter_What), I could
easily employ 100 people full-time with important follow-up research. Lots of
people would have the transferable skills to make progress on this problem-so
it really is a lack of money.

I agree that the principal agent problem is more difficult if you have non-EA workers. I just think that the price of oversight is well worth it when you look at the benefit to cost ratio including future generations. For instance, many graduate students will switch their research focus after getting their PhD-that is
okay-we still would be reducing the chance that we lose civilization. And by attracting a lot of attention with more money, this could convince many more people who have not really thought about it that reducing GCR is of overwhelming importance.

By: Benjamin Todd

Benjamin Todd — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 12:11:00 +0000

GiveWell’s recent announcement of a ~$100m funding gap for its top charities, excluding Give Directly, is a bit of an update against the conclusions of this post, at least insofar as you’re focused on international development. Though I still expect greater talent constraints than funding constraints.
http://blog.givewell.org/2015/11/18/our-updated-top-charities-for-giving-season-2015/

By: G Diego Vichutilitarian

G Diego Vichutilitarian — Sat, 28 Nov 2015 01:18:00 +0000

Thank you Ben, a fabulous post , addressing a fundamentally necessary point that has been overlooked by many since at least EAGlobal, and that was visible but not thoroughly confirmed for at least two years. Some specific actions I suggest readers take, that I’ve taken to address this:
1) Persuade some of the most skilled EAs you are aware of to become researchers, especially In areas that don’t seem obviously connected to EA, like Audiovisual, Sociology, Linguistics, etc… so they can milk the best insides from those areas.
2) for areas like mathematics, computer science, and philosophy, where we have a large contingent of people, endorse approaches distinct from those taken by the major organizations, say Diverging from the technical research agenda or in philosophy from Quinean realism.
3) Create new organizations, like we did with convergenceanalysis.com, whose explicit goal is to take on a cluster of research questions currently unaddressed.
4) I cannot speak for the executive talent constraint, but there are equivalent considerations there, I presume.