If you make programmer money and a bunch of your friends are working on weird projects that take two hours to explain and justify—and I know that describes a lot of people here—then you’re in an excellent position to do this. Essentially it’s legibility arbitrage.
I would expect that one of the key reasons why many people would not do this, is because it’s socially weird and they are uncertain about how to handle how that changes their social relationship to the people around them.
Especially, given that many programmers are more on the shy side, writing a check to a GiveWell-recommended charity is easier. I think it would be valuable if someone who acts like that would write more about their experience doing it, so that people have an easier model to copy.
I like the term “legibility arbitrage” but I don’t think it’s actually useful as a model.
It’s possible that you happen to have a friend with sufficient skill, drive, and connections to make a bigger difference with your support than a more established organization could. It’s possible that you have enough friends with this potential that you really should go with the VC model—small throwaway investments in a number of tiny ventures, in the hopes that one of them will be bigger than the sum of your investments.
I’ve actually done this and it worked incredibly well, so I’m not persuaded by your vague doubts that it’s possible. If you insist on using “opinion of established organizations” as your yard stick then I’ll add that a strong majority of the people I supported would later go on to get big grants and contracts from well-respected organizations, always after years of polishing and legibilizing the projects which I’d supported in their infancy.
Certainly it wouldn’t work for the median person on Earth. But “LW reader who’s friends with a bunch of self-starting autodidacts and has enough gumption to actually write a check” is not the median person on Earth, and people selected that hard will often know some pretty impressive people.
If you make programmer money and a bunch of your friends are working on weird projects that take two hours to explain and justify—and I know that describes a lot of people here—then you’re in an excellent position to do this. Essentially it’s legibility arbitrage.
I would expect that one of the key reasons why many people would not do this, is because it’s socially weird and they are uncertain about how to handle how that changes their social relationship to the people around them.
Especially, given that many programmers are more on the shy side, writing a check to a GiveWell-recommended charity is easier. I think it would be valuable if someone who acts like that would write more about their experience doing it, so that people have an easier model to copy.
I like the term “legibility arbitrage” but I don’t think it’s actually useful as a model.
It’s possible that you happen to have a friend with sufficient skill, drive, and connections to make a bigger difference with your support than a more established organization could. It’s possible that you have enough friends with this potential that you really should go with the VC model—small throwaway investments in a number of tiny ventures, in the hopes that one of them will be bigger than the sum of your investments.
But I doubt it.
I’ve actually done this and it worked incredibly well, so I’m not persuaded by your vague doubts that it’s possible. If you insist on using “opinion of established organizations” as your yard stick then I’ll add that a strong majority of the people I supported would later go on to get big grants and contracts from well-respected organizations, always after years of polishing and legibilizing the projects which I’d supported in their infancy.
Certainly it wouldn’t work for the median person on Earth. But “LW reader who’s friends with a bunch of self-starting autodidacts and has enough gumption to actually write a check” is not the median person on Earth, and people selected that hard will often know some pretty impressive people.