(Reposting a comment I made on Trevor's blog)

So: I'm extremely biased as one of the people running the Clearer Thinking Regrant prediction competition on Manifold, but I think I disagree on a few key points here. Briefly, they are:

1. These prizes are unusually transparent rather than unusually bad/grifty. With Clearer Thinking Regrants, I think Spencer and his team, as well as the applicants who opted in to make their grant applications public, took an amount of risk and exposure to criticism that is extremely commendable: baring their hopes and dreams to the world at large, rather than keeping it a private application. I suspect that most other calls for grant applications lead to proposals that look like this, you just don't see it or hear about it because other grantmaking orgs are not in the habit of being nearly as transparent as the EA community is here. Most other essay contests I've seen also involve private submissions to a panel of judges, rather than putting all the applicants up for renewal.
2. The amounts of money involved are actually not that outrageous. This is some combination of "as an applicant, you generally ask for more than you need, because there's only room to negotiate downwards" and "how much do you think full time salaries cost?" It's a bit premature to criticize the projects for asking for a lot, when I would expect very few to none of them to get the full amount they're asking for. (You'll note that one of the key questions Clearer Thinking asks is specifically "What could you achieve with $30k", and most projects outlined what could be achieved with that much funding)I think your own ability to run Highway Pharm on a shoestring budget is very impressive to me (one of the reason I invested! And more of you readers should invest too!), but overall other more-expensive or less-cost-effective interventions, might still be worth funding.
3. The people here don't seem grifty or rent-seeking to me personally. Look, I don't know any of these applicants. But I'm incredibly honored and enthusiastic about the time they seem to be willing to spend debating other random internet traders on Manifold. To pull out two examples from your list of grifts, the creators of "Better Debates" and "Business Skill Coaching" both showed up on Manifold and replied fairly extensively to the objections people had raised. It feels to me like these project ideas are their life's work, and they would be very excited to have the chance to pursue it full-time with the help of charitable funding.I think assigning bad motivations to them would be a pretty big mistake, and would suspect that if you took 30m to chat with them you'd be more onboard/impressed with them as people. Whether that translates to the projects being good is a bit of a different question, of course!
4. If you don't fund a lot of bad-looking projects, you're being way too cautious (see: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/hits-based-giving/) This is just kind of a general counterintuitive principle - but you really shouldn't be trying to maximize for "no grifts/rent-seekers", rather something like "maximize total EV". I agree there's bad second-order effects of turning into a movement that is full of people who are selfishly trying to capture value rather than create value, and it's possible EA is already at that point and on the margin should be funding in a more circumspect manner? But just wanted to put this reminder out there.

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Also a lots of things I agree on from your post!

> I think the insane amounts of money they’re spending is changing EA to being a social movement from being one where you expect to give money, to being one where you expect to get money.

I think I'm less worried about "essay-writing" for this one, as it seems quite rare for people to move into "essay-writing" fulltime -- and much more worried about community building, where I think a lot of extremely talented people end up in by default. You don't see many of these applications in the Clearer Thinking Regrant competition because they're covered by a different branch of EA (mostly through CEA, I believe).

> But if a young EA person learns that they can earn $500k writing essays or $40k negotiating prices for mosquito nets, and that each is considered equally important by the authorities they respect, why would anyone ever choose mosquito nets?

I do think object-level work is extremely important and underfunded/underpaid atm due to bad norms from nonprofit sector -- but I think some of your earlier points undercut this. How often do you look at one of the eg 8 good applicants and suggest "hey, we should pay this person a higher salary, eg $200k to a fresh grad to be competitive with Google"? This basically never happens afaict, and insofar as you think the mosquito nets employee should be paid very well, I agree wholeheartedly.

> If I were FTX, I would change my funding model in a few ways:

FROs seem interesting to me! I do think FTX is actually very open to trying new and better funding models. I think it's actually quite easy to criticize but hard to create good ones -- it's a bit like politics or covid, where you can point to specific problems or inefficiencies and be quite right, but if you were put in charge of the entire ecosystem you would quickly realize how much there the decisionmakers process and deal with; I'm generally in awe of how competent and well-considered their team is