Thanks to Clay Graubard for doing my work for me:

These run from about 48% to 60%, but I think the differences are justified by the slightly different wordings of the question and definitions of “invasion”.

You see a big jump last Friday when the US government increased the urgency of their own warnings. I ignored this on Friday because I couldn’t figure out what their evidence was, but it looks like the smart money updated a lot on it.

A few smaller markets that Clay didn’t include: Manifold is only at 36% despite several dozen traders. I think they’re just wrong - but I’m not going to use any more of my limited supply of play money to correct it, thus fully explaining the wrongness. Futuur is at 47%, but also thinks there’s an 18% chance Russia invades Lithuania, so I’m going to count this as not really mature. Insight Prediction, a very new site I’ve never seen before, claims to have $93,000 invested and a probability of 22%, which is utterly bizarre; I’m too suspicious and confused to invest, and maybe everyone else is too.

(PredictIt, Polymarket, and Kalshi all avoid this question. I think PredictIt has a regulatory agreement that limits them to politics. Polymarket and Kalshi might just not be interested, or they might be too PR-sensitive to want to look like they’re speculating on wars where thousands of people could die.)

What happens afterwards? Clay beats me again:

For context:

So it looks like forecasters expect that, conditional upon Russia invading at all, there’s an 80% chance they’ll take Mariupol in the east, a 66% chance they’ll take Kharkiv (also eastern, but only a third ethnic Russian and currently aligned with the central government), and only about a 30% chance they take Kyiv or Odessa. See also this thread full of speculation in the subreddit.

As for me, I’m going all in on “yes” after seeing this tweet:

Alexander Cube

Last week I speculated that to truly realize the potential of prediction markets, we’d need one that was real money, easy to use, and easy to create markets on. Gustavo Lacerda and Nuno Sempere very kindly drew this picture and named it after me:

Nobody has reached the promised land at the furthest point. But all three connected vertices are occupied. Augur is real-money and lets people create their own markets, (but it’s impossible to use - it’s made of complicated crypto contracts that nobody’s made a workable front end for yet). Polymarket is real money and easy to use (but doesn’t let people create their own markets; apparently they’re nervous about resolution disputes). Manifold is easy to use and lets people create their own market, but it’s not real money (they’re American and centralized, so they have to follow anti-gambling regulations).

Manifold Markets

Speaking of which, they’re open!

As the cube suggests, Manifold is a site where anyone can create their own (play money) prediction market. They set the question and they decide when and how it resolves (with everyone else just out of luck if they decide to fake it or rug-pull). It’s a bold strategy, but boy oh boy are people liking it so far:

This is a semi-randomly selected sample of Manifold markets, but let’s go through them one by one.

The Ukraine market is the biggest on Manifold. It’s also deeply out of step with every other prediction market and the top non-prediction-market authorities - who are all giving numbers in the 50s and 60s. I don’t understand how this is so low - yes, play money < real money, but mostly because play money doesn’t get enough people betting. Here lots of people are betting - it’s the biggest market on the site, and since you only start with $1000 either twenty people have bet everything or more people have bet a fraction - but it’s still wrong. I tried to spend some play money to correct it and it snapped back to just as wrong as it was before. I have no explanation.

Midnight The Stray Cat is the second biggest market on Manifold, just after Ukraine. I guess the Internet really liking cats shouldn’t be a surprise at this point. In case you need to do research first I’m told this is the cat in question:

Props to Manifold for a bunch of markets like the third one on there, where they eat their own dog food by using their market to predict how their business decisions are going to go.

ACX Bot has copy-pasted all of my predictions from 2022. At some point they should be able to compare their results with Zvi (ie a single very smart person), with the contest many of you entered (ie an average of formless crowdsourced predictions), and Metaculus (ie a non-monetary forecasting tournament). I’m looking forward to it!

Most of you already know Lars Doucet, who’s written some great ACX posts on Georgism. I don’t know what possessed him to make a Joe Rogan Georgism interviewee market, unless he’s gunning for the position.

Valinor is a group house on my street, with ~a dozen people living in and around it. We’ve been talking about fixing the backyard for a while. Now we can bet about whether it will happen. Having a number for this actually affects some of my decisions a little.

Connor is hijacking the prediction market to make a poll, which is pretty cute.

Dwayne Johnson does not have a 15% chance of winning the election. Manifold is suffering from the usual play money problem, where if you only start out with $1000 in play money, nobody wants to lock it up for three years to make a 15% profit.

Vivek’s market, “Will I believe that 13177 is a prime number”, is pretty unusual. I’m interpreting it as a test/demonstration of prediction markets’ information-gathering ability. If you don’t know something and it’s hard to Google, you can make a prediction market about whether you’ll believe it in the future, and people who are able to figure out the answer will bet on it. Based on the 97% YES rate, I’m guessing 13177 is in fact a prime number. What else can you do this with? TANSTAAFL’s “Will I Be Convinced That Justin Trudeau Is Not Fidel Castro’s Son?” market is maybe pushing the limit of this methodology.

Anyway, there are lots of me-too prediction markets but this is something genuinely new under the sun. Maybe it will be awesome itself, but I’m also hoping it helps bigger players realize how much more is possible.

This Week In Metaculus

A few new questions on intelligence enhancement, eg:

The question explicitly allows embryo selection, but says it must raise IQ ten points and be available for <25% median income to count. Trivial improvements to existing embryo selection will top out around 9 points, so this seems to be predicting something more interesting, maybe iterated embryo selection at the very least. I’m probably slightly bearish on this one; I believe if it existed someone would find a way to get it, but I think the regulatory climate might be able to prevent the relevant research indefinitely.

Improving adult IQ is really hard.

This is a bold thing to speculate about! Atmospheric CO2 was 300ish for most of pre-industrial history, 400ish now, and rising. This question predicts 600 in 2100, which sounds like what happens if global warming gets a bit worse but eventually stabilizes. I’m less sure. I think if we make it to 2100, we’ll have so much technology that atmospheric CO2 can be whatever we want it to be. But maybe we’ll want it to stay where it is; once there’s been a lot of global warming and people have moved / shifted lifestyles, it could be equally disruptive to cool the planet back down.

Right now it’s 5%, the official government prediction is 10% by 2030, but this market says 17.6%. But look at that probability distribution! It’s a lot of people saying 10%ish, plus a very long tail of very big numbers. I think people are disagreeing about how exponential this change is going to be.

Shorts

• Metaculus is holding an essay contest for people who want to use their AI-related prediction markets to argue the future of AI. $6500 available in prizes.

• Nuno Sempere is giving out $10,000 in forecasting-related microgrants.

• Some more New Years’ predictions: Pontifex Minimus on “Scotland, UK, and the world”; Slime Mold Time Mold on 2050 (and 1950?), sorry if I’m missing somebody.

• A “literal marketplace of ideas”, I still don’t have a good sense of what this is but I’m going to look into it more.

1: The team behind Polymarket want me to clarify that despite the tone of my post about them they do still exist, they’re open for real-market trading outside the US, and they might have some kind of compliant US product in the future. I apologize for inadvertently implying they were dead.

2: And the team behind Manifold Markets (ACX grant recipient) want me to announce that they’re officially open!

This has been kind of surreal for me, because I haven’t seen much about them in the usual prediction market news, but lots of friends from outside the forecasting space have gotten involved. A writing circle I know are betting with each other about who will finish their stories when. A housemate opened a market into whether she’ll get pregnant, and another housemate who helps with childcare is buying shares “as a hedge”. I’m feeling pretty good about my claim last week that easy market creation would open up hitherto unexplored territories.

3: Related: ACX Grants recipient Nuno Sempere somehow got grant money of his own and is giving out $10K in prediction market related microgrants. Apply here if interested.

4: A message from Sam and Eric, who are running the prediction contest which incidentally this is your last day to enter:

"We have some plans to compare (aggregates of) ACX reader predictions against various prediction markets. But there are probably much cooler things we can do which we haven't thought of yet! If you run a prediction market and have an idea for an interesting collaboration that involves sharing our data before it's publicly released, get in touch with us through the contest feedback form. If you don't run a prediction market but still have an idea for something interesting we can do with the contest data, also feel free to suggest it in the feedback form, but we probably won't share the contest data with you."

Gabriel writes:

The brain trains on magnitude and acts on sign.

That is to say, there are two different kinds of "module" that are relevant to this problem as you described, but they're not RL and other; they're both other. The learning parts are not precisely speaking reinforcement learning, at least not by the algorithm you described. They're learning the whole map of value, like a topographic map. Then the acting parts find themselves on the map and figure out which way leads upward toward better outcomes.

More precisely then: The brain learns to predict value and acts on the gradient of predicted value.

The learning parts are trying to find both opportunities and threats, but not unimportant mundane static facts. This is why, for example, people are very good at remembering and obsessing over intensely negative events that happened to them -- which they would not be able to do in the RL model the post describes! We're also OK at remembering intensely positive events that happened to us. But ordinary observations of no particular value mostly make no lasting impression. You could test this by a series of 3 experiments, in each of which you have a screen flash several random emoji on screen, and each time a specific emoji is shown to the subject, you either (A) penalize the subject such as with a shock, or (B) reward the subject such as with sweet liquid when they're thirsty, or (C) give the subject a stimulus that has no significant magnitude, whether positive or negative, such as changing the pitch of a quiet ongoing buzz that they were not told was relevant. I'd expect subjects in both conditions A and B to reliably identify the key emoji, whereas I'd expect quite a few subjects in condition C to miss it.

By learning associates with a degree of value, whether positive or negative, it's possible to then act on the gradient in pursuit of whatever available option has highest value. This works reliably and means we can not only avoid hungry lions and seek nice ripe bananas, but we also do compare two negative or two positives and choose appropriately: like whether you jump off a dangerous cliff to avoid the hungry lion, or whether you want to eat the nice ripe banana yourself or share it with your lover to your mutual delight. The gradient can be used whether we're in a good situation or a bad one. You could test this by adapting the previous experiment: associate multiple emoji with stimuli of various values (big shock, medium shock, little shock, plain water, slightly sweet water, more sweet water, various pitch changes in a background buzz), show two screens with several random emoji, and the subject receives the effect of the first screen unless they tap the second. I'd expect subjects to learn to act reliably to get the better of the two options, regardless of sign, and to be most reliable when the magnitude difference is large.

For an alternative way of explaining this situation, see Fox's comment, which I endorse.

OK, now to finally get around to motivated reasoning. The thoughts that will be promoted to your attention for action are those that are the predicted to lead to the best value. You can roughly separate that into two aspects as "salience = probability of being right * value achieved if right". Motivated reasoning happens when the "value achieved if right" dominates the "probability of being right". And well, that's pretty much always, in abstract issues where we don't get clear feedback on probabilities. The solution for aspiring skeptics is to heap social rewards on being right and using methods that help us be more right. Or to stick to less abstract claims. You could test this again by making the emojis no longer a certainty of reward/penalty, but varying probabilities.

Source: I trained monkeys to do neuroscience experiments.

That comment by Fox is:

The underlying intuition here about reinforcement learning is incorrect.

> Plan → higher-than-expected hedonic state → do plan more

No, it's: higher (relative to other actions) hedonic future state *conditioned on current state*. The conditioning is crucial. Conditioned on there being a lion, RL says you should run away because it's better than not running away.

It gets tricky with partial observability, because you don't know the state on which you have to condition. So instead, says RL theory (not so much practice, which is a shame), you can condition on your belief-state, *but only if it's the Bayesian belief-state*. If you're not approximately Bayesian, you get into the kind of trouble the post mentions.

But being Bayesian is the RL-optimal thing to do. You get to the best belief state possible: if there's a lion, you want to believe there's a lion, litany-of-Tarsky style. The visual cortex could, in principle, be incentivized to recognized lions through RL.

I suspect people don't open IRS letters not because their RL is fundamentally broken, but because their reward signal is broken. They truly dislike IRS letters, and the pain it causes to open one is truly more than their expected value. People probably also underestimate the probability and cost of a bad IRS letter, but that's due to poor estimation, not poor deduction from that estimation.

Perhaps it's easier to see in organizations, where you can tell the components (individuals) apart. It's sometimes hard to tell apart the bearer-of-bad-news from the instigator-of-bad-news. This disincentivizes bearers, who might be mistaken for instigators. With enough data, you can learn to tell them apart. Until you do, disincentivizing bearers to the extent that they really could be instigators is the optimal thing to do.

I agree that if we were perfect Bayesian reasoners, the knowledge that there was now a 5% chance of there being a lion would propagate throughout all brain regions and they could condition on this immediately.

And yet a few days ago, I (on a diet) visited some friends who sometimes leave delicious brownies on their counter. I worried that if I saw the brownies, I would eat them, so I tried not to look at the counter. But part of me felt bad that I was passing up the opportunity to eat delicious brownies, so my split-second reaction as I walked through their kitchen was to compromise by looking towards the edge of their counter to check for brownies, but to deliberately exclude from my vision the part of the counter where the brownies were most likely to be.

This makes me think that the parts of my brain doing active inference are not quite perfect Bayesians making perfect updates.

Steve Byrnes:

I pretty much agree with everything you said.

One of 5 or so places in the brain that can get a dopamine burst when a bad thing happens (opposite of the usual) is closely tied to inferotemporal cortex (IT). I talked about it in "Example 2C" here - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jrewt3rLFiKWrKuyZ/big-picture-of-phasic-dopamine#Example_2C__Visual_attention Basically, as far as I can tell, IT is "making decisions" about what to attend to within the visual scene, and it's being rewarded NOT for "things are going well in life", but rather for "something scary or exciting is happening". So from IT's own narrow perspective, noticing the lion is very rewarding. (Amusingly, "noticing a lion" was the example in my blog post too!)

Turning to look at the lion is a type of "orienting reaction", I think. I'm not entirely sure of the details, but I think orienting reactions involve a network of brain regions one of which is IT. The superior colliculus (SC) is involved here too, and SC is ALSO not part of the "things are going well in life" RL system—in fact, SC is not even in the cortex at all, it's in the brainstem.

So yeah, basically, looking at the lion mostly "isn't reinforceable", or to the extent that it is "reinforceable", it's being reinforced by a different reward signal, one in which "scary" is good, as far as I understand right now.

Deciding to open an email, on the other hand, has basically nothing to do with IT or superior colliculus, but rather involves high-level decision-making (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex maybe?), and that bran region DOES get driven by the main "things are going well in life" reward signal.

But check out the rest of the comment subthread for some pushback against and clarification of this model.

II. Arguments That The Long-Term Rewards Of Spotting The Lion Outweigh The Short-Term Drawbacks

Here are three comments that I think say about the same thing from different angles.

Phil:

Not sold on the "visual-cortex-is-not-a-reinforcement-learner" conclusion. If the objective is to maximize total reward (the reinforcement learning objective), then surely having your day ruined by spotting a tiger is better than ignoring the tiger and having your day much more ruined by being eaten by said tiger. (i.e.: visual cortex is "clever" and has incurred some small cost now in order to save you a big cost). Total reward is the same reason humans will do any activities with delayed payoffs.

KJZ:

Rather than a purely "is reinforceable" vs "isn't reinforceable" distinction I suspect the difference has more to do with the relevant timescales for reinforcement. In the foot injury case, we'd have a very fast gait correction reinforcement loop trying to minimize essentially instantaneous pain. In the lion country case it sounds like something slightly longer timescale -- we make a plan to go to lion country and then learn maybe a few hours later that the plan went poorly so we shouldn't make such plans again. In the taxes case it's much longer term, it might take years before the IRS manages to garnish your wages, though you'll still eventually likely get real consequences. Politics on the other hand, often cost/reward is so diffuse and long-term that I suspect the only reason anyone is ever right about difficult policy issues is because the cognitive processes that correctly evaluate them happen to be useful for other reasons. The vision example I think is a mistake of timescale; a vision system which learned to not see something unpleasant would get a much worse net reward when you don't avoid the lion you could have seen and subsequently get mauled.

I'm coming at this from the ML side so I'm out of my depth biologically, but perhaps we have different relevant biological RL processes with different timescales? Eg, pain for ultra-short timescale reinforcement, dopamine for short-to-medium timescale reinforcement, and some higher-level cognitive processes for medium-to-long timescale reinforcement.\

Mike:

I think all of the supposed discrepanices with modeling the brain as a hedonic reinforcement learning model can be explained with standard ML and economics. If you do a lot of research on epistemic facts related to your political beliefs, the first order consequence is often that you spend hours doing mildly unpleasant reading, then your friends yell at you and call you a Nazi. In the case of doing your taxes or the lion, that unpleasantness is modulated by the much larger unpleasantness of being sued by the IRS and/or eaten alive by a lion. So there's a normal tradeoff between costs (filing taxes is boring, seeing lions is scary) and benefits (not being sued or devoured).

I feel like we can thought-experiment our way out of this. Suppose I invest in Bitcoin, then check its price every day. There is a little up arrow or down arrow next to some number and percent. Some days it’s a green up arrow and I feel good and smart and rich. Other days it’s a red down arrow and I feel bad and dumb and poor. None of this ever gets confirmed by any kind of ground truth, because I am HODLing and will never sell my Bitcoins until I retire. So how come I don’t start hallucinating that the arrow is green and points up? Every time I’ve “taken the action” of seeing a green upward-pointing arrow, I’ve felt better; every time I’ve taken the opposite action, I’ve felt worse!

You can no longer appeal to the “the ultimate reinforcement is whether you got mauled by a lion or not”, because I’ve never sold my Bitcoin and gotten any form of reinforcement more final than checking the arrow (if you want, imagine that I get hit by a truck at age 64 and never sell the Bitcoin).

I don’t want to say “epistemics are protected from reinforcement learning” is the only way out of this. It could be that the visual cortex gets reinforced at the level of broad principles, and any change that caused you to flip the direction and color of the arrow would have to change really fundamental things that would make your vision worse in other ways. But it doesn’t seem like “ultimate reinforcement” is what’s preventing this from happening, since there is none.

Also, behavioral reinforcement learning is nowhere near this good. You might think that the short-term reward of eating brownies wouldn’t change behavior because the real reward we should be considering is the reward of being healthy and looking good. But this works very inconsistently, as opposed to the “see lions as lions” thing which works all the time.

III. Am I Ignoring The Many Practical Reasons For People To Have Motivated Reasoning?

Melvin:

I think you're thinking about this too much from a model where everybody is a good-faith Mistake Theorist.

In a mistake theory model, it's a mystery why people fail to update their beliefs in response to evidence that they're wrong. If the only penalty for being wrong is the short term pain of realising that you'd been wrong, then what you've written makes sense.

I think that most people tend to be conflict theorists at heart, though, using mistake theory as a paper-thin justification for their self interest. When I say "Policy X is objectively better for everybody", what I mean is "Policy X is better for me and people I like, or bad for people I hate, and I'm trying to con you into supporting it".

There's no mystery, in this model, why people are failing to update their "Policy X is objectively better" argument based on evidence that Policy X is objectively worse; they never really cared whether Policy X was objectively better in the first place, they just want Policy X.

I commented:

I think there are three things: honest mistakes, honest conflicts, and bias - with this last being a state in which you "honestly believe" (at least consciously) whatever is most convenient for you.

If a rich person says the best way to help the economy is cutting taxes on rich people, or a poor person says the best way to help the economy is to stimulate spending by giving more to the poor, it's possible that they're thinking "Haha, I'm going to pull one over on the dumb people who believe me".

But it also seems like even well-intentioned rich/poor people tend to be more receptive to the arguments that support their side, and genuinely believe them.

I don't think honest mistakes or honest conflicts need much of an explanation, but bias seems interesting and important and worth figuring out.

XPYM asks:

Is the conventional explanation unsatisfactory? That people are more convincing when they argue for their position honestly, and so it's beneficial for them to become biased in ways that favor their interests.

This answers the “why” question but not the “how” question. If you wonder why animals can see, the answer is “it’s useful for spotting food and predators and stuff”. If you wonder how animals can see, the answer is a giant ophthalmology textbook and lots of stuff about rods and cones.

One of the ideas that’s had the biggest effect on me recently is thinking about how small the genome is and how poorly it connects to the brain. It’s all nice and well to say “high status leaders are powerful, so people should evolve a tendency to suck up to them”. But in order to do that, you need some specific thing that happens in the genome - an adenine switched to a guanine, or something - to give people a desire to suck up to high-status leaders. Some change in the conformation of a protein has to change the wiring of the brain in some way such that people feel like sucking up to high-status leaders is a good idea. This isn’t impossible - evolution has managed weirder things - but it’s so, so hard. Humans have like 20,000 genes. Each one codes for a protein. Most of those proteins do really basic things like determine how flexible the membrane of a kidney cell should be. You can’t just have the “how you behave towards high status leaders” protein shift into the “suck up to them” conformation, that’s not how proteins work!

You should penalize theories really heavily for every piece of information that has to travel from the genome to the brain. It certainly should be true that people try to spin things in self-serving ways: this is Trivers’ theory of self-deception and consciousness as public relations agent. But that requires communicating an entire new philosophy of information processing from genome to brain. Unless you could do it with reinforcement learning, which you’ve already got.

My take on the motivated-reasoning-as-misapplied-reinforcement-learning theory is something like “we always knew people had to be doing self-deception somehow, I was previously puzzled by how this got implemented, but it turns out it’s a trivial corollary of this other much more fundamental program”.

IV. Miscellaneous

qbolec:

How did AlphaStar learn to overcome the fear of checking what's covered by the fog of war?

Daniel Speyer:

Having separate reinforcement and epistemic learners would be the elegant solution. There's also the ugly hack, which is to make "there might be a lion" even scarier than "there is a lion" so that checking is hedonically rewarded with "at least now I know". Successful horror movie directors can confirm evolution went for the ugly hack, as usual.

NLeseul:

One observation: You can't avoid a lion trying to eat you by refusing to look at it. But you might be able to avoid another lecture from your neighbor Ug Bob about how you haven't made the proper blood sacrifices to Azathoth in a while, if you refuse to make eye contact with him and keep walking.

That is to say, huge parts of our brains developed in order to process social reality. And social reality, unlike physical reality, actually does change based on what information you have (and what information other people know you have, or what information you know other people know you have...). So controlling the timing of when you are seen by people around you to acquire certain information likely does have some degree of survival benefit. And the parts of our brains that learned how to do that are probably the ones that are involved in reading letters from the IRS today.

tcheasdfjkl:

To me the difference between the lion case and the taxes case is something like - how quickly are you going to get feedback on your decision/beliefs? In the lion case, you can't actually avoid learning in short order if there is a lion, because it will probably eat you. In the taxes case, you can avoid it for a pretty long time! Short-term bias is a pretty normal factor in how humans make decisions and it seems pretty applicable here too.

I’ve removed obvious trolls, a few for-profit businesses without charitable value who tried to sneak in under the radar, and a few that violated my sensibilities for one or another reason. I have not removed projects just because they’re terrible, useless, or definitely won’t work. My listing here isn’t necessarily an endorsement; caveat lector.

Still, some of them are good projects and deserve more attention than I was able to give them. Many applicants said they’d hang around the comments section here, so if you have any questions, ask!

(bolded titles are my summaries and some of them might not be accurate or endorsed by the applicant)

You can find the first 66 of these here.

#67: Investigate Weighted Belts As An Appetite Suppressant
I’m a data scientist with experience in healthcare and human subject research. I’m interested in the efficacy of weighted belts as an appetite suppressant. Over the last several years there's been interesting research on the gravitostat, a body weight homeostat independent of leptin that is controlled by the amount of weight loaded on the large bones. Two years ago, results from a “proof of concept” RCT were published showing that wearing weighted vests seems to reduce body weight and fat in humans. More research is needed, and more is being done (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04809129), but none has focused on long term compliance or long term weight loss in humans wearing weighted clothes. I’m planning on sending subjects weighted clothing (various belts and vests), a randomized amount of weight, and instructions and guidance covering the theory etc. Compliance and body weight will be tracked and reported for two years along with surveys of what subjects' experiences have been. Resulting data and findings will be published. Improving compliance and intervention effectiveness through improved weighted clothing is something that academic researchers may be slow to focus on but could be of incredible value. Costs of the weighted clothing are estimated to be at least $5000. To provide funding or suggestions, contact me at justintgardiner@gmail.com.

#68: Educational Software To Hit Developmental Windows In Babies
One way to counteract the growing burden of knowledge[1] and increase innovation is to teach people more in less time. Early childhood education could be useful to this end. Indeed, very young children appear to have developmental windows that close as they age; for example, after a certain point children can't learn perfect pitch or discernment of certain foreign language phonemes. However, early childhood education does not always focus on explicitly teaching skills and knowledge. Some educators even push back against the idea of explicitly teaching the very young, claiming it is developmentally inappropriate. This view lacks evidence, and explicit teaching has proven successful with small children. I plan to create a simple computer interface with accompanying educational software specifically targeted at babies. The interface will be simple enough that a baby can intuitively use it, and the software will make it easy to develop learning modules for babies. I'll first test a learning module helping babies acquire perfect pitch. I need money for hardware prototypes, developing the software, and compensating volunteers who test the product. For further details, email me at info@thoughtson.education. I’m interested in a variety of efforts to accelerate education and would love to hear from anyone working on or interested in that.

#69: Guided Reading Program To Help Children Catch Up
More than 1 million children are behind on their reading due to the Pandemic. 11 year olds have the reading age of 7, and secondary schools are having to teach phonetics. Remote classes has led to disjointed learning and inconsistent teaching and the gap between the poor and the moderately well off is growing exponentially. Education systems do not have the capacity to deal with this difference as funds are stretched. A Multilevel, individual, across discipline approach is needed to encourage students to catch up. ECST is exactly this – a remediation guided reading programme that allows students to work at their own pace and move ahead as fast as their learning rate and capacity will let them. They are encouraged through various rewards to work independently, keep going and to progress. The reading materials have been chosen to enhance well-being. They are all classic books that have stood the test of time and apart from cracking good stories they feature archetypes who share their innate human knowledge and thus empower the reader. The readings are guided by videos of talented narrators reading the stories out loud. This stripped down approach, creates an intimate atmosphere, an accountable connection and aids true communication between author, narrator and student. ECST already has 40 titles and over 90 hours of stories and is looking for $25000 to facilitate the next stage of growth to create more titles and to market to schools, councils and education departments. [Contact Cecile@englishclassicstorytime.com]

#70: Video Courses For Language Learning
We are building a “Metaversity” to help democratise language learning. We film on location, with teachers and genuine students, to create a 360 video course that anyone with a VR headset can use to learn from. Students learn from a world class teacher, feel present in an intimate classroom setting, pause/rewind, and interact with our AI speech recognition.

#71: Oculus App For Language Learning
We have a prototype Oculus Quest app called Dynamic Spanish, available here: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/4231524270226603/ The co-founders are a husband-wife team from the UK. Dave is a chartered chemical engineer by trade, and is the camera operator, post-production lead, and general techie. Katie studied languages at university, has worked as a language teacher for many years, and is responsible for managing syllabus creation with language-specific experts. The next few years will be spent filming the classroom scenes for more languages (in London), before travelling to film native speakers in interactive scenarios around the world, and capturing the sights and sounds of the countries for students to virtually explore in narrated guided Trips. We are creating courses that can be completed over a few months, giving learners the confidence to speak their new language in real life, and connect more deeply with the cultures that speak it. We hope this project is appealing to a generous do-gooder, who is excited by the prospect of helping to build a positive vision of accessible education.

#72: Teach Reproducible Research
There is a reproducibility crisis in the world. My project is for three summer months. I will dedicate this time to prepare online open source class to teach how to do reproducible research in Computational Modelling Field. [Contact asarmakeeva@gmail.com]

#73: Create A New Kind Of Money And Cities
The combination of markets and ideas has reduced suffering somewhat. This trend must continue, but I think a global median income of US$30,000 by 2049 is possible. We just need to teach everybody the same skills that Americans have. To enable this, 2 areas where improvement can be made and no new technology is needed are: a new money, and cities welcome to everyone. A new money is needed because the current financial system is not burdened with the risks it creates. Cities don’t grow like they did in the past. Over a 50 year period at the turn of the twentieth century Detroit grew 10X, whereas in this era the Bay Area has not even doubled its population. Nowadays cities that attract the best talent only attract the best talent. If we had a Hypothetical-Bay-Area-City grow like American cities of the past, it would have a population of around 45 million people and GDP of $4.5 billion. What would an asset be worth if it had a $4.5 billion income stream? A little bit of money and land is needed to make a start, but mostly I need you and your talents. Here is my new Substack with details: https://marketismandidearism.substack.com/p/a-new-money-and-cities-welcome-to . Please sign up to make a global median income of US$30,000 by 2049 a reality. P.S. I am talking money here. Accounting entries. Do not talk to me about Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an attempt at cash. 99.99999% of money transactions are not done with cash, they are done with IOU’s. Please. Spare. Me.

#74: Apply Constructor Theory To AI
Constructor theory is a framework developed by the physicist David Deutsch which seeks to express scientific theories as claims about which physical transformations are possible and which are impossible. This is in contrast to the standard framework which describes physical systems in terms of their initial conditions and laws of evolution. It is hoped that this framework will solve fundamental problems in physics and other fields. I believe that there is an analogy between the problems in the natural sciences which constructor theory was developed to solve and the AI alignment problem. I would like to spend a couple of months thinking about this and fleshing out my ideas as posts on LessWrong/The Alignment Forum and opening them up for discussion. I am currently in the final few months of a PhD in theoretical physics during which I have published two papers. After my PhD finishes, I would like to spend some time (two or three months) researching this problem and will need some funding to do this full time during this period. If you would like to fund this work or discuss the idea further, please send an email to AlfredSPH@protonmail.com .

#75: Study The Real-World Effectiveness Of Psychedelics
Psychedelics are set to be approved as medicines as early as 2023. I think that there is a citizen-science project not happening that could add to the evidence base and help the wide-spread implementation of psychedelic-assisted therapies. As founder of Blossom, a project dedicated to providing information on psychedelics - from research to implementation - and effective altruist (GWWC since 2015 & Founders Pledge), I could lead a large-scale citizen-science study to study the real-world effectiveness of non-clinical use of psychedelics for mental health & self-development. I'm looking for $45.000 to dedicate a significant amount of time to this project & pay others involved in the study. [Please contact acx@floriswolswijk.com]

#76: Richard Hanania’s Think Tank
I’m Richard Hanania, and I’m seeking funding for my think tank, The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI). We believe that scientific stagnation, identity politics, and widespread risk aversion didn’t come out of nowhere. They’re the result of bad policies and practices – bureaucratization, politicization, and credentialism – that have infected our institutions and spilled over into the larger culture. CSPI is bringing these dynamics to the attention of scientists, intellectuals, and politicians, emboldening them to take steps to reform, deregulate, or defund stagnant institutions. Over the last year, our researchers have had a large impact on the discourse surrounding several important issues. Philippe Lemoine helped discredit the public health consensus surrounding COVID and showed lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions to not be worth the costs. Eric Kaufmann documented political intolerance in academia and worked with the British government to secure enhanced free speech rights for academics. My own work has demonstrated that wokeness is largely the product of civil rights law and the HR bureaucracy that enforces it. We’re seeking additional funding so that we can hire more research fellows and distribute more grants, expanding our influence in the policy space to fight back against failing institutions. If you’re interested in helping, email me at contact@cspicenter.org. To learn more, visit our website at https://cspicenter.org.

#77: Computer Programs That Write Themselves
I've been working on faster ways to create computer programs. I'm looking for funding to extend my time to work on this. This could improve the success probability of hundreds of other projects and allow the existence of many more. Tools help reduced the time and resources needed for a project. If someone tried to work on their project without access to a computer or internet, getting them a connected machine would be of high priority even though it has nothing to do with the content of the project itself. And if computers or the internet didn't already exist, it'd be worthwhile to try to come up with them. But we only know this in hindsight and the same could be true of what I'm trying to make. That we should have never tried to do without. The tool that I want to create is a computer program P that is an interactive tutorial for (re)creating P from scratch. But more importantly, P helps recreate significant variations of P. We'd then use P to make other programs that would help with whatever project is at hand. How this work and why it would be helpful is explained in the original grant submission at https://blog.asrpo.com/grant You'll also find contact info and links to some of the project's components there. Instead of funds, you can also help by contributing your own time to the project. If you think you can help with any component or are good at either compilers or thinking abstractly, please feel free to reach out.

#78: Research Questions In Progress Studies
With funding from ACX Grants I will investigate a set of specific and crucial open questions for Progress Studies: What is our capacity to slow technological progress if desired? What are general properties of technology which limit or exacerbate existential risk? How robust are recommendations to different sets of moral ethics? These are crucial to understanding the importance of accelerating progress, but relatively little effort has been devoted to these questions outside of AppliedDivinityStudies’ The Moral Foundation of Progress, and my own Stubborn Attachments From Behind The Veil. In the past, I’ve interned on economic policy at the CATO Institute and The Charter Cities Institute where I published on growth and governance. ADS has also agreed to mentor me over the summer, and provides a vote of confidence. If you’re able to provide funding, please email maxwell.tabarrok@gmail.com.

#79: A Method For Solving Coordination Problems
My name is Bendini, and I’ve figured out how to solve coordination™. Okay no, that’s an overstatement. What I’ve actually done is figured out a general method for turning some intractable coordination problems into a set of merely difficult ones. I call this general method Intentionality, and it can be summarised as follows: A) Get people to state their intentions explicitly and honestly. B) Put everything in place that’s necessary to ensure that people actually do A, instead of just pretending to do it. The core insight is A, but it’s irrelevant without B’s infrastructure. As such, I’m writing a yellow paper aimed at smart laypeople that explains all of B’s interlocking parts and how to bootstrap them into existence. This is a huge task, and I have no credentials that would grant plausibility to my claims, but here are 4 reasons to treat them as plausible anyway: 1) I’ve never set foot in California. 2) Scott rejected my application without asking to see a draft of the yellow paper, so its ideas are yet to be judged. 3) The paper is written in plain language similar to (https://bendini.uk/systematic-cooking-intro), so unlike Ribbonfarm, it should be easy to tell if the ideas hold water. 4) I’m not asking for funding, only feedback to get it published ASAP. If you think this either 1) sounds plausible, or 2) sounds fake, but worth a Pascal’s mugging on the chance that it’s real, you can reach me at kernelmanchester@gmail.com or @BendiniUK on Twitter.

#80: A “Mnemonic Medium” To Replace Textbooks
What comes after the book? Is it pictures of pages on screens? Videos of people lecturing? Why are all the answers to this question so boring? Where are the powerful ideas about memory, psychology, sociology? I’m Andy Matuschak, and I’ve been developing a “mnemonic medium” which embeds interactive memory supports to make it easy for readers to remember and apply what they read. To test these ideas, physicist Michael Nielsen and I created a quantum computing textbook called Quantum Country. Hundreds of readers have now demonstrated long-term retention of the text’s fine details. I’ve been running experiments to understand and improve the medium, both in that textbook and by expanding the technology to a variety of other contexts. I believe that this medium, refined and widely deployed, could help people learn difficult topics much more easily and reliably. Now, here’s where you come in: I used to lead R&D at Khan Academy, but now I’m independent and crowdfunding a research grant. You can read more about my work and help make it happen at https://patreon.com/quantumcountry.

#81: Entheogenic Plant Program For Addictions
Natura Care Programs (NCP) is a new, cutting-edge, longitudinal spiritual care program for individuals struggling with a broad range of addictions. NCP integrates entheogenic plant medicine ceremonies, a social model for recovery with peer support, contemplative practice instruction, and nature immersion with an online curriculum. Our online component offers process-oriented recovery, individual and group counseling, and integration. NCP is lead by Celina De Leon, Todd Youngs, and Alex Olshonsky. We are a non-profit seeking funding to help provide scholarships to veterans, BIPOCs, and underrepresented communities to attend one of our first cohorts in 2022. Learn more and get in touch here https://naturacareprograms.org/.

#82: Create AGI
I’m Sainadh Chityala and I’m developing a general purpose machine learning architecture that could potentially make any device intelligent. I have chosen a radically different approach to get this done, that is by developing a self-driving car in India. A self-driving car ML pipeline is the closest to the brain’s physiology than any other that humans are working on. An architecture of this sort could reduce the resources, time and effort for projects that involve massive R&D like in the case of Development of Rockets and New Treatments by automating and emulating everything. Basically everything would eventually become an application of this. This architecture paves the way towards a post scarcity world. My goal with this is to develop AGI (Which might seem too much but who knows). [Contact me at sainadh.chityala@gmail.com]

#83: Detect And Fight Healthcare Fraud
Our company is using data to detect fraud against the government. Access to quality healthcare is dwindling in the United States. There is an estimated hundred billion dollars in fraud every year leading to lower standards of care and making healthcare unaffordable. We’re seeking a hundred thousand dollars to buy data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services. This will allow us to find fraud and file lawsuits on behalf of the government. The Department of Justice signaled a new level of support for independent companies using data methods to identify fraud in June of last year when they picked up a case brought by Integra Med Analytics. For the past twelve months we’ve been working with attorneys specializing in this area (qui tam). We’ve been consolidating data returned from broad FOIA requests and begun assisting law firms with data science. Our team combines broad technical expertise (Google, NASA, LANL, NIST, UC Berkeley) with business acumen and investigative experience. The three of us have been working together on projects with positive externalities for five years. Previous successful projects include providing flexible housing, and a micro-targeting methods for political action. [Contact erbahr@gmail.com if you can help]

#84: Study Cognitive Strategies, Argument Distillation, And Build A Better Social Network (3)
Hi, I'm a regular pseudonymous commenter here (and in other Rationalist spaces), but my real name is Isaac P. Burke. Some of you may know me from the Irish SSC meetups. I submitted three proposals: the first, a Rationalist nonprofit to conduct studies on effective cognitive strategies, initially focusing on group rationality in toy scenarios/competitions. The second, a nonprofit social network, not subject to advertiser pressure or clickbait incentives, with a focus on providing users with choices in terms of the moderation and algorithms they want to experience - think AO3. The third, a collaborative tool, based on Gwern's proposal here: https://www.gwern.net/CYOA but focusing on user-submitted arguments, distilling debates down to a dialogue between the most persuasive crowdsourced points on both sides (this would also be useful as an artistic tool for collaborative storytelling, but that's less EA-relevant.) In terms of qualifications, I'm a programmer with experience primarily in games and web design, and a passionate EA, currently working part-time for a small educational nonprofit. None of these proposals necessarily require a huge budget, at least to reach the "minimum viable product" stage - maybe $15k-$20k - but all would require a lot of collaboration (even more so if more than one of them gets interest). If you're interested in volunteering/funding/collaborating on any of these proposals, you can reach me at Isaac.Philip.Burke[at]gmail[dot]com.

#85: Study The Neuroscience Of How The Self Matures
The ‘self’ matures and change throughout adulthood, progressing through distinct stages. Social scientists have demonstrated that individuals at each stage have a unique outlook on life and way of interacting with the world. In earlier stages the focus is on exterior stimuli, while in later stages the exploration is of one’s interior experience, and how the exterior world is interpreted through our interior experience. Qualities such as compassion, dis-identification from the concept of self, and an understanding of the constructed nature of experience, become stronger and more nuanced at each stage. Professional coaches exploit this knowledge to help their clients achieve personal and professional goals. Yet, this maturity (or ‘vertical development’) model has been almost completely ignored by psychologists and neuroscientists despite the potential for this knowledge to transform our understanding of individual differences in how the mind works. Our team, led by renowned Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar, is seeking funding to conduct a series of experiments to characterize the maturity process in scientific language and situate it within the fields of psychological and cognitive neuroscience. Charitable gifts of $50,000 to $500,000 will allow us to conduct essential preliminary studies to establish proof of concept and enable us to seek federal funding. Please contact slazar@mgh.harvard.edu with questions.

#86: More Accurate Measurement Of Mental Health
Even Mental Health is a startup working on improving how we measure mental health. Current approaches rely on asking individuals to summarize how they’ve felt in the past. This yields a blurry and often inaccurate depiction of one’s mental health. Our app, Even Mind, takes a different approach that avoids recall bias altogether (you can find out more at https://evenmind.app). We believe more accurate measurement tools will lead to significantly improved treatments and outcomes for individuals. We’re looking to connect with others interested in improving mental health measurement or mental healthcare more broadly. We’re also raising an initial round and looking for investments in the $50,000 - $100,000 range. If you’d like to connect, please email me at cwoods@evenmind.co.

#87: Gather Data On Successful Arguments
I would like to create an Argument website that asks users to create their argument for particular proposals (Dogs are the best pets; The Rock would make a great president). Once we have a reasonable number of arguments, we would then ask users to vote for the best arguments by ranking 3 arguments at a time. Over time, we'd have good data on what types of arguments are more likely to be successful and why. I would need to be able to hire a better coder than I am (5-10k) to put this together and then figure out how to promote it. [Email nstearns@yahoo.com]

#88: Daniel Ingram’s Nonprofit For Studying Emergent (ie spiritual) Phenomena
Emergence Benefactors (EB: https://ebenefactors.org/) is a 501(c)(3) charity established in 2021, striving to reduce global suffering and promote long-term human flourishing through an in-depth understanding of emergent (spiritual, mystical, energetic, psychedelic, and related) phenomena. We are designed to support the roadmap of the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium (EPRC: https://theeprc.org/) and its allied entities. This way, we fund and support methodologically rigorous, ontologically agnostic research on emergent experiences, practices, and their effects. Furthermore, our aim is to promote the culturally-sensitive incorporation of this scientific and clinical knowledge into global, evidence-based knowledge bases. We draw insights from rationalist and effective altruism frameworks. EB’s Board and team of contractors ensure a diverse range of professional skills and talents. Dr. Daniel M. Ingram (CV: https://tinyurl.com/dringram), the self-funded Acting CEO and Board Chair of EB, has over 37 years of professional and personal experience with emergent phenomena. We welcome both unrestricted donations and those intended to support specific projects and activities. We do appreciate valuable feedback from the ACX community on how to make this project the best it can be. The EPRC Whitepaper contains all the detailed information: https://hypernotes.zenkit.com/i/UFIY1UO1cp/84TWK0BwQlq/?v=M6pP_Tb7W6 For inquiries: daniel.ingram@ebenefactors.org

#89: A Wiki For Rebuilding Civilization After Disaster
My name is Jehan, I've created the site Wikiciv.org as a guide to rebuilding civilization in case of global catastrophe. Its editing is crowdsourced like Wikipedia because a project this large is far too much for one person, or even a team. Technologies and raw materials are linked so both upstream and downstream technologies are easily accessible. There are other projects with similar goals, but they are 1) Not publicly accessible 2) The wrong scale. Books such as "The Knowledge" and "How to Invent Everything" are too cursory to be a practical guide for recreating critical technologies like steel, fertilizer and antibiotics. Meanwhile the "Manual for Civilization" from the Long Now Foundation is 3500 paper books in one corner of San Franciso. Wikiciv fully open and available for database downloads. Distributed backups are encouraged to ensure resiliency during a disaster. WikiCiv could be be helpful even for regional supply-chain disruptions. For example during the Covid-19 pandemic, there were critical oxygen shortages in India. It turns out that a reasonable oxygen generator can be made from zeolite and an air compressor. Wikiciv aims to be a single, interconnected database of "from scratch" manufacturing instructions for situations like these. It is the eventual goal of Wikiciv to be accepted as a Wikimedia Foundation project (like Wikipedia, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage etc). The better Wikiciv becomes, the more likely this is. Get in touch at admin@wikiciv.org

#90: A Crowdfunding Platform For Bounties On Beneficial Projects
viaPrize.org is a free and open crowdfunding platform for bounties on socially beneficial projects. There currently are organizations like the X Prize Foundation which host these sorts of contests, however there is no platform which allows open submissions of both bounty ideas and bounty funding. viaPrize.org unbundles ideas, funding, and execution by permitting anyone to submit great bounty ideas, regardless of their resources or know-how. It further unbundles the funding by crowdfunding contributions which then combine into a larger and more worthwhile bounty prizes. If you're interested you can help in the following ways: 1) Post bounty ideas to the site (no funding need) 2) Try to win existing bounties 3) Pledge or contribute funding to bounties 4) Help out with the project by volunteering, promoting the site, advice, or useful contacts (e.g. X Prize). Some bounties up right now that you might like: Transparent bank accounts, A no-login shareable calendar, A hotkey standardization app. Contact: info@viaprize.org

#91: Protein-Based Desalination
I would like to conduct research into aquaporin protein bearing GUVs (lipid bilayer spheres ~50μm wide) and their ability to uptake pure H2O within a saline/sucrose solution. This research would benefit the field of biomimetic membrane filtration and possibly pharmacokinetics. I'm a fourth year Bio-Chem undergrad, graduating this Spring, so I'm not able to apply next year for typical undergrad research grants. I'm a mature student with a strong scientific mentor network and experience in taking on and completing other high risk and complex projects. I would require money for lab space rental (which I can negotiate from my school) and the necessary reagents/lipids/cultures. For more info or suggestions on other funding avenues besides this one, please email matthew.tjones57@gmail.com (or even comment on this thread if possible)

#92: Do Gay Rights In India Reduce Discrimination?
I’m looking for funding for research that will test whether the expansion of the legal rights of gay people in India reduces discrimination by coordinating a shift in the social norms surrounding anti-gay behaviour. Using the Supreme Court ruling in 2018 that decriminalised homosexuality across India, I will use an RCT to measure the effect of exposing individuals who are not already aware of this law to the information that homosexuality is legal. I will measure how this information impacts participants’ anti-gay behaviours and sentiment. Being told about the law is likely to act as a signal to people that being homophobic is no longer socially acceptable. Even if the information doesn’t change their private attitudes, they may therefore be more likely to act kindly towards gay people when their actions are visible to others. Relatedly, they may be more prone to positive communication about gay people, e.g., they may share less anti-gay news stories on social media. This reduction in anti-gay narratives could in turn help the longer-term process of positive social change. If you’re interested in this project, please email me at dmbwebb@gmail.com!

#93: Found A Non-Territorial Nation-State
My idea is founding a non-territorial nation-state of souvereign individuals, to offer a viable and better alternative to tackle both global and local issues. Globalization and its implications doesn't "care" about borders, like pandemics or climate change, or other man-made complexity induced problems; community activities are impaired by state dependencies. Corporations bypass this and act like international and networked entities with both global and local influence. We need something better in an increasingly complex and interdependent world that allows us to make a change for the better. This is already being partially addressed (Club of Rome et al.), models of human progression have been developed, and new philosophical constructs emerge (metamodernism etc.), thinktanks like Berggruen Institute explore possibilities. Yet we are still stuck on a philosophical level instead of walking the talk. There currently is no structure that would allow for ultimate "global thinking, local acting". It's not intended to be a global government, but the mission must be to have a seat at the UN to at least co-exist with other countries. The goal is not to revolt against or replace current countries, or dreaming up another utopia (nirvana fallacy, ignoring tribalism etc.). For this and in its urgency, I'm looking for funding to work full time on this, to build a platform, to attract experts and professionals, to examine and offering an actionable, viable, better alternative to what is. [Email benjamin@wittorf.me]

#94: A Clinic That Practices A New Model Of Community Medicine
Open Source Wellness (OSW) is an Oakland-based 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to transforming health care and health outcomes in partnership with communities. OSW delivers “Community As Medicine” via a “Behavioral Pharmacy” approach, in which patients struggling with chronic conditions such diabetes, hypertension, and depression are supported with four universal pillars of wellbeing: physical activity, healthy food, stress reduction, and social connection. OSW specializes in partnering with Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC’s) serving patient populations that are predominantly low-income and communities of color, utilizing a Virtual Group Medical Visit model that generates revenue for clinics while achieving critical health outcomes. These visits combat social isolation, and are led by culturally-relevant health coaches and peer leaders in addition to primary care providers. Peer-reviewed, published research outcomes include reductions in ED visits, blood pressure, depression, and anxiety and increases in weekly physical activity, and fruit/vegetable intake. Seeking funding from $50,000 to $150,000 to support two key project areas: Continued expansion of the OSW model to clinical and community orgs nation-wide. Development of a nationally accredited health coach training program, which will create a certification and employment pipeline for our diverse and under-employed participants and peer leaders. Visit www.opensourcewellness.org or email liz@opensourcewellness.org

#95: Make Programming By Voice More Practical
I'm Michael Arntzenius (rntz.net) and I'd like $5-40K to work on making programming by voice more practical. Many programmers at some point suffer from repetitive strain injuries (RSI) that make typing difficult; I'm one. To mitigate this I use a tool called Talon that lets me control my computer by voice. Thanks to recent advances, voice control is increasingly practical, and voice programmers form a small but rapidly growing community. However, idioms and tools for coding by voice are in their infancy. I believe now is the right time to push hard on voice-oriented editing: the underlying voice recognition tech is ready, we have a creative, dedicated community willing to experiment with new approaches, and mature editor technology like language servers and online error-robust parsing (eg. tree-sitter) supports editing commands at a higher level than character-by-character. Specifically, this money could support me working part-time for 6 months ($5k) up to full time for 2 years ($40K). I could work on: contributing to Cursorless, the state-of-the-art open-source voice editing framework for VSCode; porting cursorless to other editors to increase its reach; incorporating ideas from recent research on structural editing and typed holes; and on my duties as co-maintainer of the de-facto default Talon script-set. If you're interested, contact me at daekharel@gmail.com.

#96: Improve The Readability Of Scientific Writing
I want to research, demonstrate, and facilitate the adoption of better norms in scientific writing. Science papers are more tedious to read than their inherent complexity requires, in part due to misaligned incentives in science publishing, but also because of ossified expectations of what a paper "should" be. This has several drawbacks: 1) Less productivity for scientists, who have to expend energy to understand papers. 2) Fewer papers are read, which means less usefulness of scientific work and less cross-pollination between fields. 3) It may contribute to people leaving science. 4) Less accessibility of science to educators, leaders, professionals, and the broader public. I've been researching language in science for several months; see my work at https://jawws.org/. The new norms I suggest follow two principles: reduce cognitive load for readers, and avoid requiring more work from authors. One idea is to create a new journal to publish rewritten versions of existing papers, showing that new norms are possible without sacrificing scientific content. (The goal is not science journalism.) I would love to talk to you if you have any interest in science publishing and editing! If you'd like to contribute funding, it would help me cover living expenses; it would also allow me to offer prize money for a "Make a Tedious Paper Fun to Read" contest, on the model of the ACX book review one. If any of this sounds interesting, contact me at hello@jawws.org.

#97: Start An EA Club At A Turkish University
I am Berke, a philosophy major interested in Effective Altruism from Istanbul, Turkey. I am interested in EA since 2019, and currently I am a research volunteer at Kafessiz, an organization working to end the use battery cages for hens in Turkey. EA doesn’t have much presence neither in Istanbul nor the country in general. There are no EA clubs at colleges, and I intend to start the first one at my college. We plan to do seminar programmes (fellowships) similar to the ones in Oxford and increase EA outreach at both our college and in online Turkish language platforms. If we find enough people interested, we plan to start a fellowship program in one or two months and a few other things. If you’re interested you can contact me at berke.celik@boun.edu.tr . What would be achieved in the name of utility if you fund an EA Society at a college you've never heard of? For certain EA causes, there is a lot to be achieved in Turkey. For example, the number of hens in battery cages in Turkey is something around 100 million. Establishing a non-trival EA presence at my college would be good first step because it is the most selective college in the country. In Turkey you enter college via a central exam, and 70% of the 1000 people who scored highest in the exam chose to be here, and this is not a flex, I am just trying to say:If one wants Effective Altruist ideas to spread in a country of 80 million, or at least among the future Turkish elite, my college is a good place to start.

#98: Help People Effectively Navigate Their Local Government
I’m John Kurpierz, a PhD student interested in making local governments more fair and transparent for their constituents. We can do this by improving the sophistication of those constituents. Two ways you can improve the sophistication of regular constituents are: 1) by improving their reasoning skills and desire for good-faith deliberation, and 2) by giving them better information on their rights as voters, responsibilities as voters, and norms of their local government. Working with a multidisciplinary team (Ken Smith, PhD; Theresa Walker, PhD; Wendy Cook, PhD) we’ve developed a pilot program of “cool tools” that help regular people effectively navigate their local governments while remaining in favor of “Niceness, Community, and Civilization”. We’ve done some test runs with underserved communities and have promising initial results, but are currently small-scale. My colleagues are professors and don’t have interest in scaling up these projects to see if they’re viable outside of an academic environment. By contrast, I would like to try deploying this at a larger scale to see if we can feasibly increase the number of individuals we can train and the impact we can have. I would like to seek $10,000 to work on seeking additional interested constituents, deploying the courses at larger scale, and tabulating the results to see if the ROI on outcomes remains high with a larger population. Interested funders or advisors can contact me at JohnRKurpierz@gmail.com.

#99: Research Retraction Insurance To Ensure Retractions Get Publicized
I'm Christopher Akin, and am developing a new financial insurance product for academic research, “Research Retraction Insurance” or “RRI”. RRI is a financial insurance product that pays out to promote new findings and retractions when earlier findings are later proven false. Academia does not equally promote scientific findings when they prove false as when they are originally announced. We see this juxtaposition between the grand public declarations of scientific success and pin drop retractions. We see this is the current replication crisis of ‘classical’ results in the social sciences. RRI will help resolve the current system limitations of professional accountability, limited transparency, the likelihood of learning equally from mistakes, and an ill-informed public holding on to false findings. RRI payouts are earmarked to publicize later research findings that falsify early pronouncements, and the receiver of research funding will voluntarily, or likely be required by funders, purchase the RRI. Researchers only allocate pennies (~.025% of each funding dollar) on the thousands of funding dollars received to insure for promoting future falsifying results. The earmarked PR payouts are ~15X of premium payments, or ~4% of total received funding. I am seeking $50,000 in seed funding to conduct market research, begin RRI product development, and engage leading funding institutions in business development. Email iamchrisakin@gmail.com or visit www.linkedin.com/in/akinchristopher

#100: Tools For Protecting People’s Legacies After They Die
Preserving your memories, beliefs, personality, and expectations about the future should be cheap and easy today. Storage, preservation, and discoverability are all cheaper and simpler than ever before. Yet every year more than 50 million people die, and the vast majority won't leave this kind of legacy. That's a tragedy. Preserving personal legacies has value for the people whose legacy is preserved, for the people who get access to these legacies, and for all of us: a clearer understanding of humanity, its values, and experiences. So what could significantly increase preservation of our legacies? First, simple tools for collecting the material: A well-designed web form with prompts for significant memories, vital stats, family medical history, ethical will, and so on; and tools for collecting, tagging, and preserving photos, videos, and other media. Second, tools, tech, and a plan for long-term preservation. Third, a robust system, designed with legal advice, for specifying who gets to access which parts of the legacy and when. Fourth, convenient, controlled access to the information. Fifth, an effort to promote the project and its reliability. Each of these five components might require a team of professionals. However, there is such a clear void here that even a proof of concept using simple tools would be a big improvement and demonstrate the value of further investment. legacyproject@protonmail.com

#101: A Foundation To Support Undercover Journalism
Nellie Bly exposed 19th-century asylum horrors without hidden cameras or recorders. With those tools, Shane Bauer got a book out of his undercover private-prison job, yet few have followed him. Exposing corrupt institutions operating often takes many people bravely coming forward at personal risk. One journalist, outfitted with the right tech and backed by correct legal advice, could do similar work with less risk and get greater personal reward. So why aren't journalists regularly going undercover? It's a coordination problem. No single journalist or organization has the time or resources to make this workable. But an organization dedicated only to this project could recommend tools, provide training videos, offer general legal advice, and consult on projects for any reputable news organization or other qualifying truth-seeking entity. That would make these kinds of projects more rewarding relative to risk, and a thousand stories could bloom from journalists turned undercover staffers in nursing homes, meat processing plants, and other places where vulnerable people are subject to abuse with little recourse. Just the threat of this kind of exposure would cause many previously untouchable organizations to clean up. The idea is to buy the top-rated recording devices, to test them, to produce training videos, and to find First Amendment lawyers to outline legal advice and provide consultations. journalismundercover@protonmail.com

#102: Screen Addiction Detox Via Competitive Water Fight League
Hi, we’re Michoel and Yitzi, PhD in Neuroscience, BA in Psychology, respectively. We would like to run an active screen addiction detox in the form of a competitive water fight league. The activity would provide a high-adrenaline, physically active, socially collaborative/competitive alternative to ordinary humdrum team sports on the one hand, and sedentary video games on the other. The literature suggests that phone addiction is both extremely pervasive and extremely difficult to address. When interventions do work, it seems to be because they’ve given people engaging activities as a healthy substitute. The water fight league is a novel and relatively-cheap approach that may hold more appeal for children and teenagers who feel no great draw to conventional sports. It would take approximately $3,120 to run a pilot program. If you would like to contribute or discuss, please get in contact: leaguehydro@gmail.com

#103: Games To Fight Cognitive Bias
Decades of widespread awareness of cognitive bias, and several impressive projects to help people overcome them, does not seem to have led to any population-level improvement in the fundamental problem. Many specific biases and irrational mindsets probably take hold during school years, and likely in school. But give kids games, preferably ones they can play against each other, that take rationality to win, and they'll have powerful incentives. Show that if they can avoid anchoring they'll come closest to guessing a number. Play with and not against Monty Hall and over time, accrue the winnings. Overcome loss aversion and dominate gamified markets. Bring together a rationalist experienced in turning these biases into stories (Eliezer, Julia) with a videogame maker who'd enjoy the virtuous side project and you could have the most useful and fun educational game around. rationalismgame@protonmail.com

#104: Bring Big Tech’s Optimization Experiments To The Masses
The most efficient and profitable companies constantly run experiments on their own products, optimizing directly for profit or indirectly through customer acquisition and retention or other metrics. Optimizely and other companies provide platforms for managing and measuring experiments, and many companies have built their own systems in-house. These can support greedy optimization algorithms such as multi-arm bandit. Yet when we want to measure the effect of minor variations in diet, or of playing chess on certain days, or anything else, we have to build all that from scratch -- or risk wasting all that effort on tracking on subpar conclusions. That, in turn, likely dissuades many curious people from even trying. A simple Bayesian system with even some of the features Big Tech uses would be a big improvement, and a boon for personal, relationship, and child-rearing optimization. It could also be deployed in small, nonprofit, and government organizations, for internal processes as well as external-facing products. A few months of part-time work for a programmer and a data scientist. personalexperimentationplatform@protonmail.com

#105: Fully Transparent Patient Advocacy
Patient advocacy tends to be one-on-one, high-priced work, where the professional is incentivized to hoard expertise to apply for future clients. That tends to maintain the collective action problem for patients in a system so bad that those who can pay a lightly credentialed person >$100/hour just to help them get even the mediocre care and billing that is their poorly protected sorta right. This proposal is for a starter fund to get off the ground a lower-priced patient advocacy business with a very different goal and model. Clients get to pay less or nothing in exchange for cooperation in recording everything about the process -- including, where valid by local laws, recording phone calls with the billers, schedulers, and occasionally doctors who immiserate fellow human beings because they can, with impunity. And everything recorded is shared, minus identifying details and in accordance with medical privacy laws, on a free website alongside commentary about how readers can apply what was learned for their own greater success in the system. Consider the popularity of the Substack Sick Note, Freddie DeBoer's account of his experiences with the psych system, and Scott's posts on how to interact with psychiatry. There is enormous informational asymmetry in so-called health care. A fully transparent patient advocacy, and any copycats it inspires, could shift the balance of power toward patients. transparentpatientadvocacy@protonmail.com

#106: Undercover Hospital Boss Program
If everyone who worked in hospitals had to spend a night in theirs as a pretend patient every six months, the experience ought to get much better fast. Imagine a place optimized for healing, rest, calm, and happiness and you'd be hard-pressed to name anything you'd imagined that's present in most hospitals. Yet the people who can bring the vision and reality closer together often are blinded, or blind themselves, to what's happening in their places of work. To get started: Create a pilot program in one department of one hospital. Start with the top administrators. Don't proceed until COVID-19 isn't a significant risk for the program. And, to start gently, everyone knows the "patient" is really a boss. Then they report back to everyone what they experienced and saw. Budget is for an outside consultant to design and run the program, record impressions, facilitate discussion, and outline possible expansion of the program. The work will be in finding the hospital department and consultant. The budget will be to pay for the consultant and some amount for the hospital's time and bed. hospitalmysteryshopper@protonmail.com

#107: RADVAC: Open Source Vaccines
RaDVaC is a non-profit organization working to maximize access to vaccines when & where most needed: the first days of a disease outbreak. Since March 2020 we have developed & published 12 coronavirus vaccine designs under an open-access license, and worked to catalyze vaccine development globally. We envision a renaissance in vaccinology that is -- Diverse & Decentralized: enabling a diverse, distributed participation in vaccine R&D through lower tech barriers to vaccine design & development -- Transparent: fostering broad, open access to R&D, tools, and data (with less opportunity for distrust) -- Collaborative: optimizes vaccine formulations and their immunological & epidemiological relevance using pooled research, standards, and data -- Resilient: tech platforms that are easily modifiable to adapt to new variants, and centered on conserved domains for durable, mutation-resistant utility -- Rapid: able to deploy high-quality vaccines, at scale, at the earliest days after an infectious disease is identified -- These goals are achievable through the proliferation of open, accessible, & adaptable technologies in vaccine design & production, and improved vaccine trialing models (RaDVaC is developing a novel challenge trial model for safer, faster, lower cost clinical trials). Funds will be used for additional staff and hours, research supplies and services, and cultivating an ecosystem of vaccine developers around the world. More information about supporting the project can be found at https://radvac.org/support/.

#108: EEG For Dementia Screening
BrainTrip has developed a fast, early, and affordable dementia-screening solution based on EEG measurement. BrainTrip’s novel biomarker can detect the disease at its pre-symptomatic stage and can also be used to measure its progression. Traditional naked-eye inspected EEG has been of little use in dementia because large EEG changes are often only evident late in the illness when other clinical signs become obvious. However, the brain’s electrical activity contains many hidden features which can be extracted by sophisticated signal processing and inference modeling. The core of our innovation - the BrainTrip Dementia Index (BDI) - is based on such models. The BDI combines neuroscientific knowledge with complex mathematical models, relying on specifically developed AI optimization and machine learning. The BDI is a numerical score calculated from a test subject’s resting-state EEG, and it can detect subtle dementia-specific EEG changes early on, long before symptoms become evident. BrainTrip’s solution comprises a 15-minute EEG recording which detects even early stage dementia with an accuracy of 85% and can be administered by minimally trained staff. The BDI has already been CE marked as a Class I Medical Device used for dementia screening. We are now looking for 30-100k for a validation study on up to 500 individuals in Slovenia, before bringing the BDI to market.

#109: Writing That Explains And Normalizes Hybrid Remote/In-Person Schools
I'm Sebastian Garren, and I am building hybrid schools. Traditional five-day schools are not the future. They demand too much conformity, too much peer socialization, and don't allow for enough independent exploration. Hybrid schools meet in person for fewer than five days per week (normally three). I want to write the official guide on how to start and run a Hybrid School. I have started one hybrid school myself and been Dean at another for seven years with a total of 227 students, expecting 280 next year. I believe up to 20% of students would be better off in a hybrid school than a traditional one, and now is the time to start helping people opt out of the current system and normalize educational non-conformism. I am looking for $17,000 - $34,000 to help me take time to research and write. I have a matching grant up to $8,500, and I need an experienced editor or publisher to bounce ideas off of. The digital version will be free to the community. Contact sebastian.garren@gmail.com if you would like to fund or advise this project.

#110: Invest In Organic Kolanut For Startup
We are a small social startup from Germany needing organic kolanut for our production. As there was no organic kola at the European market, we partnered with a young organic farmers cooperative to supply us. In West Africa kolanut is used traditionally, but usually not dried and exported. Relevant exports would help to diversify the income for the farmers and open new perspectives with a traditional product. We got first small shipments of kola so we are able to use it in our own production and supply others with samples. We already have inquiries for 20-30t, but we can't deliver these demands without firstly helping our African partners in extending their quality management and invest in the supply chain more than we can currently afford. We do not look for usual venture investment because we don't want to optimize our business for profits. When we are big enough we want to incorporate steward ownership (https://purpose-economy.org/en/) to keep our business this way. If we could get a grant of 10,000€ we could buy some needed equipment, travel to Africa or even find some consultants to improve quality management. We are also looking for Investors to found a non-profit importing company, having more sustainable positive impact, but also needing substantial Investment (~100,000€). If we don't find such an Investor, we have to find a established importing company to partner with. Contact: info@kolakao.de. Homepage: https://kolakao.de/kolanuss (still only in German, sorry)

#111: Long-Termism + Progress Studies Unconference
Long-termism + Progress UnConference. We intend to solve the problem of unproductive conferences and the challenges of the interdisciplinary nature of long-termism, existential risk and progress studies by applying participatory techniques (OpenSpace) in an UnConference format. We need collaborators more than money, but budget is c. $15K. What: An innovative conference format bringing cross-silo thinkers and doers together to think about the long-term and progress. Typical conferences work badly. Hierarchies and old networks impede new connections and growth in social and relationship capital. The best conversations occur in the corridors of typical conferences. Why: The long-term is vital for humanity. Ideas are multidisciplinary and emergent. There is debate as to how much progress was are making and what we can do. The challenge cuts across a wide range of domains. Governments and traditional institutions are struggling to rise to the challenge. New ideas are needed. For those interested in these ideas, we believe participatory meeting events could lead to fruitful new ideas and connections. Perhaps low probabilities or very impactful outcomes/meetings. How: The Long-termism UnConference will be a one/two day event bringing together a range of thinkers from a wide range of domains and backgrounds to discuss long-term challenges and solutions in a self-selecting participatory manner. More on me: thendobetter.com/links or @benyeohben Pod: Ben Yeoh Chats

#112: Think Tank Of Mediators To Help Countries Understand Each Other
Today many political, social and business processes are ruined due to mutual misunderstanding between countries and nations - misunderstanding of other parties’ motivations and goals, reasons of doing things in a certain way, ways to understand and value what is said or done by others. When the sides do not hear each other or only hear what they want to hear, discussions, actions, projects and even wars always go wrong. But being able to stand above one’s national “self” and explain in general and in details other side’s goals, motivations, limitations is vital. Placing plans and relations in the right context of cultural codes, mentalities and psychos may much improve the success rate, decrease tensions and intensity of conflicts. One does not necessarily have to accept but have to understand. I suggest to build a think tank-like non-profit international panel from skeptically and rationally thinking “mediators” with vast international and intercultural experience. Such panel being always outside wrong paradigms may provide convincing explanations & advice for different audiences. Combination of persistence and patience with absence of agitation will (slowly!) lead to strong reputation. My own successful >22 years of intercultural experience and international business representation was always partially based at such explanatory “mediation”. Plans do not work without money, your questions please send to pavelkartashov@mailbox.org. More details at https://cutt.ly/eOo6pTR

#113: Increase Own Intelligence, Then Write About How
My name is David Gretzschel and I want money to increase my own intelligence full-time for about a year. Once I have succeeded (more than I already have), I will teach others how to do this. The benefits of this are obvious. And I already know how to do that for the most part. I have a concrete foundation in the form of a synesthetic encoding scheme, that I can build on. I merely need the time to do an intense amount of training without being distracted by either having a job or not having one and starving. And practice how to use them on various mathematical and computational problems. And a bunch of other things. Details are in the long pitch (see below). So I need 20.000 dollars to not worry about rent and food for that time. Please send them in Bitcoin here: 3Qcm3UJRuFca1fTkf2iPPEkU3PevpzPuwP I certainly would have use for more money, too. (though it'd not be necessary, I don't want to dissuade you from it, if that's an option) So do feel free to shower me with the stuff, if you have it and believe in my cause. (or you only believe in it 10%, but know that the expected value calculation still ends up with a happy face /pascal-mugging) With 10.000 dollars I'd still commit to a year, though that would be a bit tighter than I’d like. The longer pitch is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/170WETB6enUOzQEzwbwmOCVHz9VkBe4R86rCh_ewvOcg/edit?usp=sharing . If you have further questions/conditions/need more persuasion, send an email to: davidgretzschel@gmail.com

#114: Analyze Policy Failure In The COVID Pandemic In Germany
The management of the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany revealed some classical modes of policy failure, but also some rather new or underexplored ones. I want to analyze those in-depth in a type of study that has a minimum of societal reputation. In a second step, if results will be interesting, I want to feed them back into the political process to induce change. I’m a mid-career person with a background in science, including working with a Nobel prize winner, and in project management. I have enough contacts in the ‘Kanzlermeile’, the political center of Berlin, to make the results relevant for change. I’m looking either for seed funding between 5000 and 20000 Euro for finding funds through grants or others or for 75000 Euro total to finalize the whole study and if relevant take first steps for exploiting results. If you can support this in any way, please contact me at policy.failure.analysed at gmail.com. If you’re working on similar topics, please also feel free to get in touch.

#115: Fight Factory Farming In Turkey
“Turkey without Cages” (Kafessiz Türkiye) is an animal welfare organization working by Effective Altruist principles to end cage egg farming in Turkey. We reach out to companies that have cage eggs in their supply chain and secure cage-free pledges from them. Turkey is in the top 10 egg-producing countries with around 120 million laying hens. Turkey is also a major egg exporter with an increasing volume each year. Therefore, animal welfare standards in the region depend on the progress in Turkey. In a few years, we have secured pledges from 20 companies. This will enhance the welfare standards of roughly 1 million hens. Our progress is due to the extraordinary efforts of a limited number of employees and our network of volunteers. This year, we plan to expand our efforts to the fish farming industry and initiate similar NGOs in the countries close to us geographically and culturally. The number of fish farmed in Turkey is estimated to be between 1-2 billion and 60 percent of the production is being exported. At an early stage of our fish welfare endeavor, we secured a pledge from a major wholesaler, Metro AG in Turkey, which will considerably impact the welfare of 10 million fish. In 2022, we want to expand our capacities to maximize the number of animals we impact. If you think you can help, please email cagri.mutaf@kafessizturkiye.com to learn more about how you can support us. You can also visit www.kafessizturkiye.com

#116: Chart Enlightenment Hacking Technology
The Enlightenment Hacking group is looking for funding and collaborators to tackle the problem of charting the current state of knowledge with regard to neurotechnological enhancement or substitution of progress at meditation practice. We think this is an important opportunity for humankind because meditation experience offers a) reductions of stress and suffering, b) broad enhancement to very general cognitive capacities, and c) reduced selfishness - an almost ideal package of human enhancement that benefits both individual and society. Currently, benefits are known to accumulate over years and decades of meditation practice, but in the potential for (neuro)technology to speed up or substitute this progression remains largely unexplored. Widespread adoption of such technology might change the world for the better. If you can offer help, please email us at enlightenmenthacking@gmail.com.

#117: Help Nonprofits Share Evidence And Determine Impact
The nonprofit sector’s approach to using evidence in service delivery is fundamentally flawed. A failure to use knowledge from different sources slows progress and harms the people we want to help. Since we can’t reliably know the impact of our services we can’t determine which services have a negative impact, or how to improve them if and when they do. Maturing our approach to generating evidence about our work is critical. A similar situation in academia—the replication crisis—led to a shift in orientation for the entire sector, enabling collaboration that wasn’t possible before. Our issues (like academia’s) are systemic, and solutions can’t be focused on helping one organization at a time. If we ever expect to improve our services, we need to be open to radically altering the structure of the sector. The nonprofit sector needs an “existential crisis” of its own, so that we can collectively address this issue. Ajah is a social enterprise that has more than 20 years of experience working to help stakeholders increase their impact through better use and sharing of data. Our work with some of the largest foundations in the world, and nonprofits across the globe has given us a deep understanding of how conditions in the sector prevent us from knowing our impact. We write extensively about this evaluation crisis and how advances in technology are not a solution. We are also working to build tangible solutions (such as access to administrative data) to solve pieces of the puzzle. [Contact: ben.mcnamee@ajah.ca]

#118: CBT App To Help Depression
Depression affects 17 million US adults. Anxiety affects 40 million. For people with these and other mental health challenges, cognitive behavioral therapy is an intervention that is proven to work. Unfortunately, less than half of the people that would benefit from therapy end up getting it. This can happen due to time, cost, stigma, and other constraints. Mobile and web apps can be helpful in overcoming these hurdles, but current products have their fair share of problems. Some are slick, but use "fluffy" content. Others stick to the evidence, but don't prioritize usability. We think there is an opportunity to create a CBT app that is evidence-based, easy to use, engaging, and low cost. Here are preliminary mockups that illustrate what we’re building: tinyurl.com/yckz8k9v Currently, we have an app built that we’re testing internally ahead of a wider release. We’re looking for $5,000 that would go toward Legal consultation, paid user research, marketing and advertising. Would also love advice if you have experience in the space! The team comprises me (Calvin, engineer, linkedin.com/in/calvin-woo), Maria (designer, linkedin.com/in/mhmichelsen), Shwetha (engineer, linkedin.com/in/shweta-patrachari) and Stephanie (clinical psychology PhD student at UCLA, linkedin.com/in/stephaniehtyu) You can contact me at calvinwoo32@gmail.com

#119: Nonprofit To Reform Psychiatric Crisis Systems
I’m Jess Watson Miller (@utotranslucence) and I’m looking for seed funding for a nonprofit to reform Western psychiatric crisis systems using a systems change strategy inspired by the work of Donella Meadows. Last year I lost my brother to suicide after he had been locked up and spiraling for months in the hospital system, with multiple escape attempts. This story is not unique; many people who have used the crisis system or work in it consider it frequently actively harmful to the people it is aiming to help. I believe there is a lack of creative efforts that are aimed at reform rather than abolition, that seek to do more than minimize risk and cost for payers and clinicians, and with more risk-tolerant sources of funding than Medicaid and government health departments. I have a background in economics and social sciences and am actively looking for partners with clinical and insurance/payer experience. My initial focus is creating research reports on bottlenecks to change and building connections with other reform projects. I am looking for connections to related projects, people with experience working in frontline crisis positions, or administrative positions in hospitals, insurance or health law, and donation funding: $10K would let me keep doing this in the short term; $100K would let me hire others and fund the basics of the organization for up to two years. More info here: shorturl.at/djmJ7. If you want to help, email me at jessicawatsonmiller@gmail.com

#120: Tool To Develop Arguments In Parallel
I've been working on a tool that facilitates an argument where two competing theories are developed in parallel in an iterative manner. The goal of the process is: (1) to produce a pair of coherent arguments that stand on their own instead of a long chain of correspondence which can be difficult to follow; (2) to ensure that all relevant counterarguments are addressed, or in the case their not, to make it easy for the reader to notice this; (3) to provide the debaters an opponent to spar with from the start which should result in sounder arguments; and finally (4) to be more feasible than adversarial collaboration since the elusive goal of converging views need not be met. I can't seek funding via Grants++ for legal reasons. But if you're otherwise interested, check out the GitHub repo (tinyurl.com/2p8w4jbe) or the LessWrong post (tinyurl.com/2s3z7ct8) and feel free to contact me (mat5n@outlook.com).

#121: System To Refine Cell Media Recipes
Essentially all laboratory-based human biological research relies on maintaining cells in appropriate culture media. Most culture media were designed at least 50 years ago; today, we grow a wider variety of cells for a broader scope of purposes, but media formulation has not kept pace. A major obstacle to formulating media is the large design space: a culture medium may have 70 or more ingredients, and some ingredients are themselves complex mixtures of even more ingredients. The usual approaches to handling high-dimensional problems, factorial design and high-throughput screening, cannot deal with design spaces this big. However, there is a better way: iterative mathematical optimization, the same approach we use to train neural networks. As a postdoc, I have built a prototype system using motorized microscopy, computer vision, statistics, and mathematical optimization to iteratively test, evaluate, and refine media recipes. My postdoc is ending, and I am seeking the resources to fully automate and open-source this system. The stakes are higher than just improving culture media: biological research is maddeningly slow, and it’d be faster if machines could do more of the work. Although machines are bad at posing hypotheses, they are very good at iterative optimization. A more thorough description of this project is available at https://www.todhunter.dev. Please contact me at todhunter@todhunter.dev if you’d like to learn more or contribute.

#122: In Vitro Gametogenesis
I'm a reproductive endocrinologist and Professor of OB/GYN at Oregon Health & Science University.  We work on novel assistant reproductive technologies for the treatment of infertility.  We propose an alternative method of in-vitro gametogenesis.  Most people working in this field are trying to reprogram adult somatic cells to become oocytes (eggs).  Our strategy involves somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT; also known as therapeutic cloning). We basically take a somatic cell (e.g. skin cell) and transfer it into an enucleated donor egg and then induce that reconstituted egg to undergo meiosis resulting in a haploid oocyte which can then be fertilized with sperm to create an embryo and then eventually a baby.  This would allow women with age-related infertility or premature ovarian failure and same-sex male couples to have genetically-related children.  Because this research involves human embryos, it is not eligible for NIH funding, which is why we are seeking private funding.  Please contact me is you are interested in supporting this work at amatop@ohsu.edu.  For proof of concept in the mouse model, we just published this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-022-03040-5

#123: Next-Generation mRNA Vaccines
PopVax is an Indian startup working on next-generation mRNA vaccines for COVID-19, with a team of scientists that includes Moderna’s former Director of Chemistry and leading Indian mRNA experts. Our mRNA platform is built to tackle many of the problems inherent in those of Moderna & BioNTech-Pfizer, including their need for storage and transportation at supercold temperatures (our vaccine candidates use a novel LNP formulation and structural modifications to mRNA to achieve room-temperature stability for extended periods of time), their waning immunity to new variants (our multivalent sequences encode epitopes for existing and predicted future mutations), their extremely low-rate but real inducement of myocarditis in young men (we target delivery to avoid heart tissue), the high costs due to primarily western supply chains (we have built out a fully-indigenized, low-cost supply chain for critical raw materials), and, most importantly, their inability to produce sterilizing immunity in the mucosal membrane (our strategy involves an intranasal booster that we expect will, in most cases, block transmission). We have received a small amount of funding from the Gates Foundation, and are looking for a combination of grants and investment to fund both our clinical trials and simultaneous buildout of manufacturing in the existing GMP facilities of a large Indian pharma company, with the intent to bring online 1 billion+ doses of new capacity/year in 2022. Contact me at soham@soh.am.

#124: Develop New Systems For Understanding Model And Human Genetics
I’m Dr. Bryan Andrews, a molecular biologist who studies the principles of genotype-phenotype mapping. I’m concerned that the strategies being used to assess human genetic variants today are fundamentally not scalable. That is, learning a lot about Gene A doesn’t improve your prior predictions about Gene B, and this fundamentally constrains computational predictions of gene function. It doesn’t have to be this way, and subtle but non-intuitive tweaks to how we assay gene function could make the data legible at a genome-wide scale to machines and humans alike. I’m currently developing new systems for functional genetics in model organisms, but I am seeking research support to help bridge the gap to human genetics. If you’re interested in providing such support, or wish to know more, please contact me at andrewsb@uchicago.edu.

#125: Plant Trees For Carbon Capture
My name is Dan Sparkman and I want your help to plant trees for carbon capture. There are plenty of people planting trees and they are mostly worthy of support. However most reforestation projects are eventully going to be cut down. I aim to plant forest gardens which should stand for hundreds of years. The first principle of sustainablity is (or ought to be) sustain the caretaker. Your porject needs to look after them so that they have the time, money and incentive to look after the project. Most reforestation project aim at maxim growth for maxim carbon capture. Because of this, when local people have a need for that land, the carbon capture forest will be cut down. I plan on planting a mix of trees that provides income for locals every year. This mix will be centered on Black Walnuts and American Chestnuts. Both native climax trees. This mix of trees will provide food and wood, for years into centries, all with minimal human intervention once it is started. There have been recient studies on the west coast with forest gardens still triving after 200 years of neglect. I have no specal skills, just a passionate amature, but I do have the connections with local land owners, goverments, and tree hobbiests to plant 1000 trees for $10 000. Give me more money and we can start to see real change. That's my project in a nut shell. Help me plant trees. Trees which provide a food crop, supporting the farmer/land owner/locals so they won't be cut down. Contact me at sparkman.dan@gmail.com

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Medical training is a wild ride. You do four years of undergrad in some bio subject, ace your MCATs, think you’re pretty hot stuff. Then you do your med school preclinicals, study umpteen hours a day, ace your shelf exams, and it seems like you're pretty much there. Then you start your clinical rotations, get a real patient in front of you, and you realize - oh god, I know absolutely nothing about medicine.

This is also how I felt about running a grants program.

I support effective altruism, a vast worldwide movement focused on trying to pick good charities. Sometimes I go to their conferences, where they give lectures about how to pick good charities. Or I read their online forum, where people write posts about how to pick good charities. I've been to effective altruist meetups, where we all come together and talk about good charity picking. So I felt like, maybe, I don't know, I probably knew some stuff about how to pick good charities.

And then I solicited grant proposals, and I got stuff like this:

A. $60K to run simulations checking if some chemicals were promising antibiotics.
B. $60K for a professor to study the factors influencing cross-cultural gender norms
C. $50K to put climate-related measures on the ballot in a bunch of states.
D. $30K to research a solution for African Swine Fever and pitch it to Uganda
E. $40K to replicate psych studies and improve incentives in social science

Which of these is the most important?

Part of my brain keeps helpfully suggesting "Just calculate how much expected utility people get from each!" I can check how many people die of antibiotic-resistant infections each year (Google says either 30K, 500K, or 1M, depending on which source you trust). That's a start! But the chance of these simulations discovering a new antibiotic is - 10%? 1%? 0.00001%? In silico drug discovery never works and anyone with half a brain knows that? The compounds being tested are dumb compounds? Even if they worked, bacteria would just develop more resistance in a week? Pharma companies would capture all the value from any new antibiotics and make it impossible for poor people to afford them? Five much better labs have already tried this and all the low-hanging fruit has been picked? Screening for new antibiotics is a great idea but actually it costs $4.50 and this is outrageously overpriced?

And that's an easy one. What about B? If the professor figures out important things about what influences gender norms, maybe we can subtly put our finger on the scale. Maybe twenty years later, women across the Third World will have equal rights, economic development will be supercharged, and Saudi Arabia will be a Scandinavian-style democracy with a female Prime Minister. But maybe the professor won't find anything interesting. Or maybe they will find something interesting, but it will all be stuff like "it depends what kind of rice they cultivated in 4000 BC" and there won't be any subtle finger-putting-on-scale opportunities. Or maybe the professor will find something great, but nobody will listen to her and nothing will happen. Or maybe Third World countries will get angry at our meddling and hold coups and become even more regressive. Or maybe we'll overshoot, and Saudi Arabia will become really woke, and we'll have to listen to terrible takes about how the Houthi rebels are the new face of nice guy incel misogyny.

Which is higher-value, A or B? Probably more women suffer under oppressive gender norms than people die of antibiotic-resistant infections, but dying is probably worse than inequality, and there's a clearer path from antibiotic -> recovery than from research paper -> oppressive countries clean up their act. What about second order effects? If women have more equality in Saudi Arabia, maybe an otherwise unrecognized female genius will discover a new antibiotic. But if we have more antibiotics, someone who would otherwise have died of a bacterial infection might liberate women in Saudi Arabia. Aaagh!

Part of my brain helpfully suggests "Do a deep dive and answer these questions! This is the skill you are supposedly good at!" Quantifying these questions sounds crazy, but I am nothing if not crazy for quantifying things. It could work.

…except that I had 656 applications like this, and everyone told me it was important to get back to people within a month or two. I don't think I could fully explore the subtleties of the antibiotic proposal in that time - let alone 656 proposals, most of which were even less straightforward.

II.

There’s a well-known solution to this kind of thing:

Just make a ballpark guess and then get on with your life.

The problem is: this grants program could be the most important thing I’ll ever do. Maybe everything else, all my triumphs and failures, will end up less important than getting this one grants program right.

GiveWell estimates that if you donate to their top charity, Against Malaria Foundation, you can probably save a life for about $5000. ACX Grants raised $1.5 million. Donated to AMF, that’s enough to save 300 lives. I didn’t donate it to AMF. I believed that small-batch artisanal grant-making could potentially outperform the best well-known megacharities - or at least that it was positive value in expectation to see if that was true. But if your thesis is “Instead of saving 300 lives, which I could totally do right now, I’m gonna do this other thing, because if I do a good job it’ll save even more than 300 lives”, then man, you had really better do a good job with the other thing.

Robin Dunbar claims that humans have a capacity to handle 150 social relationships. Count up my friends, family members, coworkers, and acquaintances, and there will probably be about 150 who I can remember consistently and have some vague emotional connection to. If I made some mistake that killed all those people - all my friends, relatives, everyone I know - then in some “objective” sense, that would be about as bad as screwing up this grants program in some way that made it only half as good as the malaria counterfactual.

This isn’t what really bothers me. My brain refuses to believe it, so I don’t really care. The part that really bothers me is that I know a lot of middle-class people who are struggling. Somebody who’s $10,000 in credit card debt, and it’s making their life miserable. Someone else who posts a GoFundMe for a $5,000 medical bill. Another person who’s burned out at their $40,000 a year job and would probably have vastly better health if they could take a few months off and then job-search from a place of financial stability.

If on average these people need $10,000 each, my $1.5 million could help 150 of them. Most of these wouldn’t literally save lives, but a few might - I saw a patient once who attempted suicide for want of $5,000. And it would sure brighten a lot of people’s years.

So: $60,000 could test some promising antibiotics, or fund a book on gender norms. But it could also cure twelve Africans who would otherwise die of malaria, or save 5-10 Americans struggling under dead-end jobs and unpayable debts.

I tried not to think too hard about this kind of thing; I’m nervous it would make me so crazy that I’d run away from doing any kind of charity at all, and then everyone would be worse off. Even more, I’m worried it would scare me into taking only the most mainstream and best-established opportunities, whereas I really do think a lot of value is in weird charity entrepreneurship ideas that are hard to quantify.

But I couldn’t push it out of my mind far enough to do a half-assed job on the grants round, which meant confronting some of those problems head-on.

III.

…by which I mean “passing them off to other people”.

All those effective altruism conferences might not have given me infallible grant-making heuristics, but they did mean I knew a lot of grantmakers. I begged the institutional EA movement for help, and they lent me experts in global poverty, animal welfare, and the long-term future. I was able to draw on some other networks for experts in prediction markets and meta-science.

There wasn't as ready-made an EA infrastructure for biology, so I jury-rigged a Biology Grants Committee out of an ex-girlfriend who works in biotech, two of her friends, a guy who has good bio takes in the ACX comments section, and a cool girl I met at a party once who talked my ear off about bio research. Despite my desperation, I lucked out here. One of my ex’s friends turned out to be a semiprofessional bio grantmaker. The guy from the comments section was a bio grad student at Harvard. And the girl from the party got back to me with a bunch of detailed comments like “here’s the obscure immune cell which will cause a side effect these people aren’t expecting” or “a little-known laboratory in Kazakhstan has already investigated this problem”.

These people really came through. Don’t take my word for it - trust the data. The five of their opinions correlated with each other at r = 0.55, whereas my uninformed guesses only correlated with them at r = 0.15. This made me feel much more confident I was picking up something real.

But even the “experts” weren’t perfectly aligned. There were three proposals where one evaluator assigned the highest possible rating, and another assigned the lowest possible. Sometimes these were differences of scientific opinion. Other times they were more fundamental. One person would say "This idea would let you do so many cool things with viruses" and another person would say "This idea would let you do so many cool things with viruses, such as bioterrorism".

Still, with their help I started to feel like I was finally on top of this.

IV.

Then I got the rug pulled out from under my feet again.

I was chatting online with my friend Misha about one the projects my Bio Grants Committee had recommended. He asked: given that they got funding from XYZ incubator a few years ago, why are they asking you for more funding now? XYZ incubator is known for funding their teams well, so they must have lost faith in these people. Some reports from a few years ago included the name of an impressive guy on their executive team, but more recent reports don’t mention him. The simplest explanation is that something went wrong, their executives expected rough going, their incubator got cold feet, and now they’re turning to a rube like you to help them pick up the pieces.

I was kind of flabbergasted. I had a very nice report from my Bio Committee telling me that all the science here was sound, the cells they were working with were very nice cells, etc. But here was a whole new dimension I hadn’t considered. Misha explained that he was an angel investor - not even some kind of super-serious VC, just a guy who invested his own money - and this kind of thing was standard practice in his field.

I’ll be honest. I know a lot of you are VCs. You read and support my blog, and I appreciate it. Some of the grant money I distributed came from VCs, which was very generous. But I always imagined you guys as kind of, you know, wandering into work, sipping some wine, saying “Hmmm, these guys have a crypto company, crypto seems big this year, I like the cut of their jib, make it so,” and then going home early. I owe you an apology. VC-ing is a field as intense and complicated and full of pitfalls as medicine or statistics or anything else.

As a grant-maker, I was basically trying to be a VC, only without the profit motive. But that meant I was staking $1.5 million on my ability to practice a very difficult field which, until five minutes previous, I hadn’t realized existed.

I solved this problem the same way I had solved my previous few problems: I begged Misha for help, and he agreed to serve on my grant evaluation team. But this kind of thing kept happening. Every time I thought I knew approximately how many different variables I needed to consider, my ship accidentally got blown off course into an entire undiscovered new continent of variable-considering, full of golden temples and angry cannibals.

I’m not going to write up the whole travelogue, but here are ten things worth thinking about if you’re considering a grants program of your own:

(1): Many applicants ask for a random amount of money, and it’s your job to decide if you should give more or less.

For example, I originally said my grants would max out at 50-100K, and many people asked for 50-100K grants. Some of these people needed more than 50-100K, but figured any little bit helped. Others needed less than 50-100K, but figured they’d ask for more and let me bargain them down. Others had projects that scaled almost linearly, such that 50K could do ten times as much good as 5K, but only a tenth as much as 500K. They asked for 50-100K too.

Suppose I gave a dozen organizations $50K. It would be really suspicious if a dozen organizations just happened to all be equally effective at spending the marginal dollar! The people screening new antibiotics and the people untangling cross-cultural gender roles really have exactly equal expected value? Realistically it shouldn’t be at all surprising if one of them was ten or a hundred times more valuable than the other! So maybe instead of giving both of them $50K, I should give one of them $100K and the other one nothing.

There was a strong temptation for me to make lots of different grants, because then I would feel like a good person who’s helped many different causes. In many cases, I succumbed to this temptation: realistically I don’t know which of those two causes is better, and realistically I don’t know enough about how each of them scales with money to second-guess the grant-writers who requested approximately $50K each.

But also, after making all my other choices, I nixed the five or six least promising grants, the ones I secretly knew I had only done to feel like a diverse person who gives to diverse cause areas, and gave all their money to the oxfendazole project, which most evaluators agreed was the most promising.

(2) Most people are terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE grantwriters

It’s fascinating! They’re all terrible in different ways!

One person’s application was the very long meandering story of how they had the idea - “so i was walking down the street one day, and I thought…” - followed by all the people they had gone to for funding before me, and how each person had betrayed them.

Another person’s application sounded like a Dilbert gag about meaningless corporate babble. “We will leverage synergies to revolutionize the paradigm of communication for justice” - paragraphs and paragraphs of this without the slightest explanation of what they would actually do. Everyone involved had PhDs, and they’d gotten millions of dollars from a government agency, so maybe I’m the one who’s wrong here, but I read it to some friends deadpan, it made them laugh hysterically, and sometimes they still quote it back at me - “are you sure we shouldn’t be leveraging synergies to revolutionize our paradigm first?” - and I laugh hysterically.

Several applications were infuriatingly vague, like “a network to encourage talented people”. I, too, think talented people should be encouraged. But instead of answering the followup questions - how do you find the talented people? why would they join your network? what will the network do to encourage them? - the application would just dribble out a few more paragraphs about how under-encouraged the talent was these days.

A typical pattern was for someone to spend almost their entire allotted space explaining why an obviously bad thing was bad, and then two or three sentences discussing why their solution might work. EG five paragraphs explaining why depression was a very serious disease, then a sentence or two saying they were thinking of fighting it with some kind of web app or something.

Several applications very gradually made it clear that they had not yet founded the charitable organization they were talking about, they had no intention of doing so, and they just wanted to tell me they thought I should found it, or somehow expected my money to cause the organization to exist.

This proved to be a sort of skeleton key to diagnose a whole genus of grant-writing pathologies: I think some people don’t understand, on a deep level, that between the steps “people donate money to cause” and “cause succeeds”, there’s an additional step of “someone takes the money and does some specific thing with it”. Or they thought it could be abstracted away - surely you just hire some generic manager type. Yeah, these grant applications are auditions for that job, and you failed.

One person, in the process of explaining why he needed a grant, sort of vaguely confessed to a pretty serious crime. I don’t have enough specifics that I feel like I can alert police, and it’s in a different country where I don’t speak the language. Still, this is a deeper grantwriting failure than I imagined possible.

(3): Your money funges against the money of all the other grants programs your applicants are applying to.

Right now AI alignment has lots of cash. If there’s a really good AI alignment charity, Open Philanthropy Project and Founders Fund and Elon Musk and Jaan Tallinn will all fight each other to throw money at it. So if a seemingly really good AI alignment charity asked me for money, I would wonder - why haven’t they gotten money from a big experienced foundation?

Maybe they asked and the big experienced foundations said no - but then, do I think I’m in a position to second-guess the experts? Or maybe they don’t know the big experienced foundations exist, which suggests they’re pretty new here - not necessarily a fatal flaw, but something to think about. Or maybe they’re asking the big experienced foundations too, but they figured they’d use me as a backup.

How is this actionable? First, sometimes I was able to ask the big experienced foundations if they’d seen a grant application, and if so what they thought. But second, if I had a great global poverty proposal and a great AI safety proposal, and I thought they were both equally valuable, the correct course was to fund global poverty and ask the Long Term Future Fund to fund the AI safety one.

(what actually happened was that the Long Term Future Fund approached me and said “we will fund every single good AI-related proposal you get, just hand them to us, you don’t have to worry about it”. Then I had another person say “hand me the ones Long Term Future Fund doesn’t want, and I’ll fund those.” Have I mentioned it’s a good time to start AI related charities?)

Sometimes an experienced grantmaker would tell me that some specific application would be catnip for the XYZ Foundation, and we could forward it on to them instead of funding it ourselves. This made me nervous, because what if they were wrong and this great proposal slipped through the cracks? - but usually I trusted them.

(4) There are lots of second-order effects, but you’ll go crazy if you think about them too hard

Suppose a really good artist comes to you and asks for a grant. You think: “Art doesn’t save too many lives. But this art would be really good, and get really famous, and then my grants program would get really famous for funding such a great thing, and then lots more funders and applicants would participate the next time around.”

Or suppose some promising young college kid asks you for a grant to pursue their cool project. Realistically the project won’t accomplish much, but she’ll learn a lot from it. And she seems like the sort of person who could be really impressive when she gets older. Is it worth giving her a token amount to “encourage her”? (my impression is that Tyler Cowen would say “Hell yes!” and that this is central to his philosophy of grantmaking). What about buying the right to boast “I was the first person to spot this young talent!” thirty years later when she wins her Nobel, which brings glory to your grants program down the line? What about buying her goodwill, so that when she’s head of the NSF one day you can ask a favor of her? Doesn’t that promote your values better than just giving money to some cool project?

(but remember that $10K = saving two Africans from malaria, or relieving one American’s crushing credit card debt. That’s quite a price to “encourage young talent”, isn’t it?)

What if there’s a project you don’t think will succeed, but which is very close to a field you want to encourage? Do you fund it in order to build the field or lure other people in? What about a project you do think will do good, but which is very close to something bad?

The experienced grantmakers I worked with mostly suggesting weighing these kinds of considerations less. They take too much precise foreknowledge (this art will become famous, this young student will become an impressive luminary, my grants will move lots of people into this field) when realistically you don’t even have enough foreknowledge to predict if your grant will work at all.

Still, Tyler Cowen does this and it works for him. My only recommendation is to make a decision and stick to it, instead of going crazy thinking too hard.

(5) Being advised by George Church is not as impressive as it sounds

One applicant mentioned that his bio project was advised by George Church - Harvard professor, National Academy of Sciences member, one of TIME Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People In The World”, and generally amazing guy. I was astonished that a project with Church’s endorsement was pitching to me, and not to Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or someone.

Then I got another Church-advised project. And another.

What finally cleared up the mystery is that one of my Biology Grants Evaluation Committee members also worked for George Church, and clarified that Church has seven zillion grad students, and is extremely nice, and is bad at saying no to people, and so half the biology startups in the world are advised by him. There are lots of things like this. Remember: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure!

(6): Everyone is secretly relying on everyone else to do the hard work.

Sometimes people gave me pitches like “[Fintech billionaire] Patrick Collison gave us our first $X, but he didn’t fund us fully because he wanted to diversify our income streams and demonstrate wider appeal. Can you fill the rest of our funding for the year?” This was a pretty great pitch, because Patrick is very smart, has a top-notch grant-making infrastructure, and shares many of my values. I was pretty desperate to be able to rely on something other than my wits alone, and Patrick’s seal of approval was a tempting proxy. I tried to give all these people a fair independent evaluation, because otherwise it would defeat the point of Patrick making them seek alternative funding sources. But it sure did get them to the top of the pile.

Then people started sending me requests like “Please give us whatever you can spare, just so that when we’re pitching to some other much richer person, we can say that other grantmakers such as yourself are on board.” This made me really nervous. It was bad enough risking my own money (and the money of my generous donors). But risking my reputation was something else entirely. If all grantmakers secretly relied on other grantmakers to avoid the impossibly complex question of figuring out who was good, then my decisions might accidentally move orders of magnitude more money than I expected. It’s all nice and well to replace your own judgment with Patrick Collison’s. But what if someone tried to replace their own judgment with mine?

I have no solution here except to type up this 5000 word essay on how I really don’t know what I’m doing and you shouldn’t trust me. Those who have ears to hear, let them listen!

(7) If you can’t rely on other grantmakers, you’ll rely on credentials

I still think that credentialism - the thing where you ignore all objective applications of a person’s worth in favor of what college they went to - is bad. But now I understand why it’s so tempting.

I’d previously been imagining - you’re some kind of Randian tycoon, sitting serenely in your office, reviewing resumes for your 1001st software engineering drone. You can easily check how they do on various coding exams, Project Euler, peer ratings, whatever, but instead you go with the one who went to Harvard, because you’re a f@#$ing elitist.

Now I’m imagining - you’re a startup founder or mid-level hiring manager or something, getting thrown into the deep end, asked to make a hire for your company despite having no idea what you’re doing. If you get it wrong, the company’s new product will flop and everyone will blame you. One software engineer claims to be an expert in non-Euclidean para-computing, whatever that is, and the other claims to be an expert in ultravectorized peta-fragmentation, or something to that effect. You Google both those terms and find that StackOverflow has removed the only question about them because it’s “off-topic”. The Standardized Coding Exam That Everyone Has Taken Which Allows Objective Comparison turns out not to exist. Project Euler exists, but you worry if you asked them about it they would think you’re crazy and obsessive. So you go with the one who has a Computer Science degree from Harvard, because at least he’s probably not literally lying about the fact that he knows what a computer is.

(it’s not that everyone is an imposter with no idea what they’re doing. But everyone starts out that way, and develops their habits when they’re in that position, and then those habits stick.)

(8) You will suffer heartbreak

I’d been on a couple of dates with someone a month or two before the grants program. Then in the chaos of sorting through applications, I forgot to follow up.

Halfway through the grant pile, I found an application from my date. It was pretty good, but I felt like it would be too much of a conflict of interest. I sent them an email: “Sorry, I don’t feel like I can evaluate this since we’re dating”.

The email back: “I don’t consider us to still be dating”. This remains the most stone-cold rejection I have ever gotten.

(9) If you can’t rely on other grantmakers or credentials, you’ll rely on prejudices and heuristics

Here are some of mine: your new social network won’t kill Facebook. Your new knowledge database won’t kill Wikipedia. No one will ever use argument-mapping software. No matter how much funding your clever and beautiful project to enforce truth in media gets, the media can just keep being untruthful. The more requests for secrecy are in a proposal, the less likely it is to contain anything worth stealing. Subtract one point for each use of the words “blockchain”, “ML”, and “BIPOC”.

A lot of these italicized sections here are trying to get at the same point: when you’re truly lost in a giant multidimensional space that requires ten forms of expertise at once to make real progress, you’ll retreat to prejudices and heuristics. That’s what credentialism is, that’s what relying on other grantmakers is, and - when you have neither Harvard nor Patrick Collison to save you, you’ll rely on that one blog post you read that one time saying X never works.

(10) …but your comparative advantage might be in not doing any of this stuff

See my post from yesterday, Heuristics That Almost Always Work.

What’s your story for why you need a microgrants program? Why not just donate to GiveWell or OpenPhil or some other charity or foundation you respect?

(technically OpenPhil doesn’t accept individual donations, but if you break into their office and leave $1.5 million on a desk, what are they going to do?)

If your story is “I have a comparative advantage in soliciting grant proposals” or “I have a comparative advantage in soliciting funders” or even “it takes the excitement of a personal grants program to incentivize me to do charity at all”, then fine, whatever.

But if your story is “I think I have a comparative advantage in assessing grants” - then consider actually having a comparative advantage in assessing grants.

If you only fund teams with a lot of Harvard PhDs who already have Patrick Collison’s seal of approval, you don’t have much of a comparative advantage. You could be replaced by a rock saying “FUND PRESTIGIOUS PEOPLE WHO OTHER PRESTIGIOUS PEOPLE LIKE”. I don’t want to say they’re sure to get funding - one of life’s great mysteries is how many foundations are desperate for great causes to fund, how many great causes are desperate for funding, and how the market still doesn’t always clear. And if everyone galaxy-brains themselves into not funding the obvious best teams, then the obvious best teams never get funded. And the surest way not to do that is to stop galaxy-braining and fund the obvious best teams.

Still, given that your money is somewhat fungible with other people’s money, one way to have an outsized impact is to outperform that rock. That means trying to find undervalued projects. Which means not just using the same indicators of value as everyone else: credentials, popular cause areas, endorsements. It means taking chances, trying to cultivate long-term talent, trying to spot the opportunities you’re uniquely placed to see and other people are most likely to miss.

This is a dangerous game - most of the time you try to beat Heuristics That Almost Always Work, you fail. Still, part of what you’re doing in setting yourself up as a grants evaluator is claiming to be able to do this (unless you have another story in mind, like that you’re good at soliciting proposals or leveraging your personal brand to get funding). The overall grantmaking ecosystem needs some people to take the obvious high-value opportunities, and other people to seek out the opportunities whose value isn’t obvious. If you want to be the latter, good luck.

The other way the HTAAW post is relevant here: beware of information cascades. If you give someone a grant because they have good credentials and two other grantmakers approved of them, they’re going to be telling the next guy “We have good credentials and three other grantmakers approve of us!” This was another worry that pushed me to put a supra-HTAAW level of work into some grants.

V.

If you solve all these problems, congratulations! You can write a blog post announcing that you are giving out grants! People you respect will say nice things about you and be happy!

Then you have to actually give people money.

You know how, whenever there’s a debate about cryptocurrency, some crypto fanboy gushes about how it makes sending money so much easier? And if you’re like me, you think “yes, but right now you can just enter a number into Paypal, that already seems pretty easy to me”?

I take it all back. The crypto future can’t come soon enough. Sending money is terrible.

Paypal charges 2-3% fees. If you’re sending $50K, that’s a thousand dollars. Your bank might do wire transfers for you, but they have caps on how much you can send, and that cap may be smaller than your grant. Wires can involve anything from sending in a snail mail form, to going to the bank in person, to getting something called a “Medallion Signature Guarantee” which I still have not fully figured out. Sometimes a recipient would tell me their bank account details, and my bank would say “no, that account does not exist”, and then we would be at an impasse. If you have double (or God forbid, triple) digit numbers of recipients, it all adds up.

I solved this the same way I solved everything else - begged friends and connections to do it for me. The Center For Effective Altruism agreed to take over this part, which was a lifesaver but created its own set of headaches. They’re a tax-deductible registered charity, which means they’re not supposed to give money to politics or unworthy causes. But some of my recipients were doing activism or things that were hard to explain to the federal government (eg helping a researcher take some time off to re-evaluate their career trajectory). They asked me to handle those myself, and I muddled through. Also, registered charity aren’t allowed to let donors influence its grant-making decisions, so I wasn’t allowed to donate directly to my own grants program; I had to split it in two and fund my fraction separately, with inconsistent tax-deductibility.

I understand that Molly Mielke is working on a project called Moth Minds that will take away the headache and make personal grants programs easier. So far her website is heavy on moth metaphors and light on details, but moth metaphors are also good, and I’m long-term excited about this.

VI.

More and more people are talking about microgrants programs. Maybe you’re one of them. So: should you run a grants round?

Your alternative to running a grants round is giving to the best big charities that accept individual donations. GiveWell tries to identify these, and ends up with things like Against Malaria Foundation, which they think can save a life for ~$5,000. So to a first approximation, run a grants round if you think you can do better than this.

Why should you expect to do better than these smart people who have put lots of effort into finding the best things? GiveWell mostly looks at scale-able and stable projects, but most microgrants work with small teams of people pursuing idiosyncratic opportunities. Funding research teams, activist groups, and companies/institutions can easily outperform direct giving to individuals.

There are very large organizations who handle these kinds of one-off grants. They’re also smart people who put lots of effort into finding the best things. So why should you expect to outperform them?

Maybe because they say you can. I talked to some of these big foundation people, and they were unexpectedly bullish on microgrants. They feel like their organizations are more limited by good opportunities than by money. If you can either donate your money or your finding-good-opportunities ability, consider the latter.

How can big foundations be short of good opportunities when the world is so full of problems? This remains kind of mysterious to me, but my best guess is that they set some high bar, donate to everything above the bar, and keep the rest of their money in the hopes that good charities that exceed the bar spring up later - or spend the money trying to create charities that will one day exceed the bar. Global health charities sometimes set a bar of “10x more effective than GiveDirectly”, where GiveDirectly is a charity that gives your money directly to poor people in Africa; other cause areas are harder to find a bar for but maybe you can sort of eyeball it. This model suggests you should only donate your finding-good-opportunities ability if you think there’s a chance you can clear the relevant bar, but there might be pretty high value of information in seeing whether this is true.

Anyone deeply interested in this question should read Carl Shulman’s Risk-neutral donors should plan to make bets at the margin at least as well as giga-donors in expectation and Benjamin Todd’s comment here. But here are some preliminary reasons why your microgrants program might be worth it:

Because you have a comparative advantage in soliciting proposals. Big effective-altruist foundations complain that they’re entrepreneurship-constrained. That is, funders give them lots of money, they’ve already funded most of the charities they think are good up to the level those charities can easily absorb, and now they’re waiting for new people to start new good charities so they can fund those too. This is truest in AI alignment, second-truest in animal welfare and meta-science, and least true in global development (where there are always more poor people who need money). ACX Grants got some people who otherwise wouldn’t have connected with the system to get out there and start projects, or at least to mention that their project existed somewhere that people could hear it. One of my big hopes is that next year or the year after OpenPhil gives $10 million or something to some charity they learned about because of me. I don’t know if this will happen but I think the possibility made this grants round worthwhile in expectation.

Because you have a comparative advantage in getting funding. I might have been in this category: I think some people trusted me with their money who wouldn’t necessarily have trusted OpenPhil or GiveWell. But I’m having trouble thinking of many other scenarios where this would happen.

Because you have a comparative advantage in evaluating grants. This one is tough. The big foundations have professional analysts and grantmakers. These people are really smart and really experienced. Why do you think you can beat them at their own game?

One possible answer: you’re also really smart and experienced. Fast Grants is run by Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison (plus Emergent Ventures with Shruti Rajagopalan); it wouldn’t surprise me if their particular genius is more valuable than a big foundation’s increased specialization and resources. If that’s you, then good work, I guess.

A second possible answer: no big foundation exactly captures your beliefs and values. Scott Aaronson ran a grants round recently and donated entirely to causes involved in STEM education. Maybe he thinks STEM education is more important than other big players believe (which actually seems very plausible). Or maybe his value system puts less emphasis on pleasure vs. suffering compared to the human urge toward deep understanding of Nature, and he feels incompletely aligned with OpenPhil who eg donate $786,830 to crustacean welfare.

A third possible answer: you have no absolute advantage, but you do have a comparative advantage. Scott Aaronson was both a student and professor at one of the math education groups he donated to, knew people who had been to the others, and had readers of his (math-focused) blog advise him on others still. I totally believe Aaronson is at least as qualified to evaluate math education as big foundations are, especially math-education-as-understood-and-appreciated-by-Scott-Aaronson’s-values. I gave several grants to prediction markets, something I’m plausibly an expert on.

(which is a bad example, because the small handful of people who know more about prediction markets than I do are disproportionately employed as OpenPhil grantmakers. But one day I’ll find a cool new field before OpenPhil does, and then I’ll give it lots of grants and feel very smug.)

So, all of these are ways your microgrants can potentially add value over a generic gift to someone else. So why might you not want to start your own grants program?

Sometimes human temptations caught up with me. I funded some grants that were cool, and made me seem cool for funding them, and made me happy, and supported my politics and identity commitments - but which, when I judge them by the standards of “was giving these people $X better than saving $X/5000 lives from malaria or relieving $X/10,000 people’s life-ruining credit card debts?”, probably fail. Part of the appeal of GiveWell is that you don’t have to win any spiritual battles against temptation; you know you’re doing more or less the right thing. Grants programs throw you right into the middle of spiritual battles, each one you lose counts against your effectiveness rate, and after you lose enough you’re subtracting value instead of adding it.

So should you run your own grants program, or donate to an existing charity?

If you have any of the above comparative advantages, if you plan to work hard enough to realize them, and if you win spiritual battles so consistently that you have to fight off recruiters for your local paladin order - I say try the program.

If not - and especially if you expect to half-ass the evaluation process, or succumb to the pressure to give to feel-good causes that aren’t really effective - then donate to existing charities. I really don’t want to make this sound like the loser option: donating to existing charities is usually the right thing to do, and choosing the less flashy but more effective option is also a heroic act.

If you’re on the fence, I’d err on the side of doing it, since the upside is potentially very high and the downside limited.

VII.

There’s one other reason to run a microgrants program: you think it would be fun.

I have no moral objection to this. Nothing along the lines of “wouldn’t it be better to something something expected utility?” Realistically the highest expected utility thing is whatever gets you interested enough to donate. If that’s a grants program, do it.

My actual objection is: no it won’t be.

I can’t say this with certainty. Some people are very weird. Some people are masochists. Some people already have experience in a related field and won’t feel as overwhelmed as I did.

But I’m already scheming ways to try to capture the positive effects of a grants program without having to run one myself. If the American way is a “government of laws, and not of men”, then the ACX way is a government of byzantine highly speculative institutions instead of men. So I’m thinking about how to replace my role with a impact certificate-based retroactive public goods funding market, and working on talking to various interesting people who might be able to make this happen. Once I recover from the current grants round, I’ll push them harder and see if we can get a prototype by next fall.

The basic idea would be: you all send in your grant proposals as usual. I (and any other interested funders) pledge some amount of money (let’s say $250K) to be distributed to successful projects one year later, ie after they’ve succeeded and made a difference. Then some group of savvy investors (or people who think they’re savvy investors) commit the same amount of their money (so $250K in our example) to buying grants, ie fully funding them in exchange for a meaningless certificate saying they “own” the grant - if people wanted, this could be an NFT, since that technology excels in producing meaningless certificates. At the end of some period, maybe a year, I would come in with my $250K and “give it” to the successful projects, by which I mean to whoever owned their impact certificates. Think of it as kind of like a prediction market for which grants will do well. Don’t worry, it’ll make more sense when we do it.

(don’t get too excited though, this will probably be harder than I expect, and maybe none of it will pan out)

All miserable slogs eventually become pleasant memories (eg high school, travel, medical residency). I can already sense the same thing happening to ACX Grants. I’m proud of what we accomplished, and with the pain fading away and only the fruits of our labor left, I feel like it was good work.

But if you’re wondering whether or not to start a grants program, the most honest answer I can give is “I tried this once, and now I’m hoping to invent an entirely new type of philanthropic institution just to avoid doing it again.”

He works in a very boring building. It basically never gets robbed. He sits in his security guard booth doing the crossword. Every so often, there’s a noise, and he checks to see if it’s robbers, or just the wind.

It’s the wind. It is always the wind. It’s never robbers. Nobody wants to rob the Pillow Mart in Topeka, Ohio. If a building on average gets robbed once every decade or two, he might go his entire career without ever encountering a real robber.

At some point, he develops a useful heuristic: it he hears a noise, he might as well ignore it and keep on crossing words: it’s just the wind, bro.

This heuristic is right 99.9% of the time, which is pretty good as heuristics go. It saves him a lot of trouble.

The only problem is: he now provides literally no value. He’s excluded by fiat the possibility of ever being useful in any way. He could be losslessly replaced by a rock with the words “THERE ARE NO ROBBERS” on it.

The Doctor

She is a primary care doctor. Every day, patients come to her and says “My back hurts” or “My stomach feels weird”. She inspects, palpates, percusses and auscultates various body parts, does some tests, and says “It’s nothing, take two aspirin and call me in a week if it doesn’t improve”. It always improves; no one ever calls her.

Eventually, she gets sloppy. She inspects but does not palpate. She does not do the tests. She just says “It’s nothing, it’ll get better on its own”. And she is always right.

She will do this for her entire career. If she is very lucky, nothing bad will happen. More likely, two or three of her patients will have cancer or something else terrible, and she will miss it. But those people will die, and everyone else will remember that she was such a nice doctor, such a caring doctor. Always so reassuring, never poked and prodded them with needles like everyone else.

Her heuristic is right 99.9% of the time, but she provides literally no value. There is no point to her existence. She could be profitably replaced with a rock saying “IT’S NOTHING, TAKE TWO ASPIRIN AND WAIT FOR IT TO GO AWAY”.

The Futurist

He comments on the latest breathless press releases from tech companies. This will change everything! say the press releases. “No it won’t”, he comments. This is the greatest invention ever to exist! say the press releases. “It’s a scam,” he says.

Whatever upheaval is predicted, he denies it. Soon we’ll all have flying cars! “Our cars will remain earthbound as always”. Soon we’ll all use cryptocurrency! “We’ll continue using dollars and Visa cards, just like before.” We’re collapsing into dictatorship! “No, we’ll be the same boring oligarchic pseudo-democracy we are now” A new utopian age of citizen governance will flourish. “You’re drunk, go back to bed.”

When all the Brier scores are calculated and all the Bayes points added up, he is the best futurist of all. Everyone else occasionally gets bamboozled by some scam or hype train, but he never does. His heuristic is truly superb.

But - say it with me - he could be profitably replaced with a rock. “NOTHING EVER CHANGES OR IS INTERESTING”, says the rock, in letters chiseled into its surface. Why hire a squishy drooling human being, when this beautiful glittering rock is right there?

The Skeptic

She debunks everything. Telepathy? She has a debunking for it. Bigfoot? A debunking. Anti-vaxxers? Five debunkings, plus an extra, just for you.

When she started out, she researched each phenomenon carefully, found it smoke and mirrors, and then viciously insulted the rubes who believed it and the con men who spread it. After doing this a hundred times, she skipped steps one and two. Now her algorithm is “if anyone says something that sounds weird, or that contradicts popular wisdom, insult them viciously.”

She’s always right! When the hydroxychloroquine people came along, she was the first person to condemn them, while everyone else was busy researching stuff. When the ivermectin people came along, she was the first person to condemn them too! A flawless record

(shame about the time she condemned fluvoxamine equally viciously, though)

Fast, fun to read, and a 99.9% success rate. Pretty good, especially compared to everyone who “does their own research” and sometimes gets it wrong. Still, she takes up lots of oxygen and water and food. You know what doesn’t need oxygen or water or food? A rock with the phrase “YOUR RIDICULOUS-SOUNDING CONTRARIAN IDEA IS WRONG” written on it.

This is a great rock. You should cherish this rock. If you are often tempted to believe ridiculous-sounding contrarian ideas, the rock is your god. But it is a Protestant god. It does not need priests. If someone sets themselves up as a priest of the rock, you should politely tell them that they are not adding any value, and you prefer your rocks un-intermediated. If they make a bid to be some sort of thought leader, tell them you want your thought led by the rock directly.

The Interviewer

He assesses candidates for a big company. He chooses whoever went to the best college and has the longest experience.

Other interviewers will sometimes choose a diamond in the rough, or take a chance on someone with a less-polished resume who seems like a good culture fit. Not him. Anyone who went to an Ivy is better than anyone who went to State U is better than anyone who went to community college. Anyone with ten years’ experience is better than anyone with five is better than anyone with one. You can tell him about all your cool extracurricular projects and out-of-the-box accomplishments, and he will remain unswayed.

It cannot be denied that the employees he hires are very good. But when he dies, the coroner discovers that his head has a rock saying “HIRE PEOPLE FROM GOOD COLLEGES WITH LOTS OF EXPERIENCE” where his brain should be.

The Queen

She rules over a volcanic island. Everyone worries when the volcano would erupt. The wisest men of the kingdom research the problem and decide that the volcano has a straight 1/1000 chance of erupting any given year, uncorrelated with whether it erupted the year before. There are some telltale signs legible to the wise - a slight change in the color of the lava, an imperceptible shift in the smell of the sulfur - but nothing obvious until it’s too late.

The queen founded a Learned Society Of Vulcanologists and charged them with predicting when the volcano will erupt. Unbeknownst to her, there were two kinds of vulcanologists. Honest vulcanologists, who genuinely tried to read the signs as best they can. And The Cult Of The Rock, an evil sect who gained diabolical knowledge by communing in secret with a rock containing the words “THE VOLCANO IS NOT ERUPTING”.

Every so often an honest vulcanologist felt like the lava was starting to look little weird and told the Queen. The Queen panicked and ask everyone for advice. The Honest vulcanologists said “look, it’s a hard question, the lava seems kind of weird today but it’s always weird in some way or other, this volcano rarely erupts but for all we know this time might be the exception”. The rock cultists secretly checked their rock and said “No, don’t worry, the volcano is not erupting”. Then the volcano didn’t erupt. The Queen punished the trigger-happy vulcanologist who sounded the false alarm, grumbled at the useless vulcanologists who weren’t sure either way, and promoted the confident cultists who correctly predicted everything was okay.

Time passed. With each passing year, the cultists and the institutions and methods of thought that produced them gained more and more status relative to the honest vulcanologists and their institutions and methods. The Queen died, her successor succeeded, and the island kept going along the same lines for let’s say five hundred years.

After five hundred years, the lava looked a bit weird, and the new Queen consulted her advisors. By this time they were 100% cultists, so they all consulted the rock and said “No, the volcano is not erupting”. The sulfur started to smell different, and the Queen asked “Are you sure?” and they double-checked the rock and said “Yeah, we’re sure”. The earth started to shake, and the Queen asked them one last time, so they got tiny magnifying glassses and looked at the rock as closely as they could, but it still said “THE VOLCANO IS NOT ERUPTING”. Then the volcano erupted and everyone died. The end.

The Weatherman

He lives in a port town and predicts hurricanes. Hurricanes are very rare, but whenever they happen all the ships sink, so weathermen get paid very well.

If you’ve read your Lovecraft, you know that various sinister death cults survived the fall of Atlantis, and none are more sinister than the Cult Of The Rock. This weatherman was an adept among them and secretly communed with a rock that said “THERE WON’T BE A HURRICANE”.

For many years, there was no hurricane, and he gained great renown. Other, lesser weathermen would sometimes worry about hurricanes, but he never did. The businessmen loved him because he never told them to cancel their sea voyages. The journalists loved him because he always gave a clear and confident answer to their inquiries. The politicians loved him because he brought their town fame and prosperity.

Then one month, a hurricane came. It was totally unexpected and lots of people died. The weatherman hastily said “Well, yes, sometimes there are outliers that even I can’t predict, I don’t think this detracts from my vast expertise and many years of success, and have you noticed some of the people criticizing me have business connections with foreign towns that probably plot our ruin?” An investigation was launched, but the businessmen and journalists and politicians all took his side, and he was exonerated and restored to his former place of honor.

Heuristics That Almost Always Work

Sometimes there’s a Heuristic That Almost Always Works, like “this technology won’t change everything” or “there won’t be a hurricane tomorrow”.

And sometimes the rare exceptions are so important to spot that we charge experts with the task. But the heuristics are so hard to beat that the experts themselves might be tempted to secretly rely on them, while publicly pretending to use more subtle forms of expertise. “My statistical model, accounting for chaos theory, barometric pressure, and the price of tea in China, says there won’t be a hurricane tomorrow. Rejoice!”

Maybe this is because the experts are stupid and lazy. Or maybe it’s social pressure: failure because you didn’t follow a well-known heuristic that even a rock can get right is more humiliating than failure because you didn’t predict a subtle phenomenon that nobody else predicted either. Or maybe it’s because false positives are more common (albeit less important) than false negatives, and so over any “reasonable” timescale the people who never give false positives look more accurate and get selected for.

This is bad for several reasons.

First, because it means everyone is wasting their time and money having experts at all.

But second, because it builds false confidence. Maybe the heuristic produces a prior of 99.9% that the thing won’t happen in general. But then you consult a bunch of experts, who all claim they have additional evidence that the thing won’t happen, and you raise your probability to 99.999%. But actually the experts were just using the same heuristic you were, and you should have stayed at 99.9%. False consensus via information cascade!

This new invention won’t change everything. This emerging disease won’t become a global pandemic. This conspiracy theory is dumb. This outsider hasn’t disproven the experts. This new drug won’t work. This dark horse candidate won’t win the election. This potential threat won’t destroy the world.

All these things are almost always true. But Heuristics That Almost Always Work tempt us to be more certain than we should of each.

[EDIT: Some people are asking if this is just the same thing as black swans. I agree black swans are great examples, but I think I’m talking about something slightly different, which includes heuristics like “you should hire the person from the top college” or “you should believe experts”. If you want you can think of a high school dropout outperforming a top college student as a “black swan”, but it doesn’t seem typical. And the point isn’t just “sometimes black swans happen”, but that the existence of experts using heuristics causes predictable over-updates towards those heuristics.]

Whenever someone pooh-poohs rationality as unnecessary, or makes fun of rationalists for spending zillions of brain cycles on “obvious” questions, check how they’re making their decisions. 99.9% of the time, it’s Heuristics That Almost Always Works.

(but make sure to watch for the other 0.1%; those are the people you learn from!)

[I have some corrections and mid-week announcements up here]

2: Sam M and Eric N want to remind you that you have until the end of next week to get your 2022 prediction contest entries in. Also:

We have some plans to compare (aggregates of) ACX reader predictions against various prediction markets. But there are probably much cooler things we can do which we haven't thought of yet! If you run a prediction market and have an idea for an interesting collaboration that involves sharing our data before it's publicly released, get in touch with us through the contest feedback form. If it's something time sensitive (e.g. an experiment that needs to be started before the contest submission deadline), make sure you do so soon. If you don't run a prediction market but still have an idea for something interesting we can do with the contest data, leave a comment on this open thread and we'll hopefully see it."

You can reach them through this form.

Polymarket got fined $1.4 million by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and was ordered to cease noncompliant trading in the US.

Polymarket is probably the biggest prediction market currently available. US law considers unlicensed prediction markets to be somewhere between illegal gambling and illegal futures trading, ie definitely illegal. Polymarket and a few peers had survived anyway, through the “crypto is the Wild West and nobody has time to deal with all the illegal things happening there” exemption. Apparently they found time.

The rumor on the prediction market grapevine (which I absolutely cannot substantiate; please don’t sue me for libel) is that this might have something to do with competing prediction market Kalshi. Kalshi spent two years and probably a lot of money getting the CFTC to agree they were legal, and has a former CFTC Commissioner as a Director. Their legal status forces them to do an annoying and expensive regulatory dance all the time; illegal prediction markets were able to move more nimbly, provide better user experience, and eat their lunch. This was a big problem for them - but they’d just finished making lots of friends in the agency that decides which illegal things to crack down on, so, as Tyler Cowen likes to say, “solve for the equilibrium”.

For its part, Polymarket was an easy target. Despite “decentralized” being the fourth word on their website, they weren’t exactly at Satoshi levels of opsec. They had a normal identifiable guy as CEO, a normal headquarters building in New York City, and they did normal business things like raise millions of dollars in seed funding.

Some might call a headquarters building with a CEO sitting in it and millions in the bank account a “center”, so in what sense was Polymarket decentralized? See here for more discussion, and here for the full text of the CFTC decision, but my understanding is - all of the markets themselves were smart contracts on the blockchain run by automated market makers, but you could only access them through the Polymarket website, and the Polymarket people decided how they resolved. Polymarket did not charge fees, and made money by providing liquidity. The CFTC seemed angriest about the “you can only access contracts through the Polymarket website” part of this. Crypto attorney Collins Belton writes:

It’s hard to assess which factors were most aggravating and most mitigating from CFTC’s perspective. For instance, it’s hard to assess whether Polymarket may have been okay if its agents didn’t engage in any [liquidity provider] activity and operated no [front end].

So: Polymarket got fined $1.4 million, and was ordered to make its real-money markets inaccessible to US-based traders (the rest of the world is still fine). It’s very poor news to hear that a villanous political nonentity blocked this vital prediction nexus, and I guess we Americans have no other options besides accepting that we’re vastly poorer now.

Meanwhile, Polymarket put out a rainbows-and-butterflies press release saying that:

We are excited to continue championing our mission and building out our global footprint, information and educational initiatives, and U.S. product

I assume this means they’re excited to continue building their prediction market somewhere else, and will include a US version with play money, just like lots of other companies have done.

I Will Limit My Outrage To Four Paragraphs, Then Move On

My favorite commentary on this decision is Nuno Sempere’s The American Empire Has Alzheimers. He lists various bad decisions the US has made, from Vietnam to the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan last year. In this last case, President Biden said there was “no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy” barely a month before we saw exactly that.

Throughout these bad decisions, intelligence analysts and national security advisors were begging the government to come up with some kind of good forecasting infrastructure. By the early 2000s, many of them had settled on prediction markets as the most promising opportunity. In 2008, twenty-two prominent economists including five Nobel Prize winners wrote an editorial begging the CFTC to legalize prediction markets; the CFTC refused. In 2010, Philip Tetlock (one of the signatories on the pro-prediction market letter) did some pretty basic forecasting work, not even prediction market level, and proved that he could significantly outperform top analysts at the CIA with access to classified information. The government refused to hire him or use any of his methods, and continued shutting down new prediction markets as they arose.

Starting a few years ago, cryptocurrency provided a brief “thaw” when people thought they might be allowed to try innovative forecasting mechanisms. They tried, they created really impressive work, they made (and deserved) millions of dollars, and then the government kicked them out of the country anyway.

The US is becoming the North Korea of forecasting. Every other civilized country allows prediction markets. In a perfect world, they could ignore our constant own goals and move on without us. But because America has a disproportionate share of money, users, coders, and entrepreneurs, a US-less prediction market ecosystem won’t be living up to its potential. That means decreased ability to gather and process information and worse decision-making worldwide.

Where Do Prediction Markets Go From Here?

…aside from “to other countries”.

I think there’s a general sense among people interested in the field that prediction markets are vastly underperforming their potential. There ought to be a billion dollar prediction market, maybe a ten billion dollar one. Smart VCs clearly believe something like this, or Kalshi wouldn’t have gotten $30 million+ in investment. Sometimes people who incorrectly believe I know things about prediction markets ask me if know the missing secret sauce.

I don’t think there’s any secret. A prediction market will strike it big when it gets three things right at the same time:

• Real money

• Easy to use

• Easy to create your own subsidized markets

“Real money” should be self-explanatory. Metaculus and Manifold are both very nice, but so far they’re limited to a small group of enthusiasts playing in their spare time. I value them both, but neither is the killer app that makes prediction markets as central to everyday life as stock markets or polls or whatever.

“Easy to use” is kind of self-explanatory, but with some caveats. A big part of ease-of-use is liquidity; you can get that from a big user base or from clever deployment of automated market makers. A market that requires crypto knowledge is harder to use than one that doesn’t; one that’s inaccessible from the US is harder to use than one that isn’t. Also all the normal things like UI and search.

“Easy to create your own markets” is where we’ve gotten stuck so far. Prediction markets are absolutely on top of questions about whether Donald Trump will win various elections. This is a solved problem. What I really wanted last year (and would have subsidized!) was a market about whether Alameda County, California, would permit indoor gatherings of 50 people on January 8th 2022 (ie would I be forced to cancel my wedding). But I also would have appreciated the ability to put a few questions to prediction markets before starting my psychiatry practice, or my grants program, or any of a dozen other things I did. A friend has gone further, and half-jokingly said they want to create conditional prediction markets about whether they’re compatible with various women in our friend group, to be paid out six months after the first date.

Some of these applications are attempts to route around the principal-agent problem. Maybe I have some question about whether a certain grant would succeed, I’m not sure who to ask, and even if someone gives me a “Bob Smith, Grant Evaluator” business card, I don’t know if he’s any good. A prediction market takes all the pain out of searching for information - if I subsidize it enough, it’ll attract people with the relevant skill set who will solve my problem for me.

Probably some of these ideas wouldn’t work, but probably other ideas I can’t even think of now would. I don’t know what the killer app for prediction markets will be. But we’re not going to find out unless people can create their own subsidized markets and play around.

Polymarket took some baby steps towards this before the settlement: they had a Discord server where anyone could propose questions, and a lot of those questions became markets. But they still had to be general interest, not “let Alice’s five friends predict her dating life”. And there’s a big difference between “talk it over with company representatives on a Discord server” and “press a button”. Imagine if you could only tweet by emailing Jack Dorsey and convincing him that your comment was a good thing to have on Twitter. Even if Jack had good judgment and approved most requests, this would be a long way from the limbic system < — > Send Tweet loop that real Twitter users know and love.

I asked some people in the business why they won’t do this. They said most people are bad at writing good resolution criteria. They don’t want their employees to get stuck resolving incredibly dumb questions about people’s dating lives, hunting down inaccessible or conflicting information, and making a bunch of people mad whichever way they decide. As far as I can tell, Manifold Markets solved that problem with their “proposer decides the resolution, caveat emptor” strategy. But Manifold is US-based and can’t use real money, so there’s still no way to subsidize a market effectively.

(This is why I’m pessimistic about Kalshi. They could potentially do a lot of good in the “will Afghanistan collapse?” types of markets the Nobel laureates want, though even there I think some of their betting limits will give them trouble - $25,000 is good money, but not quite good enough to incentivize founding the prediction market equivalent of a Wall Street trading firm. But even if they solve this, I can’t imagine the regulators giving them permission to host “will this grant work out?” or “how will my dating life go?” markets; it’s just too weird, and the CFTC is too conservative. I don’t know, maybe their connections will come through and pull it off, but I don’t even know if they’re ambitious enough to want this, and I hate having to rely on one organization.)

Right now my hopes are, in ascending order of likelihood:

• Manifold figures out some kind of weird crypto thing that isn’t real money from a legal perspective, but is real money from a “people really want it and will put a lot of effort into getting it” perspective.

• Polymarket does this outside the US, and it succeeds so wildly that everyone agrees we need a US version.

• Someone creates a genuinely decentralized prediction market which the CFTC either believes is legal, or can’t figure out how to shut down.

I’m most optimistic about this last one, but it would be tough. You could try a version of Polymarket without the centralized organization gating the front end and providing liquidity. But then how would it make money? It probably wouldn’t - which might be fine, Metaculus is a non-profit and is still exceptionally well-run and stable. If someone did a good job of this I would try really hard to get it funded, and would expect to succeed.

But what if the CFTC says no, they’re still angry?

In Search Of Lost Crypto Dreams

Sometimes it seems like everyone who’s ever used crypto has a different model of why it might be good. Here’s mine.

There are lots of financial products which people want, but which regulation prevents them from having. Some of these are totally without social value, like Ponzi schemes and Bored Apes. Others have a lot of social value, like prediction markets, initial coin offering style funding schemes, and cutting middlemen out of immigrant remittances. More than a few might even have negative social value, like easy ways to buy drugs, or super-high-interest loans marketed to very impulsive people. Without passing judgment on whether these things are good or bad, they are legion. Collectively, they’re a zillion-dollar market.

In theory, crypto is hard to stop and hard to trace (yes, I know the blockchain is public, but I also know that TornadoCash and Monero exist). Anonymous users could create these services so easily and in such numbers that governments would never be able to stop all of them. Or they could be run as smart contracts, where even if regulators arrest the original programmers, they can’t stop the program from existing and continuing to offer its service.

This vision is a lot like the original vision of the Internet: a magical place that nobody could censor, where information would flow freely across national and ideological borders.

That vision was . . . maybe 25% achieved? It’s pretty great that I can write a blog like this instead of begging for my supper at a major media organization. But after a brief period of discombobulation, dictatorships found it easy to create their own walled-garden Internets through light-touch censorship; although there are ways around most of their tricks, ordinary people don’t bother with them (very poor news indeed!) And in practice most people ended up basing their Internet explorations at a few big businesses like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, which became easy prey for censors and in some cases rush to self-censor even more zealously than governments demand. It’s not that the Internet can’t create a magical censorship-resistant infrastructure, it’s that it’s 5% easier to sell your soul to FAANG, and so many people take that option that the few people who don’t aren’t really a critical mass for escaping governments or building new communities.

Is crypto following the same path? I am a lazy crypto user, and I notice that nowadays I have to grovel harder to the government to access my crypto than to acces my fiat - every crypto site is a gauntlet of “please tell us your name/birthdate/SSN/address”, “please upload your ID”, “please wait for us to complete our KYC process before trading”, etc. I assume there’s some really flashy way that cool people use their crypto without doing any of this, but there’s also Tor and Brave and Mastodon, and that doesn’t mean the Internet is a free speech privacy paradise.

But then, what’s the point of crypto? I mean, right now the point is to be a Ponzi scheme, and it works great; 1000% annual returns are a perfectly adequate substitute for there being a point. But most people think crypto only has another 0 - 2 doublings left in it; after everyone who’s going to invest invests, what then?

In the early days, you could make a small fortune by buying Bitcoin and holding, or a large fortune by minting a new token and telling other people to hold it, or a gigantic fortune by creating the infrastructure people needed to do A or B. All these activities are more or less legal and there’s no point in angering the government while you do them. And brilliant coders generally wouldn’t work on the illegal projects when it was so easy to make money doing the legal ones. So everybody rolled over and let the government regulate them, because why not?

At some point, the Ponzi-ing will run out. Optimistically, the brilliant coders will need something else to do, and someone will try creating things like genuinely decentralized, impossible-to-shut-down prediction markets. I feel like this should be possible, but I also don’t understand why it hasn’t happened already. Maybe the technical challenges are too hard.

Pessimistically, by then the crypto infrastructure, crypto social norms, and crypto user base will be so comprehensively locked into the current regulated model that this won’t be able to get off the ground. You’ll try to use Coinbase to send your crypto the prediction market, and it will warn you that this is a Non-Preferred Site that isn’t a Coinbase Partner and they’ll be informing the IRS of this transaction so don’t try anything funny. A few smart people will know ways around this, and everyone else will just suffer.

Will crypto ever live up to its potential? Only time will tell - since they’ve banned every other method of forecasting things.

1: We now have a “report comment” button! If someone posts a terrible comment, click the three dots after “Reply”:

…and choose “Report Comment” on the menu. This will send it to me so I can check if it merits a banning. Remember, ACX rules are that comments should be at least two of polite, relevant, and plausibly-true-according-to-me. This means I do not generally delete comments for being false (ie “misinformation”) unless they are also rude or irrelevant. However, I may also unprincipledly delete comments that bring shame and/or negative media attention upon this blog, depending on how much shame and negative media attention I’m up for that particular day. And I may occasionally delete comments I think are stupid and lowering the average level of debate.

2: Some updates to my Predictions for 2022, especially relevant if you’re playing in the related contest: First, I misinterpreted Matt Yglesias’ question about a Q4 2021 recession as being about a Q4 2022 recession, so my prediction on it is dumb and you should ignore it - for your own contest entries, please predict the Q4 2021 recession, as Matt did. Second, for unclear reasons I gave the wrong current floor value for Bored Apes; I will be judging the prediction on whether they end up lower than the real floor price as of last week ($320K), not whether they end up lower than the false number I gave. Sam and Eric can weigh in on how they’re going to judge this in the contest.

3: Somebody sent in an ACX Grant application saying they didn’t want any money, but they wanted data on my grantmaking process for their study on what makes teams succeed. I took this out of my pile intending to come back to it after the grants round, and then I lost it. If that was you, please send me an email at scott@slatestarcodex.com reminding me what I can do for you.

4: Remember, if you won an ACX Grant I am willing to provide updates and advertisements for your project on Open Threads. ACX Grants winner Yoram Bauman writes:

One paragraph summary of Jan 2022 progress on #climate24x7 (advancing smart climate efforts in the legislature and/or via 2024 ballot measures in at least 7 states): In Nebraska, climate-concerned R state senator John McCollister introduced LB944, a short 3-page bill that cuts the regressive 5.5% state sales tax rate on electricity once electric utilities hit certain carbon intensity targets; see these one-pagers. We have a page of potential improvements based feedback from utility folks and others and are anticipating a public hearing in late February or early March. A similar idea is making progress in South Dakota, where a D legislator has expressed interest in similar legislation, and in Arizona, where I’ve hired Autumn Johnson of Tierra Strategy to pursue this; we’ve written one-pagers and draft legislation, she’s gotten fairly positive feedback from utilities, enviros, and legislative staff, and we’re doing our best to find a House member to introduce legislation before the cut-off of Friday Feb 4. In Utah we continue to work on the signature-gathering plan for the Clean The Darn Air 2024 ballot measure effort; we also anticipate the introduction of a similar bill in this year’s legislative session. Also trying to push forward with ideas or exploratory conversations in Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Michigan. Additional funding would help extend Autumn’s contract and help push forward faster in Nebraska, South Dakota, and elsewhere! From Yoram Bauman (yoram@standupeconomist.com, @standupecon)

5: In the comment section of Why Do I Suck?, someone linked this Scholars’ Stage post on Why Public Intellectuals Have Short Shelf Lives, which I found interesting.

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• Macro structure: HODLer buying has soften recently with this month’s price pull back, however long term holders remain in a region of peak accumulation. Structurally we are still in a bullish macro region. Despite bearish price action the underlying structure has no signs of a bear market.

• Short term: HODLers have been buying the dip. Coins are moving off the exchanges. Coins held by HODLers have been rising, recovering from recent weakness. Our on-chain Supply Shock valuation model implies BTC is presently trading at a $6k+ discount.

• Data from derivative exchanges is showing an uptick in demand, a bullish divergence has formed suggesting the bottom may be in.

• BTC price action expectation: Price recovery from lows with further consolidation over the weeks of December.

• Price action conviction: Medium.

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Scenario 2: OPEN below 4504. I think this scenario could be bearish one especially if we fail to take out 4504 within the IB period + trade below 4480. IB is the first hour of trade. In this case my target will be 4462. An impulse move may test NFP lows around 4440.

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2. If that was not enough, there is a lot of news flow and event risk. At this point, a strong NFP is a liability. A weak NFP may be good for stocks but should not be at the cost of sagging wage inflation.

3. Expecting balance conditions unless a close above or below my 4536 or 4480.

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Gideon's Substack

Requiem For a Liberal Internationalism That Never Really Was

Chamber of the United Nations Security Council…

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4 years ago · 7 likes · Noah Millman

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Winter Bear #4394Winter Bears

Winter Bears is a collection of 10,000 adorable and unique polar bear NFTs available on the Ethereum blockchain. One Winter Bears token is your ticket to future drops, events, and much much more. Joi…

Created by WinterBearsDeployerView on OpenSea

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