IMO counterfactuals in history are not really worth studying, unless you have some special insights into it and really want to study it.
Both funders and employees are ultimately influenced by memes. Human behaviour is hard to predict. It’s difficult to get the outcome in practice of an alternate history where a meme was less influential or more influential.
(And yes IMO you may want to be thinking in terms of “which memes should I fund” not “which projects should I fund”. Actually persuading people of an idea is often more scarce than funding, you can’t pay someone to actually care about an idea, let alone to care enough that they work full time on it out of choice. Memes can self-replicate once you provide the initial fuel for them to take off from the ground.)
I think credit allocation is extremely important to study and get right, because it tells you who to trust, who to grant resources to. For example, I think much of the wealth of modern society is downstream of sensible credit allocation between laborers, funders, and corporations in the form of equity and debt, allowing successful entrepreneurs and investors to have more funding to reinvest into good ideas. Another (non-monetary) example is authorship in scientific papers; there, correct credit allocation helps people in the field understand which researchers are worth paying attention to, whose studies ought to be funded, etc. As any mechanism designer can tell you, these systems are far from perfect, but I think still much much better than the default in the nonprofit world.
(I do agree that caringness is often a bigger bottleneck than funding, for many classes of important problems, such as trying to hire someone into a field)
IMO counterfactuals in history are not really worth studying, unless you have some special insights into it and really want to study it.
Both funders and employees are ultimately influenced by memes. Human behaviour is hard to predict. It’s difficult to get the outcome in practice of an alternate history where a meme was less influential or more influential.
(And yes IMO you may want to be thinking in terms of “which memes should I fund” not “which projects should I fund”. Actually persuading people of an idea is often more scarce than funding, you can’t pay someone to actually care about an idea, let alone to care enough that they work full time on it out of choice. Memes can self-replicate once you provide the initial fuel for them to take off from the ground.)
I think credit allocation is extremely important to study and get right, because it tells you who to trust, who to grant resources to. For example, I think much of the wealth of modern society is downstream of sensible credit allocation between laborers, funders, and corporations in the form of equity and debt, allowing successful entrepreneurs and investors to have more funding to reinvest into good ideas. Another (non-monetary) example is authorship in scientific papers; there, correct credit allocation helps people in the field understand which researchers are worth paying attention to, whose studies ought to be funded, etc. As any mechanism designer can tell you, these systems are far from perfect, but I think still much much better than the default in the nonprofit world.
(I do agree that caringness is often a bigger bottleneck than funding, for many classes of important problems, such as trying to hire someone into a field)