One issue is that decentralised grant-making could increase the risk that projects that are net negative get funding, as per the logic of the unilateralist's curse. The risk of that probably varies with cause area and type of project.

My hunch is that many people have a bit of an intuitive bias against centralised funding; e.g. because it conjures up images of centralised bureaucracies (cf. the reference to the USSR) or appears elitist. I think that in the end it's a tricky empirical question and that the hypothesis that relatively centralised funding is indeed best shouldn't be discarded prematurely.

I should also say that how centralised or coordinated grant-makers are isn't just a function of how many grant-makers there are, but also of how much they communicate with each other. There might be ways of getting many of the benefits of decentralisation while reducing the risks, e.g. by the right kinds of coordination.

I’m not sure this comment is helping, but I don’t agree with this post.
 

1. Separate from any individual grant, a small number of grant makers have unity and serve critical coordination purposes, especially in design of EA and meta projects, but in other areas as well.
2. Most of the hardest decisions in grant making require common culture and communicating private, sensitive information. Ideas are worth less than execution, well-aligned competent grantees are critical. Also, success of the project is only one consideration  (deploying money has effects on the EA space and also into the outside world, maybe with lasting effects that can be hard to see).
3. Once you solve the above problems, which benefit from a small number of grant makers, there are classes of projects where you can deploy a lot of money into (AMF, big science grants, or CSET).
4. The above response doesn’t cover all kinds of EA projects, like the development of people, or nascent smaller projects that are important. To address this, outreach is a focus and grant makers are often generous with small grants.
5. Grant makers aren't just passively gatekeeping money, just saying yes or no to proposals. There’s an extremely important and demanding role that grant makers perform (that might be unique to EA) where they develop whole new fields and programmes. So grant makers fund and build institutions to create and influence generations of projects. This needs longevity and independence.
6. The post doesn’t mention how advisers and peripheral experts, in and outside of EA, are used. Basically, key information to inform grant making decisions is outsourced, in the best sense, to a diverse group of people. This probably expands grant making capacity many, many, times. (Of course this can be poorly executed, capture, etc. is possible, but someone I know is perceptive and hasn’t seen evidence of this.)
7. I'm not sure I'm wording this well, but inferential distance can be vast. I find it difficult to even “see” how better people are better than me. It’s hard to understand this, you sort of have to experience it. To give an analogy, an Elo 1800 chess player can beat me, and an Elo 2400 chess player can beat that person. In turn, an Elo 2800 player can effortlessly beat those people. When being outplayed in this way, communication is literally impossible, I wouldn't understand what is going on in a game between me and the Elo 1800, even if they explained everything, move by move. In the same way, the very best experts in a field have deep and broad understanding, so they can make large, correct inferential leaps very quickly. I think this should be appreciated. I don't think it's unreasonable that EA can get the very best experts in the world and they have insights like this. This puts constraints on the nature and number of grant makers who need to communicate and coordinate with these experts, and grantmakers themselves may have these qualities.

I think someone might see a large amount of money and see a small amount of people deciding where it goes. They might feel that seems wrong. 

But what if the causal story is the exact opposite of this intuition? The people who have donated this money seem to be competent, and have specifically set up these systems. We’ve seen two instances of this now. The reason why there is money at all is because these structures have been setup successfully.

I’m qualified and well positioned to give the perspective above. I’m someone who has benefitted and gotten direct insights from grant makers, and probably seen large funding offered. At the same time, I don’t have this money. Due to the consequences of my actions, I’ve removed myself from the EA projects gene pool. I'm sort of an EA Darwin award holder. So I have no personal financial/project motivation to defend this thing if I thought it was bad.

Hundreds of people spent considerable time writing applications to FTX Future fund's first round of funding. It seems inefficient to me that there aren't more sources of funding looking over these applications and funding the projects they think look the most promising.

This wouldn't directly address your main concern, but I'd be really interested to see more full grant applications posted publicly (both successful and non-successful). 

One advantage of centralized grantmaking though is that it can convey more information, due to the experience of the grantmakers. In particular, centralized decision-making allows for better comparisons between proposals. This can lead to only the most effective projects being carried out, as it would be the case with startups if one were to restrict himself to only top venture capitalists.

(On phone, early in the morning!)

Thanks for this.

I agree with nearly all of it.

I'd like us to have a community fundraising platform and a coexisting crowdfunding norm so that more good ideas get proposed and backed. Also, so that the community (including centralised funders) have a better read on what the community wants and why.

As an example, I have several desires for changes and innovations that I'd be happy to help fund. As an example, I would like to be able to read and refer to a really detailed assessment and guesstimate model for whether, when, and how best to decide on giving now v saving and giving later. I'd help fund an effective bequest or volunteer pledge program. I know others who share my views. I'd like to know the collective interest in funding, either of these. I'd also like centralised funders to know that information, as that community willingness to funding something might make them decide to fund it in conjunction or instead. I don't currently have any easy way to do this.

I suspect there are many ideas in EA that would possibly attract crowdfunding but not centralised funding (at least initially) because many people in some part of the EA community have some individually small, but collectively important need that funders don't realise.

With regard to Stefan's point, rather than reduce risk by reducing and centralising access to funding like we do now, we could reduce it in other ways. We could have community feedback. We could also have contingencies within grants (e.g., projects only funded after a risk assessment is conducted). We could have something modelled on ethics committees to assess what project types are higher risk.

As a community manager, I care a lot about maximizing the potential of any community member who is already deep enough on the EA engagement funnel to even be applying for a grant. In addition to the (very good) reasons in OP's post, I want to see the grantmaking ecosystem become less centralized because:

1. Founders, scalers, and new projects are a bottleneck for EA and it is surprisingly hard to prompt people to take such a route. It seems to be a personality thing, so we should look twice before dismissing people who want to try. 

2. Even if a project ends up underperforming, the opportunity to try scaling or starting up a project does give a dedicated and self-starting EA valuable experience. That innovator-EA may get more potential benefit from being funded than a lot of other ways that one might slowly gain experience. And funding the project should come with some potential positive impact, even if it isn't the most impactful and exciting project to many grantmakers. 
Similar tactics exist in the movement already: EA/80K recommends people enter the for-profit world to gain experience, which comes with near-zero positive impact potential during that time. EA also subsidizes career trainings, workshops, and even advanced degrees toward filling bottlenecks of all types. 
Therefore, I'd also advocate for being a bit more lax in funding/subsidizing relatively cheap new projects or scale-ups which can help dedicated innovator/self-starter EAs gain career experience and  yield some altruistic wins. (I admit that some funders may already be thinking this way, I don't know!)

3. It is sad to me that dedicated EAs can essentially be blackballed in what I'd still like to think of as an egalitarian movement. I don't think it is anyone's fault (mad props to grantmakers and funders), but if the funding ecosystem evolves to be a bit more diverse, I think it would be good for the movement's impact and reputation, at least via the mental health and value drift levels of EAs themselves. I'm not saying "fund everything that isn't risky", but that being gatekept/blackballed is a uniquely frustrating experience that can sour one's involvement with the movement. Despite good intentions and a mature personality, it seems natural to stick more to the sidelines after being rejected the first time you stick your neck out and not given any recommendations for where else to apply for funding. The more avenues the movement has and the more obvious these avenues are, the less a rejection will feel like a blackball and prompt people to stop trying.

FWIW I really like the vetted kickstarter idea posted by Peter Slattery below. A bonus with an idea like that is that it will also keep E2Gers engaged. It is a lot more interesting than, say,  donating to EAIF every year, and maybe they can get their warm fuzzies there too.

I agree with the issues related to centralized grantmaking flagged by this article! I wrote a bit about this back in 2018. To my understanding, EA has not been trying forms of decentralized/collective thinking, including decentralized grantmaking. I think that this is definitely a very promising area of inquiry worthy of further research and experimentation.

One example of the blind spots and differences in theories of change you mention is reflected in the results of the Future Fund's Project Ideas Competition. Highly upvoted ideas like "Investment strategies for longtermist funders" and "Highly effective enhancement of productivity, health, and wellbeing for people in high-impact roles," which came in at #3 and #4 respectively, did not win any awards or mention. This suggests that there is decent community interest and consensus around projects and project areas that aren't being funded or funded sufficiently by centralized entities. For those project areas, there are a decent number of people within EA , project leads, and smaller-scale funders (BERI, EA Funds, various HNWIs) that I am aware of that either believe such efforts are valuable and underfunded or have funded projects in those areas in the past. The specific grantmaking team at The Future Fund may have interests and theories of change that aren't the same as other grantmaking teams and EAs. It's definitely fine to have specialized interests and theories of change, and indeed everyone does, but the issue is only one set of those is coming through to decide how to allocate all of the Future Fund's funding. As you point out, that's basically guaranteed to be suboptimal.

This is yet another reason why I'd love to see mini-EA hotels in major cities around the world as I described in this Twitter thread. Obviously, this wouldn't remove the bias towards people in major cities, but it would decrease geographical bias overall and the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good.

I agree that centralised grant-making might mean that some promising projects are missed. But we're not solely interested in this? We're overall interested in:

Average cost-effectiveness per $ granted * Number of $ we're able to grant

My intuition would be that the more decentralised the grant-making process, the more $ we're able to grant.

But this also requires us to invest more talent in grant-making, which means, in practice, fewer promising people applying for grants themselves, which might non-negligibly reduce average cost-effectiveness per $ granted.

Beyond the above consideration, it seems unclear whether decentralised grant-making would overall increase of decrease the average cost-effectiveness. Sure, fewer projects above the current average cost-effectiveness would slip through the net, but so too fewer projects below the current average cost-effectiveness would slip through the net. So I'd expect these things to balance each other out roughly UNLESS we're making a separate claim that the current grantmakers are making poor / miscalibrated decisions. But at that point, this is not an argument in favour of decentralising grant-making, but an argument in favour of replacing (or competing with) the current grantmakers.

So maybe overall, decentralising grant-making would trade an increase in $ we're able to grant for a small decrease in average cost-effectiveness of granted $.

(I felt pretty confused writing these comments and suspect I've missed many relevant considerations, but thought I'd flesh out and share my intuitive concerns with the central argument of this post, rather than just sit on them.)

[Quick thoughts whilst on mobile]

My takeaway: interested to hear what said grant makers think about this idea.

I find the arguments re: efficient market hypothesis pretty compelling , but also find the arguments re: "inferential distance" and unilateralist curse also compelling.

One last points, so far, I think one EA's biggest achievements is around truly unsually good epistemics, and I'm particularly concerned around how centralised small groups could damage that - especially since more funding could exacerbate this effect

Posted on my shortform, but thought it’s worth putting here as well, given that I was inspired by this post to write it:

Thinking about what I’d do if I was a grantmaker that others wouldn’t do. One course of action I’d strongly consider is to reach out to my non-EA friends—most of whom are fairly poor, are artists/game developers whose ideas/philosophies I consider high value, and who live around the world—and fund them to do independent research/work on EA cause areas instead of the minimum-wage day jobs many of them currently have. I’d expect some of them to be interested (though some would decline), and they’d likely be coming from a very different angle than most people in this space. This may not be the most efficient use of money, but making use of my peculiar/unique network of friends is something only I can do, and may be of value.