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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Grantmaking is more like a skill than a path, published by OllieBase on March 8, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Epistemic status: Moderately strongly held based on anecdotal data, but I could easily imagine learning about broader patterns and withdrawing this claim. TL;DR: Grantmaking, in my view, is best viewed as a set of skills or a stage in a career path than a career path itself. To be excellent at grantmaking, I think you need to be an excellent generalist in a specific field first.This post is mostly a critique of the 80,000 Hours career profile 'Grantmaker focused on pressing problems’. I agree with most of the article but object to the framing (grantmaking as a career path). 80,000 Hours staff reviewed this post and might make some changes to their article, but I’ll let them comment on that if they want to. My perspective Without intending to, I have spent a good chunk of my career trying to be a good grantmaker. I spent ~1/3rd of ~1.5 years at what is now Longview Philanthropy making grants to support projects focused on protecting future generations and I now make grants as part of my role as Community Events Manager at CEA. I don’t claim to be a good or an experienced grantmaker but I have been asked by a few people who are interested in grantmaking what they should do now to become a grantmaker focused on pressing problems. I find myself explaining to people who ask this question what I wish I knew before I tried grantmaking: to be excellent at grantmaking you need to be an excellent generalist in a specific field first. More specifically, I think you need at least the following: A “bird’s eye view” of a field - Which projects already exist? What is the track record of work in the space? Who’s who? A theory of change - What needs to happen in your field to solve an important problem? Why hasn’t that happened already? What’s the best path to the solution? A strong network - You often need to be able to talk to someone working in the field to understand whether a new project might work. Who do you know who could pick up the phone to explain something to you? Technical know-how - Can you quickly understand and vet proposals for projects in your field? Can you spot errors? I think the best way to attain this set of skills is to pursue a generalist path in a specific field, rather than pursue a “grantmaker path”. Examples of more generalist paths might be researcher, policy analyst or manager. Much of this is covered in the 80,000 Hours article and I agree with most of that article. But I think that the framing of grantmaking as a “path,” rather than a “skill” or “stage,” is confusing for two reasons: Framing grantmaking as a path encourages people to try to learn generalist skills outside the context of a specific problem. Framing grantmaking as a path encourages people early in their career to apply for an extremely narrow set of jobs (e.g. research analyst at Open Phil). Framing grantmaking as a path encourages people to try to learn generalist skills outside the context of a specific problem. I agree with the contents of the section “How to assess your fit” but I worry that people early in their career will try to work on things like 'judging people accurately' or 'thinking of grant ideas' before they have built a birds-eye view of a field or theory of change for a problem. For example, I spoke to a student at EA Global who was interested in becoming a grantmaker in AI safety. I asked them what they thought of various lines of attack on the alignment problem and they said something along the lines of “I’m not sure I want to do that kind of research directly, I’m more of a people person which is why I’m focused on becoming a grantmaker.” This sounds like it could be a big career misstep - it would be very hard to be a good grantmaker in the field of...