Honesty is important, and the truth is that it’s about the people. They need to have enough funding to snap up the right people as they come along, but they can’t just “scale up” the way you can scale up, say, a health intervention in the third world.
This seems very plausible to me, but they need to verbalize this and make a convincing case that there are people they could hire that would do good work on existential risk reduction. What would a good answer look like? “The visiting fellows program has been quite successful. Visiting fellows (who were not hired) have come up with ideas X,Y,Z and accomplished a, b, c and there are people who we would like to employ but we cannot because we don’t have the funding to do so.”
Honesty is important, and the truth is that it’s about the people. They need to have enough funding to snap up the right people as they come along, but they can’t just “scale up” the way you can scale up, say, a health intervention in the third world.
This seems very plausible to me, but they need to verbalize this and make a convincing case that there are people they could hire that would do good work on existential risk reduction. What would a good answer look like? “The visiting fellows program has been quite successful. Visiting fellows (who were not hired) have come up with ideas X,Y,Z and accomplished a, b, c and there are people who we would like to employ but we cannot because we don’t have the funding to do so.”