So You Want To Run A Microgrants Program

Scott's reflective guide to running ACX Grants: the near-paralyzing difficulty of cross-cause EV comparisons (the $1.5M could-save-300-lives counterfactual guilt), how he coped (recruiting expert committees), and ten hard-won lessons (applicants ask for arbitrary amounts; most people are terrible grantwriters; your money funges against other grantmakers; second-order effects; George-Church-advises-everyone; everyone secretly relies on everyone else; the pull of credentialism; heartbreak; prejudices/heuristics; and comparative advantage over 'a rock that says FUND PRESTIGIOUS PEOPLE'). Plus the money-sending nightmare and a candid should-you-do-this section.

Quality 77 · Excellent. Excellent-floor: an honest, genuinely useful, and entertaining distillation of hard-won grant-making experience, with a real and repeatable intellectual payoff (the comparative-advantage / HTAAW framing); one of his stronger practical-EA essays.

Claude’s paradigm shift 54 · Moderate. Moderate: the grant-making lessons and comparative-advantage framing are a fresh synthesis of Scott's own experience.

Real-world impact 3 · Moderate. Moderate: genuinely informs EA microgrant practice (and seeds the impact-certificate/retro-funding idea); real influence within the EA grantmaking ecosystem.