How many people should get self-study grants and how can we find them?

I am pretty pessimistic about the number of people who aren't in a position to contribute to the world's most pressing problems today, but could readily contribute with a year of self-study.

I think the biggest constraint for having more people working on EA projects is management and leadership capacity. But those aren't things you can (solely) self-study; you need to practice management and leadership in order to get good at them.

I am most optimistic about a year of self-study being useful if someone already has a proven track record of really established skills (whether inside the EA community or outside) and wants to pivot to apply those skills to a different situation. But in those cases I would often expect the person to get hired and learn on the job, or to get a grant for whatever their new project will be with some learning time built in.

tl;dr I think group B is small.

One thing I like about the EA Hotel is that there is a selection effect in that people who aren't committed to EA are unlikely to want to move there. Given the huge amount of funds in EA, I think that we ought to greatly expand this kind of thing, although perhaps we might want to be wary about locating such an institute in a major city.

Ideally, people would get the opportunity to get up to speed, "bridge the inferential gap" and get to start thinking about how to have an impact full time during their undergraduate studies. The way most university programs are set up right now, people spend years on often irrelevant content and wasteful busywork. I was thus pleased to see Ben Todd and Will MacAskill mention the idea of creating some kind of EA University during their EAG appearances.

See also my own “case for education.”

I imagine A < B in terms of numbers of people; and B ≈ C, given you are pre-selecting for "self-starting EAs". I think just being dedicated enough to EA to want to spend a year working on it full time is a reasonably strong signal that you would have something to contribute, given that dedication seems to require a strong understanding in the case of EA. And self-starting + dedication + a strong understanding + working full-time on trying to have impact at the margin should = impact at the margin.

Obviously there is then the important detail of how big the impact is, relative to the salary. CEEALAR tries to keep costs to a minimum as a way of raising this ratio, but it's plausible that much higher salaries (grants) could produce more impact/$. 

I think more dedicated self-starting EAs should be funded to work on EA full-time. Bs can be identified by offering grants and seeing who applies (this is already happening to some degree, but could be expanded). Once identified, we vet them to try and estimate whether it's cost effective to throw a year's salary at them.