Notes on Patronage

jenn
Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:44:21 GMT

1. If you are reading this post, odds are you are not actually someone who would self-identify as a creative type. But perhaps your way of thinking about the tension between job, career, and the actual work you think is important to do has much in common with the bind that creative types have been in since time immemorial, such that it could be useful to think in such a lens anyways. Now may be an unusually good time for people who have important work they want to do to familiarize themselves with patronesque frameworks, because many new patrons are about to come online, and many of them will think about the world in ways similar to you.

2. Like most creative types throughout history, all I want is to be able to work at what I think is important to work on without ever having to worry about money. Like most creative types throughout history, having not been born into a family of significant means, such a life is not by default available for me. Therefore, I will have to do what most creative types do throughout history, and compromise. I compromise in ways very similar to what creative types have done throughout history: I have job that pays the bills, and I cultivate relationships with patrons who sponsor my work.

3. Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Bernini: even those who were at the apex of their craft spent a lot of their working hours working on things that they didn't care about, because that's what their patrons wanted them to do (depict guys they didn't give a shit about, in ways that required long term travel to miserable far-away locales if they were unlucky) or because it paid the bills (run an apprentice shop to train the next generation of artisans, instead of making art). It's helpful to be calibrated on the amount of entitlement that you should feel. I am hardly a Rembrandt, why would I feel entitled to more of my own time than he did? If you do feel more entitled, you should be able to justify why.

4. An American socialist poster that I really like from the 70s says the following:
If you're unemployed it's not because there isn't any work. Just look around: A housing shortage, crime, pollution, We need better schools and parks. Whatever our needs, they all require work. There's work to be done... Yet, as long as employment is tied to somebody else's profits, the work won't get done.
You do not need to be a socialist to observe that there is often misalignment between the most well-paid jobs and the work that is the most important to do. Of course, there is the important work of aligning our civilization to aim more of the capital flows at the important stuff by default. But there is other important work that also need to be done in the meantime (other forms of alignment, say), that some patrons will be happy to fund you to do.

5. Historically, my biggest patron has been the EA Infrastructure Fund (EAIF). I like their work, and I think they serve a really important function in the funding ecosystem as an entry point. But in general a large, corporate fund comprised of people you don't know, with a vision or angle of their own, is not typically where the most talented creative types get funding for their work. This is because established talents have access to pockets of money that are not legible to the outside world like the EA Infrastructure Fund, and their funders are not soliciting applications.

1. Scott Alexander has been given unsolicited gifts from rich patrons, and also has a bunch of paid subscribers.

2. Zvi has anonymous patrons supporting his writing on a full-time basis, which is why he publishes five times a week.

6. I would wager that Scott and Zvi do not need to write biannual reports summarizing their works of the past two quarters and the impact that they have achieved in ways aligned to their funding, to their patrons, the way I do. (Probably they will have dinner together every so often and talk about it casually, though.) This is good; I think funding bodies like EAIF, SFF, and Coefficient Giving have reasonably good taste, but I do not trust them to have a better idea of what Scott and Zvi should write about than Scott and Zvi do.

7. At the beginning of your working life you will be clueless and inexperienced and thus you will not have good taste in what is actually the most important thing for you to do. When you are just starting out I think it is very wise to go to an established large grantmaker, see what sort of work they like funding, and then do that sort of work with their money. Institutional grantmakers are good early on partially because their constraints (reporting requirements, legibility demands) force you to articulate what you're doing and why.

8. As you do that sort of work, you will become more competent and you will develop taste. You will develop a better handle of the work that you are unusually good at/can do much more competently than other people. So it becomes useful to increasingly ask two other questions:

1. What sort of anti-patterns does my current patron unintentionally select for, that preclude me from doing the work that I think is the most good to do?[1]

2. Are there patrons out there that are more aligned with what I consider to be good work?

9. If you believe that the work you do is good, your end goal should be to find patrons who are entirely aligned with you. Patrons are, by definition, eager to convert their spare resources into work. Because there is mutual trust, and mutual agreement on the kind of work that is pleasing and beneficial, they will give you funding and then largely get out the way. To find aligned patrons, you should do high quality work, and you should be legible about doing good work.

10. Personal patronage has its own distortion patterns that are different from, and not necessarily better than, institutional ones. Additionally, those patterns will be much more difficult to write about, for reasons analogous to these ones. It is ideal to enter into them with sufficient leverage and/or a satisfactory BATNA. You should only enter them with people you know and trust.

I have been hosting rationality and EA meetups in some form or another since 2019. From 2023 onwards, this work has been funded by the EA Infrastructure Fund, which has allowed me to dedicate more time to it. As I organized more things, my idea of what sorts of community building is most useful has diverged from the EA community writ large.

I still intend to run high quality, ~traditional EA events because this is still clearly important to do, and I will continue to apply for grants to run them. But they will be a smaller fraction of all events that I will run, and I will be asking for commensurately less funding. The other kinds of events I want to run are more experimental and illegible, and I am more excited about them. A good friend has given me $10,000 to start them up, with no strings attached save their own anonymity.

1. ^

If you like your patron and they respect your input, you should consider dropping them a line about this.

Discuss