pablo@stafforini.

com
Astral Sign
Not subscribed Codexout Ten Subscribe Help

ACX
...
Grants Results
13 hr ago 125 150
Thanks to everyone who participated in ACX Grants, whether as an applicant, an evaluator,
or a funder.

Before I announce awardees, a caveat: this was hard in lots of ways I didn't expect. I got 656
applications addressing different problems and requiring different skills to judge. I'll write
a long post on it later, but the part I want to emphasize now is: if I didn't grant you money,
it doesn't mean I didn't like your project. Sometimes it meant I couldn't find someone
qualified to evaluate it. Other times a reviewer was concerned that if you were successful,
your work might be used by terrorists / dictators / AI capabilities researchers / Republicans
and cause damage in ways you couldn't foresee. Other times it meant it was a better match
for some other grant organization and I handed it off to them.

Still other times, my grant reviewers tied themselves up in knots with 4D chess logic like "if
they're smart enough to attempt this project, they're smart enough to know about XYZ
Grants which is better suited for them, which means they're mostly banking on XYZ
funding and using you as a backup, but if XYZ doesn't fund these people then that's strong
evidence that they shouldn't be funded, so even though everything about them looks
amazing, please reject them." I have no idea if things really work this way, but I needed
some experienced grant reviewers on board and they were all like this. I took these
considerations seriously and in some marginal cases they prevented funding.

My point is, (almost) all of you are great. But only some of you are great and also going to
get money, and your names are below.

I’m still getting slight updates on the amount of funding available. Some of you may notice
you’re getting more money than I told you in the private email I sent you, because a few
funders increased their contributions last-minute. There is a very small chance that some
people may decrease their contributions last minute, in which case I may have to decrease
some of these numbers again. If that happens I will try to make it up to you however I can. I
estimate the chance of this as less than 5%, so I’m not waiting on this to settle before
announcing results.

Without further ado:

ACX Grants Awardees

Pedro Silva, $60,000, to use in silico reverse screening and molecular dynamics simulations
to discover the targets of seven promising natural antibiotics and to try to develop wider-
spectrum derivatives. Antibiotic resistant infections kill a 5-6 digit number of people each
year, and this is the kind of basic research that could lead to new drugs somewhere down
the line.

Troy Davis, $10,000, to help fund his campaign for approval voting in Seattle. Approval
voting is one of the approximately 100% of voting systems better than the one we currently
use, with the potential to defuse partisanship and let people support outsider candidates
without "wasting their vote". Campaigns to switch to alternative voting systems have
recently succeeded in several US cities, most notably St. Louis, and Troy thinks Seattle's
time has come. You can read more about his efforts at Seattle Approves or see the
discussion here. He wants your help getting this on the November 2022 ballot, especially
from Washington State residents (email, donation link)

Michael Sklar, $100,000, to automate part of the FDA approval process. Statisticians spend
a lot of time designing faster and more efficient studies, but drug companies who want to
use one of these creative study designs need the FDA's permission. Right now that's hard
because FDA statisticians need to analyze it manually which takes a long time. Sklar is a
statistics postdoc at Stanford working on mathematical techniques to model study design.
He would like to create programs that FDA statisticians can use to quickly understand how
a study works and have an opinion on it. He's given talks to the FDA and they seem
interested. If he can make the program and the FDA can adopt it, that might make drug
companies feel more secure proposing novel trial designs and make the approval process
faster and easier. Sklar is also seeking a programmer with experience in cloud computing; if
interested, please email sklarm@stanford.edu to receive further details on the project and
compensation. He also has room for more funding.

Alice Evans, $60,000, for sabbatical and travel to fund her research and associated book on
"the Great Gender Divergence", ie why some countries developed gender equality norms
while others didn't. A large body of research shows that gender equality, aside from its
moral benefits, is also deeply important for economic development. Dr. Evans is an expert
on the interaction of gender, history, and economics, whose work has been cited on BBC, Al
Jazeera, and Sky News. She blogs here and podcasts here.

Trevor Klee, $20,000, to help with pharmacokinetic modeling of a possible treatment for
neurodegenerative and autoimmune diseases in advance of phase 1 trials. You may have
already read some of Trevor's excellent essays on pharmacology, and I look forward to
reading more about his successes and failures leading his new pharmaceutical startup. He's
looking for a technical cofounder/CSO who's interested in drug repurposing,
neurodegeneration, or autoimmune diseases. If that sounds like you or someone you know,
please reach out through https://highwaypharm.com/

Yoram Bauman, $50,000, to help fund his campaign for economically literate climate
change solutions. Bauman was the sponsor of the 2016 Washington carbon tax ballot
initiative, which failed by a small margin. Now he's built up a coalition of economists,
environmentalists, and friendly politicians to try to get climate measures passed or on the
ballot in seven states by 2024. Bauman is the world's only “stand-up economist”, and also on
track to be the world's only person to win a bet with Bryan Caplan. You can follow or
donate to the effort he’s part of in Utah at CleanTheDarnAir.org, connect via email or
twitter to chat about Nebraska, South Dakota, Arizona, Michigan, or your favorite state
(yoram@standupeconomist.com, @standupecon), or sign up for overall updates and see
comedy videos at https://standupeconomist.com/videos/.

Nuño Sempere, $10,000, to fund his continued work on https://metaforecast.org/ and the
@metaforecast bot. The website aims to be an easy way to search for predictions on a given
topic; the bot aims to predict, resolve, and tally predictions and bets made by other people.
People actually in the forecasting space (unlike me, who is just a poseur) who I talked to
described really appreciating Nuño's work, and thought this was a valuable extension to the
Internet's general forecasting infrastructure. Nuño is also a researcher at the Quantified
Uncertainty Research Institute and the author of a monthly forecasting/prediction markets
newsletter.

D, $5,000, to help interview for CS professor positions. D is a PhD student at a top

university, with interests in EA and x-risk. He's ready to go on the professorship interview
circuit, and thinks he could do a better job if he had some money to help with travel
expenses and lost income beyond what schools already cover. If he gets it, he thinks there's
a decent chance he could end up teaching CS at a top college. Everyone with experience in
movement-building says that getting your members into top positions at top colleges is
important, and this is a surprisingly cheap opportunity to make that happen.
Delia Grace, $30,000, to begin work aimed at bringing mobile slaughterhouses to Uganda.
Ugandan farms are being devastated by African Swine Fever, and farmers are currently
incentivized to sell their sick pigs to people who don't know they're sick, spreading the
disease around the country. A system of dedicated mobile slaughterhouses could change the
incentives and help arrest the spread of disease. Delia is a veterinarian, epidemiologist, and
senior scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya.

Nell Watson, $1,000, to work on a hazard symbol for endocrine disruptors. Endocrine
disruptors are chemicals found in plastics and other artificial products that mimic natural
hormones and probably contribute to obesity and other health issues. Eleanor says she is
less interested in money than in spreading the word, so I am giving her a token grant and a
link to her website https://www.endohazard.org/

The Oxfendazole Development Group, $150,000, to develop oxfendazole. This is a next-

generation antiparasitic drug which may one day replace albendazole and mebendazole, the
current choices for deworming. Several hundred million children worldwide suffer from
parasitic worm infections; this certainly affects their health, and a growing body of research
suggests it might affect their cognitive ability, educational attainment, and future income.
GiveWell endorses deworming as one of the most effective charitable interventions; the
successful development of new antiparasitics would further this effort. Oxfendazole has
done well in early studies and this group wants to follow them up in the hopes of eventually
getting FDA approval. To learn more or send a donation, see this site

NA, $90,000, to buy a year of his time. NA is an experienced Australian political operative
"on a first name basis with multiple federal politicians". You might remember some of his
comments and stories from the ACX comment section, where he goes by AshLael. He's
interested in using his expertise to promote effective altruism, either by lobbying directly or
by training EAs in how to produce political change. I have no idea what to do with him
right now but I am going to figure it out and then do it. If you're in EA and have a good idea
how to use this opportunity, please let me know.

The Segura Lab at Duke, $50,000, to continue work on materials that promote healthy
tissue regrowth after stroke. They say their experiments are difficult to fund because
regrowing dead brain tissue is a long shot that requires a lot of out of the box thinking and
is hard to explain. If you want to learn more about their work, check out
http://seguralab.duke.edu. If you’re a stroke survivor and want to share your story, they’d like
you to check out their Patient Connection page. They’re also looking for help spreading
their ideas. If you have knowledge of both science and writing/visual communication, apply
to work with them here; if you want to donate, you can do so here.
1DaySooner and Rethink Priorities, $17,500, to research public attitudes around human
challenge trials. Human challenge trials are studies where scientists deliberately try to
infect volunteers with a disease to see if a treatment can prevent or cure it. They're much
faster than waiting for people to get the disease naturally, and could have significantly
shortened the wait for coronavirus vaccines. But they're controversial and nobody was able
to get approval to do a challenge trial for COVID until 2021, which is why we had to wait so
long for good treatment. Preliminary research suggests lots of people support these trials; I
think building common knowledge of this is a first step towards making them available
during future pandemics. Rethink Priorities is a respected effective altruist research
organization. 1Day Sooner is a group lobbying for challenge trials. They’re currently
seeking $10 million to use challenge studies to develop a universal coronavirus vaccine.
Email josh@1daysooner.org if you can help

Spencer Greenberg, $40,000, as seed money for his project to produce rapid replications of
high-impact social science papers. Right now, when a new social science paper comes out,
we often have to wait as long as several months to discover that it was false. Spencer and his
team dream of a world where we can learn that almost immediately, soon enough that it's
within the same news cycle and the journals involved feel kind of bad about it. This money
will sponsor a pilot, after which he’ll be seeking additional funding - if you think you can
help, you can reach him here. Spencer's been involved in rationality and EA about as long as
either has existed, blogs at Optimize Everything, is the founder of
ClearerThinking.org (which offers free digital tools related to rationality, decision-making
and happiness) and runs the Clearer Thinking podcast, with guests including Daniel
Kahneman, Tyler Cowen, and Sam Bankman-Fried.

Nils Kraus, $40,000, to experiment with new ways of measuring precision weighting in
humans. The precision-weighting of mental predictions is one of the absolute basics of the
predictive coding model of the mind, but we know very little about it and have trouble
testing hypotheses about how it works. Nils wants to compare and refine some of the
leading candidate ideas and hopefully put this whole field on firmer ground. He is currently
finishing up his PhD at Psychologische Hochschule Berlin and Freie Universität Berlin.

Alfonso Escudero, $75,000, to create a platform for scientific collaborations. Alfonso and
his team already made something like this for COVID research, which got 40,000 scientists
to sign up, matched collaborator requests to experts willing to help, and resulted in some
useful papers. Now they want to expand this model to other types of science. My father has
been stalled on an important research project for years for lack of the right kind of
statistician; Crowdfight (or whatever the final name turns out to be) aims to take requests
like this and process them within 72 hours. I regret only being able to fund this at the
minimum level, but I'm pretty sure that once they're up and running they'll be able to prove
their value to richer people's satisfaction. You can also contribute by donating, by joining
their community (if you want to be matched with scientists who might need your expertise)
or, if you’re a professional scientist, by using their service to find a collaborator (it's free).

D, $10,000, to support him taking some time between his masters and PhD to re-orient,
learn some new skills, and maybe end up choosing a better topic to do his thesis on. D
studies the evolution of aging, and is interested in things like why seemingly-similar species
of rockfish have lifespans ranging "from a decade to a couple centuries". He thinks this
extra time would help direct him into higher-value areas of his field.

Nikos Bosse, $5,000, to seed a wiki about forecasting. Articles would include technical
topics like scoring rules, interviews with superforecasters, and links to existing prediction
markets and forecasting platforms. Think the Investopedia or Bogleheads of investing in
prediction markets. This is another leg of my "improve forecasting infrastructure" goal
area. Nikos is a PhD student working on infectious disease forecasting. If you think you can
help with the wiki, email him at nikosbosse@gmail.com.

L, $17,000, to breed a line of beetles that can digest plastic. Darkling beetles (and their
associated gut microbes) can already do this a little. Maybe if someone selectively bred them
for this ability, they could do it better. Plastic is generally considered bad for the
environment because it's "not biodegradable", but maybe everything is biodegradable if you
have sufficiently advanced beetles. This project will find out!

Morgan Rivers, $30,000, to help ALLFED improve modeling of food security during global
catastrophes. ALLFED studies the effects of major disasters - nuclear wars, pandemics,
economic collapses - on the food supply. If the disaster blotted out the sun or paralyzed the
technological-economic infrastructure underpinning food production and delivery, millions
more could die of starvation. ALLFED tries to develop solutions, from high-tech stuff like
"produc[ing] high quality protein from natural gas and sugar from forest biomass" and low-
tech stuff like relocating crops farming and eating more seaweed. Their current project is to
update the National Disaster Preparedness Baseline Assessment program, which is "used
widely to assess and prioritize responses to disasters globally", to better model food shocks
- raising awareness and making it easier for large organizations to think about them.
ALLFED is also looking for more funding for many other projects.

Jimmy Koppel, $40,000, to support his work on intelligent tutoring systems. We know 1-
on-1 tutoring is the best way to learn, but human tutoring doesn't scale to the number of
students who need it. Computer tutoring systems can ask questions, identify areas where
people need to improve, and notice/respond to specific error patterns. I was originally
skeptical about this but reading things like this essay have gotten me excited. Pure AI
tutoring is hard because "it takes 300 hours to develop 1 hour of intelligent tutoring system
curriculum", so Jimmy is working on a hybrid model where computers do lots of the work
but there's still a human in the loop. Jimmy has a PhD in computer science from MIT and
currently runs a company doing advanced training for professional software engineers.

Allison Berke, $100,000, for biosecurity work at Stanford. Biosecurity is the study of
protecting against pandemics, bioweapons, and other biological threats. Despite the
growing importance of this field, there are relatively few technical biosecurity centers in the
US, and the West Coast is underrepresented. This causes serious problems like poor
pandemic readiness, limited understanding of biowarfare risks, and the biosecurity grad
student who I'm dating living 3,000 miles away from me. A group of Stanford professors
wants to solve at least the first two problems by gradually building a new biosecurity hub
there. This grant would help fund a few grad students in the hopes that bigger funders
would follow. If you're interested in research on the technological aspects of biosecurity,
such as new models of pathogen sensing or encrypted sharing of genetic sequences, please
email aberke@stanford.edu

Jeffrey Hsu, $50,000, to support his startup Ivy Natal. Ivy Natal works on in vitro
gametogenesis, the process of turning ordinary cells into gametes like egg cells. This would
solve a lot of infertility problems, remove the need for difficult egg freezing cycles, and
allow same-sex couples to have biological children; it would also allow some more exciting
forms of embryo screening. Jeffrey has a PhD in molecular medicine and did his
postdoctoral research at the Cleveland Clinic; Ivy Natal has raised initial capital from Indie
Bio and is advised by George Church.

Legal Impact For Chickens, $72,000, to help kickstart their project of suing factory farms
that violate animal cruelty laws or otherwise expose themselves to legal action. They write:
"If we sue a company that kills 100 million chickens a year, then success would mean
incrementally improving the lives of a significant number (perhaps 80 million) of these
chickens". Alene, their founder, graduated from Harvard Law School and is a veteran of
animal welfare campaigns at PETA, ALDF, and the Good Food Institute. My review team
said this was an unusually high-impact animal welfare opportunity; if you’d like to donate
too, you can do so at https://www.legalimpactforchickens.org/donate .

M, $100,000, for a project involving CRISPR "spellchecking" of tissues. The team behind
this prefer not to have all the details public, but they're very smart people with a really neat
idea and hopefully I'll be able to release more information at some point.
Alex Hoekstra, $100,000, for the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (RaDVaC) to
make open-source modular affordable vaccines. They've made a coronavirus vaccine which
about fifty people (mostly scientists and biohackers) have self-administered, though there's
no hard data on whether or not it works. They don't have regulatory agency approval for
anything and probably won't get it, and they cannot sell their vaccine - the only way to get it
is to manufacture it in your lab (or home lab) from the blueprints they make available. So
what's the pitch for them being useful? First, global inaccessibility of vaccines has been a
problem in past and present pandemics and will probably continue; RadVaC thinks their
open source model might “drive up vaccine access, diversity, and security in the future”.
Second, if there's ever a pandemic much worse than COVID - super-Ebola or whatever - I'm
not waiting nine months for the FDA to have the right number of meetings, neither is
anyone else, and I think we’ll all be grateful if we previously built the capacity to have a
vaccine production group that moves fast and breaks things. Third, I think it's possible that
their comparative freedom lets them come up with something genuinely better than Big
Pharma, at which point hopefully it will encourage or embarrass Big Pharma into stealing it
(did you know RaDVaC offers nasal spray coronavirus vaccines?) Fourth, I think it has
positive...let's say "moral"...effects for people to know that ordinary people can do the same
things big corporations do, and that it's possible (and sometimes even legal) to innovate
without getting anyone's permission first. RaDVaC still needs more funding (go here to
donate) and are looking for collaborators with experience in open-source development
(RaDVaC wants to build infrastructure for decentralized vaccine R&D, including:
construction of standards for sourcing, production, & testing; data-sharing platforms; and
other online & accessible scientific tools). Reach out to them here. You can read more about
RaDVaC's work here, here, here, here, and here, and find their YouTube channel here.

Beny Falkovich, $25,000, to fund his work on a platform for screening compounds to find
potential new psychiatric drugs. Despite this space being littered with the skulls of the
people who tried it before him, he thinks that new imaging technology he is helping
develop can make it possible. Beny is a 3rd year PhD student in the Bathe lab at MIT; he
comments on ACX as "Chebky", and he's the brother of Jacob of Putanumonit.

Siddhartha Roy, $25,000, for citizen surveillance of pathogens in drinking water. Some
pathogens, notably legionella, grow in water pipes. There's not a lot of scientific or legal
structure for monitoring them, and this team wants to solve this by sending kits to
volunteer citizens who will use them to test their tap water. This is useful for avoiding
legionella outbreaks, but my reviewers were most impressed by its ability to scale to other
things and raise citizen awareness of pathogen detection. Dr. Roy is a Virginia Tech
research scientist who helped uncover the Flint water crisis.
Nathan Young, $5,000, to fund his continued work writing Metaculus questions and trying
to build bridges between the forecasting and effective altruist communities. Nathan is a
Metaculus moderator, the author of a prediction market blog I've used as a source before,
and has useful connections with people who might be convinced to use formal forecasting
methods for their organizations. This grant is a vote of confidence in him to continue this
work, and another part of my effort to fund more forecasting infrastructure. You can read
his newsletter, the UK Policy Forecast, here. If you have suggestions for forecasting
questions he asks that you DM him on twitter or add them to this open Google doc.

Will Jarvis and Lars Doucet, $55,000, to create an automated land value assessment model
for two Pennsylvania counties. You all know Lars as the guy who keeps writing guest posts
here about Georgism. Now he wants to take it to the next level and start building tools for
the Georgist future. This program would act as proof of concept that counties can assess
land value relatively easily and accurately. I was on the fence about funding it because they
can create a beautiful program with 100% success and then counties can just continue to
not be Georgist for the same reasons as usual. I'm going ahead with it because I trust Lars
who believes this is the best way forward, and because it seems like the sort of thing that
could eventually grow into a Georgist think tank at some point in the future. They’re
interested in talking to anyone who has experience in mass appraisal, Georgist or not, as
well as applied data scientists and machine learning researchers. Fill out this form here if
that’s you. You can follow their progress at https://gameofrent.com/

Michael Todhunter, $40,000, to continue work on automating testing cell culture media.
Several of my biologist reviewers gave assessments like "I'm not sure anyone will use this,
except for me personally I WOULD LOVE THIS SO MUCH". Michael himself describes
this project as "unsexy", but annoying cell culture media trial-and-error is part of a big
fraction of biology experiments, and anything that makes it go faster is a big force
multiplier for a lot of other things. Michael's postdoc is ending and he needs funding to
continue this work; mine will last him a few months, but he says he has room for lots more.
If you'd like to learn more about this project and or discuss funding, please contact
mtsowbug@gmail.com; there will also be a website up at https://www.todhunter.dev/ in a
few days.

SD, $5,000, to fund an honors' thesis on neutrino research. S is an undergraduate who

wants to work on neutrino physics with one of his professors, but needs outside funding to
be sure it will work. He thinks if he can get this thesis, he's more likely to be able to get into
a neutrino physics grad school program and continue this career. He's interested in the
applications of neutrinos for nuclear disarmament; illegal fuel enrichment produces
neutrinos which could theoretically be detected from thousands of miles away, reducing the
need for dictators to eg let in UN inspectors. I think the potential value of adding one more
person to this field is pretty high and this seems like a cheap way to do it.

James Grugett, Stephen Grugett and Austin Chen, $20,000, for a new prediction market. If
every existing prediction market is Lawful Good, this team proposes the Chaotic Evil
version: anyone can submit a question, questions can be arbitrarily subjective, and the
resolution is decided by the submitter, no appeal allowed. And the submitter/decider gets a
small cut (1%?) of the money traded on the question. I honestly have no idea how this would
play out. Certainly it would incentivize lots of people to write lots of great questions and
promote them widely. It sort of incentivizes a strategy of always deciding fairly so you get a
good reputation and more people use your questions - but also sort of a strategy of doing
that for a while to build up credibility before betraying people, making false rulings, and
stealing all their crypto (of course it's crypto). The part I'm most fascinated by is the idea of
not-necessarily-super-objective resolution criteria - we could have markets in things like
"Will the Democrats' agenda succeed [according to Scott]?" They think a clear use case is
minor Internet celebrities using their brand to make and shill markets related to their
interests, since these people at least have some reputational reasons not to take the money
and run. They have a play-money beta version up at https://mantic.markets/

S, $10,000, to support his political career. The first way I'm supporting his political career
is by not naming him here or giving any further details.

Erik Mohlhenrich, $6,000, for work on Seeds of Science, a scientific journal which publishes
articles that are nontraditional in content or style with peer review conducted through
voting and commenting by a community of "gardeners" (free to join, visit this page for
details). Mohlhenrich has been exploring the role of amateurs in science, most recently
in this journal article (non-conflict of interest note: the article mentions the SSC Surveys as
an example of good amateur science, but this grant decision was made primarily by an
outside reviewer). He also writes under the name Roger's Bacon at Secretum Secretorum.

Stuart Buck, $50,000, to help launch the Good Science Project, “a science policy think tank
that will focus on essays, blog posts, videos, and other public advocacy about how to
improve science funding in the US.” Buck was VP of Research at Arnold Ventures, helped
start the Center for Open Science, and has lectured at DARPA and IARPA and written
pieces for Science and Nature. You can read more about his philosophy of science funding
here or follow @GoodSciProject for updates.

Kartik Akileswaran and Jonathan Mazumdar, $75,000, for Growth Teams, a group that
supports low-income countries in developing economic growth. They believe that there's
no one-size-fits-all solution to development and the most helpful intervention is to give
countries experts who stay there over the long run, try to understand their priorities, and
help them chart their own course and build their own decision-making capacity. They have
a team with lots of history working in development, a country interested in cooperating
with them, and my reviewers say that their approach makes a lot of sense. They also need a
lot more funding, so if any of you have a spare $150,000 lying around, please let them know.

Other Ways Grants Might Still Get Funded

…via the Long Term Future Fund: This is an EA grants program that volunteered to
evaluate and judge all applications that had anything to do with AI or the rationalist and
effective altruist communities. They have more grant-making expertise and more money
than I do, so I was happy to send those applications their way without considering them
further. If you sent in an AI or rationalist/EA community-related grant and didn’t see your
name above, don’t despair! LTFF hasn’t made their decisions yet, so I’m not able to
announce these at the same time as the others. When they’re done, I’ll make sure you know.

…via investors: Two grant applications seemed really excellent, but beyond my price range
and probably more suitable for traditional investment. I’ve started the process of
connecting both to investors, but this is sensitive enough that I’m not going to list their
names here yet. If you’re in this category, I’ve already told you about it by email.

…via ACX Grants + : This is the part where I sent your grants around to interested rich
people and foundations, and let them decide if they wanted to fund some on their own.
Unfortunately, rich people and foundations don’t have huge amounts of time to evaluate
grants on super-short notice around the Christmas season, so I haven’t heard back from
many of them yet. I know of two projects that are on track to get funded this way. but I
don’t have permission to talk about them here yet. Your funders should be reaching out to
you shortly.

…via ACX Grants ++: This is the part where I post applications publicly on the blog (if you
gave me permission) and readers can look at them and decide to support them or not. About
500 of you gave me permission to do this, and your applications together total about 1,500
pages of text. Substack probably won’t let me write a blog post this long, and you guys won’t
read it even if I do, so I’m still thinking about how I want to handle this. Please give me
until sometime in January to work something out, but rest assured, I haven’t forgotten
about this.

Networking Or Something
Many people said that the true value of Emergent Ventures and other mini grant programs
was the opportunity to be part of a network and make use of the funder’s non-financial
resources. Unfortunately I have no idea how to set this up and I’m not sure I have a lot of
non-financial resources. So here’s what I can offer:

If any awardee (including people who get funded via LTFF, Grants+, or investors) needs a
message or advertisement broadcast - you’re looking for more funding, you’re looking for
employees, you want everyone to gaze in awe at the cool thing you’ve developed - please
send me an email with your message, and I’ll signal-boost it on an Open Thread. I will do
this at least once for everyone, maybe more if I don’t feel like you’re abusing the privilege.

If you do your project and it works, or doesn’t work, and you learn something interesting
(including “man, this was harder than I thought”) and you think other people would be
interested, you can pitch me your essay. If I like it, I may publish it as an ACX post. This
isn’t meant to be a demand or an exchange-in-kind for getting the money; I’m expecting
fewer than 10% of awardees to take me up on this. But you can if you want. I have high
standards and expect not to publish most posts pitched to me.

Everyone else who’s done this has created some kind of group where awardees can talk to
each other. I will probably get around to this too, though I’m kind of confused by the whole
idea. Why would somebody working on biochemistry want to talk to someone working on
political activism just because they got a grant from the same person? Once I figure this out
what people expect to get from this I’ll create some structure that maximizes my ability to
give it to them.

If you’d like an introduction to someone I can plausibly introduce you to, let me know. And
if there’s anything else I can do for you, let me know that too.

How To Get Your Money

I don’t know yet, I’m still waiting for an answer from the people who are going to handle
this for me. When I know, I’ll send you all an email. I’m expecting this to be sometime in
early January. If you need the money before then, contact me at
scott[at]slatestarcodex[dot]com and we’ll figure something out informally.

Acknowledgments
This was a ridiculous thing for me to try to do, and I ended up way out of my depth (I’ll
write more about why later). Everything worked out okay anyway (so far! I think!) because
many people rescued me and handled the parts I couldn’t. I got permission to include most
people’s names, but when I forgot or haven’t heard back, I’m thanking them anyway by
initials. If anyone is unhappy with how they’re represented here (either you want your name
off, or you want me to add it in) please email me.

Oliver Habryka of Lightcone Infrastructure helped explain how grants work, connect me to
everyone else, and ensure I didn’t have to rely on my own experience, good judgment, or
other things I don’t have. He is also part of the Long-Term Future Fund and has taken over
my AI grant evaluation work along with Asya Bergal and the rest of the LTFF team.

The Effective Altruism Funds team handled most of the financial infrastructure for me.
Thanks especially to Sam Deere, Jonas Vollmer, Helena Dias, and Chloe Malone for
handling my increasingly frantic questions that I needed immediate responses to over the
holiday season.

I originally planned to spend $250,000 on these grants; this came partly from subscribers
like you, partly from unsolicited gifts from rich patrons, and partly from someone who paid
an unexpectedly large amount for an NFT of a blog post. Thanks to everyone involved in
helping me have this extra money.

But I was also able to get another $1.3 million (!) from extremely generous outside funders,
of whom only two would let me reveal their names: Vitalik Buterin and Misha Gurevich.
Thank you Vitalik, Misha, and other anonymous people!

Evaluating applications was much harder than I expected, and I was saved by several teams
of people who agreed to read over some large fraction of 656 grant applications for free or at
least for much less money than they deserved. These include: Merrick Smela, Ruth Hook,
Samira Nedungadi, Tessa Alexanian, and AG for Biology; Kieran Greig for Animals; Clay
Graubard for Forecasting; José Luis Ricón for Science & Progress; Andrew Martin for
Global Health & Development, [anonymous] for Politics, Misha Gurevich for everything I
could force him to read, and a few other people who gave me miscellaneous advice on
specific proposals. I made all final decisions and you shouldn’t blame these people if I got
something wrong.

Tyler Cowen gave me publicity and good advice at several points, along with bad advice at
one point (he said it would be “great fun”).

656 of you took a risk and bared your secret dreams before a random blogger you barely
knew. You faced a barrage of dumb follow-up questions, demands for extra information on
short deadlines, and the possibility of rejection (sorry! I can’t emphasize enough that I
rejected many of them for reasons unrelated to their inherent goodness). You were the core
of this project and I’m suitably grateful.
This was one of the harder things I’ve tried and it’s not quite finished. Insofar as it works,
it’s thanks to hard work by these people and many others I forgot to mention. I think we
accomplished something good here and I have a lot of hope that some of these projects will
go on to do great things for the world. Deep and sincere thanks to everyone involved!

Subscribe to Astral Codex Ten

By Scott Alexander · Thousands of subscribers
P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.

pablo@stafforini.com Subscribe

125 150 Share

Discussion
Write a comment…
Chronological

zirkafett 13 hr ago
Such an impressive and inspiring range of projects. I am excited to live in the world where
these dreams become reality. What a cool project, Scott.
Reply
WeDoTheodicyInThisHouse 13 hr ago
Yes. And people seeing these get funded and what happens as a consequence may well
be amazing. :)
Reply
Aaron Simpson Writes Aaron Simpson · 12 hr ago
Definitely bookmarking this post. Excited to follow up over the next few months and
years to see where a lot of them end up :)
Reply
Matthew SS Writes Axioms Of Dominion · 11 hr ago
Scott has some interesting thoughts outside the mainstream such that I am
tentatively excited for some of these grants. If 20%+ end up paying off at least
somewhat that would considerably raise the prestige and interest in later ACX
grants I'd think.
 I assume Scott has already done a forecasting success thing that he will reveal
some years from now about which ones he feels most confident about. Of course
like start ups having a 1 or even 2 in 10 hit rate is actually quite good.
Reply
Gwern Branwen Writes Gwern.net Newsletter · 12 hr ago
I love the beetle one. Can we make that an ACX meme somehow?
(I also like that a nuclear war one showed up. EAers have always rated nuclear war and
pandemic/bioterrorism as two of the 3 worst existential risks, but generally had an
attitude that those two big problems were mostly better left to establishment
government & science. Covd-19 suggests that this may have been misplaced confidence
when it came to public health; perhaps we have misplaced confidence in the other one
too.)
Reply
Matthew SS Writes Axioms Of Dominion · 11 hr ago
Finally a scientific advance related to insects that doesn't require me to eat them!
Here's hoping it works.
Reply
Nick H 10 hr ago
Amen.
Reply
Paul Goodman 7 hr ago
Half of me loves the beetle one and half of me is thinking, if 20 years from now
we're looking back on this and one of these has gone horribly wrong it's going to be
that one.
Reply
Arbituram 3 hr ago
I specifically came here to say the same thing - these are generally great, but the
plastic beetle one seems the most perfect fit for this kind of grant. Some smart
biologist just needs a bit of funding for some equipment to keep beetles in; low
probability of success, potentially hugely impactful.
To address a comment below, I'm not too concerned about catastrophic risk on this
one as the plastic itself is unlikely to be nourishing enough to sustain explosive
population growth. Perhaps the ideal outcome is that there is some kind of cheap
spray that makes the plastic much more digestible to the beetles, thereby
controlling spread (but that's a problem that only happens if this project is *wildly*
successful).
Reply
Glen Raphael 1 hr ago
 Covid-19 has boosted my skepticism of establishment government & science so
much as to make me fear for the entire EA project - I feel like if we don't find a way
to address rampant demosclerosis nothing else matters, nothing else will work. I'd
feel a lot happier if any of Scott's grants or Zvi's grants explicitly addressed the
issue. Or if I had an idea of my OWN to address it - I might then have applied for a
grant myself!
I just keep noticing that in areas of concern for which people successfully "raise
awareness" the government's response is to build a bureaucracy to "address" the
issue...and that bureaucracy near-inevitably makes the problem WORSE.
The TSA, created to make travel statistically safer, makes airports SO "safe" as to
become so inconvenient/expensive/annoying it causes more people to drive instead
of fly. The increased driving means more car accidents; net effect (at least on the
current margin) is to make travel statistically less safe.
Nuclear power regulations, created to make power generation safer, require SO
MUCH "safety" that nuclear power plants are unaffordable and take too long to
develop, so states end up relying more on coal/oil/gas for baseline power. Which is
more polluting and kills more people (mining accidents and air pollution); net effect
is to make power generation less safe.
The FDA/CDC/WHO, created to make us healthier, have killed over 100,000
Americans in the last few years (and a great many foreigners) by postponing
vaccine approval, by preventing cheap instant covid tests or challenge tests, by not
letting firms update vaccines to new variants or letting them optimize dosage levels
toExpand
produce more doses or letting them optimize vaccine timing to improve
full comment
effecti
Reply eness etcetera net effect is to make s less health (and fe er of s ali e)
RFlagellum 12 hr ago
I think this whole process is awesome. I am excited to see follow-ups with the projects,
and would also be interested in seeing which projects weren't funded but might still be
interesting, like "runner-ups or honorary ideas". The beetle project and automated /
hybrid tutoring seemed very cool to me; I don't know too much about biotech. but it
would be cool if someone did a project to modify bacteria/insects/algae to be more
nutritious (e.g., altering the taste of crickets or consumable-bacterial-growths) / produce
more energy / consume-convert wastes into useful things.
Reply
Matthew SS Writes Axioms Of Dominion · 11 hr ago
My impression has always been that 4-7 or so, if you select them well, is a superior
option for small scall education creating amazing outcomes. 1 on 1 is well ahead of
1-35 and has some advantages in curriculum tailoring, though.
Reply
Metacelsus Writes De Novo · 13 hr ago
>Despite the growing importance of this field, there are relatively few technical biosecurity
centers in the US, and the West Coast is underrepresented. This causes serious problems like
poor pandemic readiness, limited understanding of biowarfare risks, and the biosecurity grad
student who I'm dating living 3,000 miles away from me.
One of these problems is not like the other ones 😂
Here in Boston, to me it seems like there are lots of biotech people but few biosecurity
specialists. I think they're concentrated around Washington DC.
Reply
Aaron Simpson Writes Aaron Simpson · 12 hr ago
Washington D.C. makes sense. Why is Boston such a biotech hub? My initial hypothesis
is proximity to a certain pair of prestigious universities, but I imagine there could be other
reasons.
Reply
Don P. 11 hr ago
Development at Kendall Square (right behind MIT) has been targeted to biotech for
a few years now. (This may be more of a description than an explanation, or
half/half.)
Reply
Dino 10 hr ago
The universities started it, but then comes clustering effects and targeted
development. We just lost a beloved long-time food market to new lab space.
What's really weird is driving around Cambridge and Watertown seeing billboards
advertising reagents, next to the usual ads for fast food.
Reply
Lambert 3 hr ago
The other Cambridge (uk) is also a biotech hub.
Reply
Will Writes My Bookshelf Runneth Over · 12 hr ago
Congrats Scott!
Reply
Metacelsus Writes De Novo · 12 hr ago
I'm glad to see several worthy projects got funded! I'm especially looking forward to Michael
Todhunter's results.
Reply
Eric Gorlin 12 hr ago
You are a cool dude
Reply
DecipheredStones 12 hr ago
This is delightful to see and makes me feel optimistic about the rationalist community having
a growing, positive impact on the world.
Reply
Erusian 12 hr ago
> This is the part where I post applications publicly on the blog (if you gave me permission)
and readers can look at them and decide to support them or not. About 500 of you gave me
permission to do this, and your applications together total about 1,500 pages of text.
Substack probably won’t let me write a blog post this long, and you guys won’t read it even if
I do, so I’m still thinking about how I want to handle this. Please give me until sometime in
January to work something out, but rest assured, I haven’t forgotten about this.
I have a suggestion here. You have 500 ACX++ grants. I'd first weed out the ones you find
objectionable. That not only do you not want to fund but you think lack merit. Then I'd pair
them in small groups of highly different proposals. Then I'd let each person do a paragraph in
a public Open Thread and tell them to be there to answer questions. The ones who won't
agree are forfeiting their right to be included in ++.
I suspect this will cut down the number significantly. Those that remain will be rationed out
over a year. But in exchange the grantees will get more exposure than people hunting through
2,000 pages or a huge database. And if you like it you can do this on a rolling basis instead of
making it into a huge Christmas nut to be cracked like you did this year. (It'll also give you
more content for however you weigh that.)
Reply
Matthew SS Writes Axioms Of Dominion · 11 hr ago
Seconding this. You need some kind of filter and this one has several advantages.
Reply
Canyon Fern 9 hr ago
Thirding. As one of the 500 people, I would be in favor of some kind of “write an
additional paragraph explaining your project” (perhaps a condensation of the
original proposal) and I definitely want to second of the above commentor
suggestion of an open thread participation for the AC X plus plus people.
Reply
Marvin 2 hr ago
Agreed. As someone with a rather speculative proposal that consumes almost no money
apart from my own time, I was planning to post in an open thread if I didn't get "funded"
anyway. (I already noted in my application that attention and "signal boosting" is more
relevant for my project than money)
Reply
Ivan Fyodorovich 12 hr ago
Earlier today Matthew Yglesias had a tweet about how despite widespread belief that
numerous government institutions failed during the pandemic, there's been virtually no
legislative effort to change anything. So I'm really glad to see ACX putting $100k toward a
better FDA. Trying to fix what's broken instead of just having fun complaining. Hell yeah!
Reply
Ivan Fyodorovich 12 hr ago
Oh, and as a biologist I want to strongly endorse the cell culture media testing project.
This is the exact kind of thing that is 1) really important and 2) in a kind of hole where it's
not the kind of thing any science funding agency would like to fund.
Reply
Arbituram 2 hr ago
Strong agree - this one is tied with the beetle one for best application in my view.
Making the process of doing science less onerous/painful is huge (not to mention
the waste in having extremely smart people spending >50% of their time fiddling
with petri dishes and whatnot, and another 20% writing grant applications...)
Reply
Matthew SS Writes Axioms Of Dominion · 11 hr ago
A lot of the stuff that did fail is just not sexy enough for politics to care. Stuff that might
be handled by MY's "secret congress" but even there not a huge priority.
Reply
Nearcyan 12 hr ago
love everything about this, thank you for putting in so much effort Scott <3
Reply
Benjamin Yeoh Writes Ben Yeoh, Then Do Better · 12 hr ago
This is super amazing work from all involved.
Reply
John Carmack 12 hr ago
This is inspiring!
Reply
Sheikh Abdur Raheem Ali 1 hr ago
Especially so when you consider that the initial announcement was made on November
12
Reply
MetaLevelUp 12 hr ago
"SD, $5,000, to fund an honors' thesis on neutrino research. S is an undergraduate who
wants to work on neutrino physics with one of his professors, but needs outside funding to be
sure it will work."
SD, if you're out there and want any outside help / input / collaboration, please feel free to
reach out. I'm a particle physics postdoc (mostly working on dark matter), know a thing or
two about neutrinos, and think your idea is super interesting and useful. If nothing else I can
connect you with people working in neutrino physics who may be more helpful than me. You
can reach me at
joshaebyATgmailDOTCOM
Reply
SD 9 hr ago · edited 7 hr ago
SD here! I've emailed you - thanks for the help! I always, always appreciate advice from
people who have been doing this for longer than I have.
If anyone else has any input or just wants to talk about the project, feel free to email me
at sd10(at)williams(dot)edu (maybe should have asked Scott to put this in the main post
but I figure I'll do the self-promo thing at some point closer to the time I begin my work,
which should do the trick).
Again, thanks a bunch!
Reply
Kevin 7 hr ago
I've worked on various neutrino experiments during my (ongoing) career as a
particle physicist, though neutrinos aren't my primary focus. Regarding your idea, i
just wanted to make sure you're aware of WATCHMAN:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01132,
http://svoboda.ucdavis.edu/experiments/watchman/,
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/physics/research/particle/neutrino/watchman. (Meant to
be informative, not discouraging - new ideas in this realm or contributions to the
existing project are both valuable!)
Reply
SD 1 hr ago
Yeah, I actually mentioned WATCHMAN (and Nucifer, although I don't think
they take Americans) in my grant application. I want to join them ASAP or at
least work in parallel with them. Thanks!
Reply
Eugene Norman 12 hr ago
Well done Scott. It doesn’t look like being “outed” by the NYT was a bad thing in the end. I
hope to do some small contribution. I’ll also sign up here.
Reply
Anthony Samir 12 hr ago
Thank you for this initiative, Scott. It has surfaced many worthwhile endeavors. It is admirable
that you took on all the related effort, with the help of many supporters and funders.
Reply
robryk 12 hr ago
> if they're smart enough to attempt this project, they're smart enough to know about XYZ
Grants which is better suited for them (...)
This sounds like the grant reviewers assume that "likely to succeed at project" is very
strongly correlated with "able to navigate searching for funding". For some of the projects
that got awarded this sounds eminently sensible to me (e.g. the affect public policy things),
but not for others (e.g. most of biology-adjacent projects). I wonder if I'm wrong about the
latter (i.e. if success at projects that ostensibly are not about influencing people is strongly
correlated with ability to navigate social mazes). Thoughts?
Reply
Mo Nastri Writes Mo’s Reads · 6 hr ago
I think the grant reviewers already took that into account because they're domain
specialists, judging by (for instance) the remark for Todhunter's grant: "I'm not sure
anyone will use this, except for me personally I WOULD LOVE THIS SO MUCH",
seconded by commenter and biologist Ivan Fyodorovich above: "I want to strongly
endorse the cell culture media testing project. This is the exact kind of thing that is 1)
really important and 2) in a kind of hole where it's not the kind of thing any science
funding agency would like to fund"
Reply
Hyperion 2 hr ago
The bigger problem I have with this line of thinking is the assumption that
> if XYZ doesn't fund these people then that's strong evidence that they shouldn't be
funded
If Scott doesn't fund an applicant, is that strong evidence they shouldn't be funded? It
seems obvious the answer is no given the limited amount of people he can fund and the
large number of applicants. Why should this not be true for other grantmakers? The
assumption here seems to be some variant of the just world fallacy where P(is funded |
should be funded) = 1, but it seems more likely that this number is quite low.
Reply
melz 12 hr ago
awesome
Reply
jnlb 12 hr ago
2021: the year when a blog about medicine, rationality, and fighting Moloch funded a research
program about breeding beetles.
Reply
Scott Alexander 11 hr ago
AUTHOR
 If they're good enough for God, they're good enough for me!
https://manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/biological/invertebrates/phylum-
arthropoda/weird-science-inordinate-fondness-beetles
Reply
larsiusprime 11 hr ago
Seriously this is one of the ones I'm most interested in hearing follow-ups about
Reply
Desertopa 12 hr ago
Beetles which can biodegrade plastic strike me as worryingly double-edged. Plus side, plastic
not hanging out in the environment forever is probably better for us, and for the global
ecosystem at large. Minus side, aren't there things made out of plastic where its non-
biodegradingness is essential to their function? Is anyone in charge of knowing the full list of
things which might fail catastrophically if plastic-biodegrading beetles were released into the
environment?
Reply
ana 11 hr ago
My thoughts exactly. Termites (wood eating insects) are a huge problem in some parts of
the world. It would be awful if similar issues arose with plastic.
Reply
Don P. 11 hr ago
"Society will be destroyed by a bug!" ... no, a literal bug.
Reply
Matthew SS Writes Axioms Of Dominion · 11 hr ago
We could always go full on science apocalypse and have an island where we ship
plastics loaded with beetles that eventually results in our destruction when they learn to
cover the distance to the mainland, possibly through micro-evolution. There are worse
apocalyptic scenarios. This one seems almost fun by comparison. Michael Crichton
would have to be simulated on a super-computer to write the novel.
Reply
Scott Alexander 11 hr ago
AUTHOR
According to the application, the beetles can only get a small amount of their
subsistence from plastic and wouldn't be very good at this in any case. What the
researcher actually wants is the gut microbes, with the hopes that once we understand
them better we can figure out some way to use them at scale. Breeding the beetles in a
plastic-enriched environment is a means to get better microbes. The microbes
presumably can't escape the beetles without human help. At least this is my current
understanding.
Reply
 Desertopa 10 hr ago
I can't help side-eyeing the "presumably" there. If plastic-biodegrading bacteria
gained the ability to survive independently of the beetles, there's an awfully rich
ecological niche waiting for them out there.
Reply
Canyon Fern 9 hr ago
Seconded.
Reply
Furrfu 9 hr ago · edited 9 hr ago
This is more worrisome than what I originally thought: first I thought, "Well, if we
need boats or landfill liners or nuclear waste containers or whatever to survive the
beetles, I guess the beetles can't eat them without oxygen, and we can always lace
them with insecticides." I don't insecticides that will work that well with bacteria,
and gut bacteria are presumably already anaerobic. So maybe we'll have to resort to
teflon or geopolymers or something in order to build bacteria-proof things in the
Grim Beetle Future.
On the plus side, the bacteria probably smell better than darkling beetles do.
(Just to be clear, I think the research should definitely be done; I'm just not sure
whether deploying the results in the wild would be good or bad.)
Reply
Paula Amato 9 hr ago
A somewhat related alternative - making some plastics/materials more biodegradable
eg. The BioMask https://www.canadianshieldppe.ca/blogs/the-canadian-shield-blog/the-
biomask™-infographic
Reply
Anon 8 hr ago · edited 7 hr ago
I don't understand, isn't this just a much *better* outcome than the one projected in the
grant? It seems increasingly clear that plastic was a terrible mistake from the get-go, and
if Scott's grant intervention leads ultimately to a world where we have to go back to
glass, steel, ceramics and tin with a small dash of bakelite (a resin) for flavor because
any plastic will just get devoured by omnipresent microbes before you have time to use
it, that will be a massive improvement on all fronts.
Reply
Dustin 7 hr ago
My prior is that plastics are an integral part of modern life in such a way that we
couldn't have much of what we have *at the price we have it for*. In other words,
much of the world would be much worse off without the existence of plastics. The
"terrible mistake" seems to be not using plastics judiciously, not that plastics exist.
 That being said, I have no special insight or knowledge and could be convinced
otherwise.
Reply
Anon 33 min ago
"My prior is that plastics are an integral part of modern life in such a way that
we couldn't have much of what we have *at the price we have it for*."
I think this is almost certainly correct (notably, every post-celluloid data
storage medium including film that doesn't burn your house down is plastic-
based), and I'm willing to bite that bullet. To me, plastic seems like our time's
equivalent of asbestos. It's no good telling people how practical it is that once
your gloves get dirty you can just throw them into the fire and they're sparkling
clean again.
Reply
Eric P. 6 hr ago
Any and all plastic could be totally re-used if only we chose to invest a little bit of
energy. It isn't currently economically cost-effective to do so, but if we really
wanted to get rid of plastic we could. We just lack the will.
Reply
robryk 1 hr ago
Where can I read more about this? I was under the, likely mistaken, impression
that we know how to reuse some plastics, but for vast majority of them once
they are polymerized we don't have better ideas than "burn them at high
temperature to recover simple compounds".
Reply
Anon 37 min ago
Really? You know how to remove nurdles from oceans, beaches and the
innards of fish? Harmlessly remove microplastics from fetuses? I think you
should have submitted an ACX grant application if this is true.
Reply
1 new reply

Lambert 3 hr ago
There's a lot of different types of plastic. I'd be surprised if there's not some high-grade
polymer like UHMWPE or something with a bunch of fluorines that the beetles can't get
at.
Reply
Michael Goldstein 11 hr ago
This is amazing. I mostly write to praise Scott and the team. But can't help but to contrast
with the many philanthropies I know well....such exciting ideas/people he has curated, in such
a short period, with so little red tape.
Reply
Tinsely 11 hr ago
You refer to Nils Kraus as N in a later sentence. Not sure if you forgot to anonymize, or just a
typo.
Reply
Scott Alexander 11 hr ago
AUTHOR
Thankfully, the error was the other direction - he was originally anonymized, and then
gave me permission to name him. I've corrected this, thank you.
Reply
robryk 11 hr ago
For peace of mind in the future: a way to avoid mistakes in the worse direction is to
compile a list of terms that must not appear in a post (in this case, names of people
who want to remain anonymous), and arrange for automation to scream loudly if a
draft contains any of them. (Not my idea, this is a pretty common approach to
ensuring that various not-intended-to-be-made-public things were redacted from a
release of some software.)
Reply
Radar 11 hr ago
This is just incredibly impressive that you pulled this venture out of thin air, roped in all the
support and expertise you needed (or could find), let it grow way beyond what you
anticipated, and then pulled off this very wide ranging list of worthy projects to support. Wow.
It warms my heart to see.
The first part of my career involved a ton of fundraising, in and out of academia, and working
with foundations on various joint endeavors. It can be a pretty slow-moving, trend-following
world. But also, some of the expertise (to raise money well and to give it away well) are for
sure real skills. It's astounding to me that you pulled this off in such a short time, and I hope
you will write more about the process of it.
I'm interested in the question of what funded groups might want to talk to each other about. I
know a lot of foundations try to start up those kinds of cross-pollinating conversations and
that on the side of the people funded, they sometimes say "yes" to whatever the funders
propose in the hopes it will lead to more funding, even if they think it's a waste of time. I think
funders get impatient encountering the same kinds of organizational stumbling blocks in the
groups they fund (I consult for organizations so I get that too). Some kind of honest
assessment of when those networking opportunities are seen to be beneficial by the people
in them would be nice to have.
Thank you for helping to bring so much good stuff into the world! I hope beyond the
exhaustion it sounds like this produced, that you have a real sense of satisfaction in it. It's a
remarkable thing you did, in a whole different direction from your writing and your psychiatry
practice.
Reply
Stuart Buck 11 hr ago
"Why would somebody working on biochemistry want to talk to someone working on political
activism just because they got a grant from the same person?"
Going to conferences of people who all think and dress the same way and work on the same
issue is beneficial in one way; going to conferences like EA or SciFoo is beneficial in a
different way--optimizing for serendipity.
Reply
ana 11 hr ago
Yeah. People who received an ACX grant probably have many more things in common
than two randomly selected people (even if we restrict the selection to compatriots). But
also, sometimes just having common knowledge that everyone in a certain group
actively wants to meet and chat with everyone else is already valuable.
Reply
Matthew SS Writes Axioms Of Dominion · 11 hr ago
It would have been useful to know that one option was funding, of some sort, for
politics/political careers, not necessarily for me personally. There are some interesting Senate
seats up this cycle that might be viable options for third party candidacy who knows what
they are doing where the existing brand name options are mediocre or in conflict with the
kinds of things you, Scott, care about.
There are, given the divergence in my interests vs Scott, more very exciting projects on this
list than I would have expected. Though part of that may be all the extra money and effort
many people contributed.
I'll also somewhat second the comment by someone that people involved in grants perhaps
associate being able to get grant funding too much with having good ideas, as far as the "why
are they asking you and not this other potential option for money".
Reply
Don P. 11 hr ago
I hesitate to ask because it seems like surely you've thought of this, but....whatever tax status
your grant fund has, have you evaluated if giving to politicians impacts it?
Double-OF-COURSE-YOU-RESEARCHED-THIS-energy: do the laws in Australia allow you to
give large sums to political actors, and the actor to accept it? I do note that the person is not
running for office themselves, but, ya know.
Reply
Scott Alexander 11 hr ago
AUTHOR
 The grants are coming from two pots: my money, and external funders' money.
External funders are donating through a tax-deductible EA Fund.
I can't do this for tax reasons, so my donations won't be inherently tax-deductible. I plan
to cover a combination of whatever grants that the EA Fund can't, plus the recipients
who are inherently tax-deductible themselves (eg charities).
Reply
Ash Lael 3 hr ago
Answer to the second part: yes, Australian laws do allow it.
It’s possible I’ll need to register my activities under the Foreign Influence Transparency
Scheme (https://www.ag.gov.au/integrity/foreign-influence-transparency-scheme) but
this doesn’t prohibit any such activities, just makes it public where the money is coming
from. And clearly there is no difficulty with that being public in this case.
Reply
Yitz 11 hr ago
I’m sort of curious if there are any ideas that you specifically didn’t fund that you’d feel
comfortable talking about
Reply
Scott Alexander 11 hr ago
AUTHOR
I hope to showcase all the ideas I didn't get to fund in Grants ++.
Reply
Yitz 11 hr ago
Looking forward to it :)
Reply
Chris Merck Writes Northeast Naturalist · 11 hr ago
Very glad to see approval voting (AV) get funded (and promoted) on ACX. We see ranked
choice voting (RCV) making inroads around the country, but there seems to be very little
awareness of the pathologies of RCV that make it inferior to AV. [This is based on my
remembrance of analysis on RangeVoting.org, which smells trustworthy to me.]
Reply
1 new reply
Matthew SS Writes Axioms Of Dominion · 10 hr ago
Approval voting is probably the best option, that could reasonably happen anyways, for
American elections. Something of a limit to the problems that can be solved solely by
better voting but at least at the municipal level it is pretty big.
Reply
Clay Shentrup Writes Utila the Econ · 8 hr ago
Agreed.
Reply
Katrine 7 hr ago
What are the pathologies?
Reply
Melvin 5 hr ago
The pathologies of ranked choice voting are that in certain weird theoretical
combinations of circumstances, voting for your true preferences makes your
preferences less likely to be satisfied.
The problems with Approval Voting are less obvious, because it's Never Been Tried
(actually it has been tried, in a few low-stakes elections but not much that we'd
learn from). The upside of Approval Voting is that it allows a charismatic centrist to
be elected... the downside might be that it precludes anyone else from ever getting
elected. In a world where Approval Voting was the norm, what kind of candidates
would we get? Would it be a "race to the centre", where candidates work hard to
avoid ever unambiguously taking any kind of position that anyone at all could
possibly disagree with? And would this be better or worse than what we have now?
Reply
Chris Merck Writes Northeast Naturalist · 2 hr ago
Good points. I look forward to seeing it tried!
Reply
Lambert 1 hr ago
>The pathologies of ranked choice voting are that in certain weird theoretical
combinations of circumstances, voting for your true preferences makes your
preferences less likely to be satisfied.
By Arrow, is that not true for all (non-dictatorial) voting systems, including
approval voting?
Reply
robryk 1 hr ago
I think you're correct. The way you can kinda claim otherwise for approval
voting is by changing the model of voter preferences (instead of them
having preference orders, claim that they have sets of acceptable
candidates).
Also: a nit: Arrow also requires determinism, but all the systems we talk
about are deterministic.
(Trivial counterexample of a nondeterministic system: choose a voter at
random and do as they wish. It's not dictatorial, because the voter is
chosen at random.)
 Reply
Chris Merck Writes Northeast Naturalist · 2 hr ago
In a highly polarized environment, you may have a candidate who is everyone’s
second choice but no one’s first choice. They get eliminated in the first round of
evaluation in the RCV algorithm.
RCV still has the benefit over our current system (PV) that the spoiler effect is
avoided. So those third parties can exist, but they still need to beat the conventional
parties in popularity.
With AV on the other hand, you're not forced to rank, only to approve, and so any
acceptable compromiser has a huge advantage in an otherwise polarized election.
Reply
Eugene Norman 1 hr ago
A quick google lands me here:
https://www.fairvote.org/electoral_systems_rcv_vs_approval_voting
Which suggests that approval voting has more problems than ranked voting in getting
your “first choice” in, although AV does away with rankings which is an odd way of fixing
that problem - pretending it doesn’t exist.
If that is even the problem (I’m not clear what your pathologies are).
As someone living in a country with ranked voting, specifically the single transferable
vote, I would often vote for a first ranked candidate destined to lose. Then on the
elimination of that candidate my vote goes to the next person. That person might also be
destined to lose so the vote percolates up to elect somebody eventually if I kept ranking.
Reply
Jacob Falkovich Writes Putanumonit · 10 hr ago
I'm awed and inspired to read about so many cool projects happening around this community.
Thank for doing this, Scott!
Also I'm super proud to be Beny's brother even if I don't understand enough biochemistry to
know what he's actually doing :)
Reply
Tom B 10 hr ago
Such an exciting list! And I was very happy to see Seattle Approves up there -- they're
addressing the meta problem of "why can't the US political process solve more of the
country's problems?"
Reply
Nick H 10 hr ago
Some really fascinating grants here (and a couple that I think might be ethically...
questionable). Setting those aside, this is a really cool thing you've done here.
Reply
zack 10 hr ago
Lots of fascinating projects, thanks for sharing
Reply
Jason Gross 10 hr ago
> Nils Kraus, $40,000, to experiment with new ways of measuring precision weighting in
humans. The precision-weighting of mental predictions is one of the absolute basics of the
predictive coding model of the mind, but we know very little about it and have trouble testing
hypotheses about how it works.
I'm quite interested in this; is there a way to follow this work as it develops? (And is there a
good source on the current state of understanding?)
Reply
Baizuo 10 hr ago
Happy to hear that people are interested :)
I can send you the proposal where I have collected some previous studies that have tried
to measure precision weighting via several different ways, if you'd like.
Reply
Jason Gross 9 hr ago
Yes, please!
Reply
Austin Chen Writes Austinsibly · 10 hr ago
I'm one of the three cofounders of Mantic Markets, and I wanted to give a heartfelt thanks to
Scott! Not just because we won a grant, or because he's namedropped us, or even because
he's been so nice about us blatantly stealing the "Mantic" name...
But because it's fairly (~70%) likely this project would not have existed without ACX Grants.
James and I were online friends, and we'd chatted before about collaborating on something.
The existence of ACX Grants gave us an excuse to actually do something! I flew out to meet
James and Stephen; and in our process of writing the grant application, we got so excited
that we decided to just build out the prototype, whether we heard back or not. We've been
hacking on it ever since (that's why our prototype is already live)!
Like Scott, I don't really know if Mantic will ultimately work out. (If you think _you_ know, bet
on https://mantic.markets/ManticMarkets/will-mantic-markets-have-over-1m !) But this grant
has already made me two good friends/cofounders, and a really exciting December so far.
Thanks again for running this program!
Reply
Austin Chen Writes Austinsibly · 10 hr ago
Re: "Why would somebody working on biochemistry want to talk to someone working on
political activism just because they got a grant from the same person?"
 I can't speak for anyone else but I'd _love_ to be thrown into a Discord with everyone
else who's gotten a grant. Beyond chatting, here are some things I'd look forward to
(patterned off of YCombinator):
- Random 1:1s with other fundees, just to learn about their field of expertise
- Weekly check ins where everyone posts updates, as a shared accountability metric
- A "Demo Day", eg in 6 months where each fundee gives a 3min talk on what they
accomplished, in front of potential future funders
Everything optional, of course! I'm happy to help organize; in fact, I may just go and do
this for the forecasting people. We've already chatted with Nuno before, and I'm
planning on reaching out to Nikos and Nathan too!
Reply
James 7 hr ago
Thanks Austin! I 100% agree and add my thanks to Scott for this grant that brought us
together.
Reply
David Kasten 10 hr ago
I am only here to say that "sufficiently advanced beetles" is the sort of Vorkosigan chaos
energy that I hope there is more of in the world.
Reply
Chris Merck Writes Northeast Naturalist · 2 hr ago
Makes me wonder if it’s the beatles or their micro-/mycobiome. There’s some exciting
work happening with plastic-eating fungi.
Reply
Banjo Killdeer 10 hr ago
Wow. Republicans are evil. I wish I hadn't read that.
Reply
Eledex 8 hr ago
I'm actually fairly surprised by that too. I expected it to be a set up for a joke that never
came.
Reply
Maxwell E 6 hr ago
Seems to pretty obviously be a joke.
Reply
Hyperion 2 hr ago
Unless Scott also believes that AI capabilities researchers are evil too (seems unlikely),
then this is obviously a joke.
 Reply
Godoth 15 min ago
I winced. It’s certainly a joke, but it’s hard to make something like that land in our
environment when so many people treat all Republicans as evil.
I chalk this up to the influence of living in the Bay Area and among his tribe, where casual
insults to Republicans come off as harmless political humor that nobody is hurt by,
because no actual Republicans would dare out themselves by objecting.
Reply
Gavriel K 9 hr ago
1Day Sooner staff member here—thanks so much, Scott! These grants are an awesome idea,
and honestly I’m kind of blown away by the company we’re in. Good luck with your projects,
everyone!
Reply
Eric Kernfeld 9 hr ago
> My father has been stalled on an important research project for years for lack of the right
kind of statistician
Just out of curiosity, what is it and what would the right kind of statistician be? I'm a
statistician and I know a lot of statisticians. Often we feel we are short on important projects,
while society is yelling that it is short on statisticians. It's hard to square that circle.
Reply
Scott Alexander 8 hr ago
AUTHOR
Biostatistician who is allowed to look at VA data.
Reply
Immortal Lurker 9 hr ago
I got such a rush reading this. I hope that there are periodic follow up posts.
Reply
Alex Hoekstra 9 hr ago
Thank you Scott at everyone who contributed to this new grant. I'm honored to have RaDVaC
included in this group of creative, important, really interesting projects. This will help take our
work at RaDVaC to new levels; in my view this is a big moment for vaccinology and the future
of global health. We're going to do some kickass science.
Reply
Liface 9 hr ago
This legitimately made me cry. I'm writing this with tears coming down my face right now,
because this is the group of people that are going to save the world.
Reply
 Canyon Fern 8 hr ago
Aww, don’t cry. Dry yourself with my fronds. I miss you over at DSL!
Reply
Deepa 9 hr ago
This was cool to read. My best wishes to everyone here, in taking their ideas to completion.
Reply
Nell Watson 8 hr ago · edited 7 hr ago
I just want to state my most heartfelt gratitude towards Scott and the other funders for their
munificent generosity. Thank you *so much* especially for supporting the
www.endohazard.org project, which I strongly believe can lead to huge beneficial second and
third order effects. Thank you!
Reply
Zærich 7 hr ago
That symbol has an interesting angry face appearance. Unsure if intended, and also
unsure if beneficial; certainly amusing, and memorable. It seems, complicated? I
wouldn't remember how to make it, although I'd certainly recognize it. Of course, I'm not
exactly the sort of person who'd be applying this to things.
Regardless, congrats on the grant, and thank you for your work on this!
Reply
Nell Watson 7 hr ago
Thank you! Yes, it's a stylized fusion of BPA atop Dioxin – two molecules that have
particularly strong and widespread endocrine disrupting properties. The 'face' is
designed to create an instinctive feeling of danger. Even if one isn't aware of its
meaning on the side of a barrel or component, it's intended to clearly convey 'bad
mojo'.
The spike elements are inspired by the biohazard symbol, which has a similar
instinctive effect. I agree that it could be simplified, and may well be in due course
as the design is further refined. Thank you for your kind comment, and the insightful
feedback! :)
Reply
stephanie zee fehler 8 hr ago
Re: the Ivy Natal Fertility one: there is a page on FB called "Them Before Us" where
adopted/test tube/donor conceived/surrogate kids have their say about basically being
commodified for the benefit of adults' desires. This may be less ethical/altruist than it
appears.
Reply
Paula Amato 7 hr ago
 Except for the adopted ones, the ART-conceived (assisted reproductive technology) kids
wouldn’t exist otherwise. And besides, the whole point of IVG (in-vitro gametogenesis) is
to reduce the need for donor gametes.
Reply
Made an Account for This One 4 hr ago
How is being conceived in a different way to the norm being 'commodified'? I want to
have kids with my partner, and right now that's not possible for us. If the Ivy Natal
Fertility group succeed, it would be. The ability to have biological children is no more
than what straight couples have, with the added bonus that all children born of this
method would be intentional and desperately wanted.
Reply
Brad Neaton Writes Euphoric Recall · 7 hr ago
"Other times a reviewer was concerned that if you were successful, your work might be used
by terrorists / dictators / AI capabilities researchers / Republicans"
Right. "Republicans." Because if we've learned anything over the past two years, it's that only
one side of the political spectrum is capable of doing harm.
Reply
Maxwell E 6 hr ago
Seeing another comment like this above makes me feel like maybe there are some new
readers on here who just aren't attuned to Scott's sense of humor? Rest assured, etc.
Reply
B_Epstein 5 hr ago · edited 4 hr ago
FWIW, I've been a huge admirer of Scott's writing in general and sense of humor in
particular, for many years, and am not a Republican (though I was, kinda, an AI
capabilities researcher, just a bit!), and yet I still cringed. It simply isn't funny
enough to justify the potential misreading or sense of alienation enough people
might have.
ETA: for the sake of new readers, though, rest assured etc. indeed.
Reply
Anteros Writes Anteros’s Newsletter · 3 hr ago
I guess YMMV with this. Being familiar with Scott's humour and the context, I would have
been unoffended with whatever word was in the place of 'Republicans'.
Mostly because the joke is set up by 'AI capabilities researchers' - after that Scott is free
to drop in whatever he feels like. Republicans, Democrats, Georgists, Hospice
nurses.......
Reply
Truism 7 hr ago
15 minutes of reading NA's Reddit history has convinced me that he's probably not actually
interested in EA and that you've been taken for a ride.
Reply
Ash Lael 2 hr ago
Two points.
First, I’m very much in favour of doing good things in efficient and effective ways. In my
book that makes me pro-EA.
Second, even if you don’t believe that, you can rest assured that I do believe in making
people who give me money feel glad they gave me money. I’m a professional, and I
intend to deliver results.
Reply
Rand 7 hr ago
"D, $5,000, to help interview for CS professor positions."
Huh? Interviewing for CS professor positions was taxing in all sorts of ways, but it wasn't
expensive. In fact, universities were super accommodating, saving me the cost of a personal
flight to Toronto in between interviews.
"Everyone with experience in movement-building says that getting your members into top
positions at top colleges is important, and this is a surprisingly cheap opportunity to make
that happen."
Huh. I'm guess I'm one of those members. Do we have any coordination mechanisms?
Reply
Medieval Cat 7 hr ago
Great work Scott! Lots of love to all involved. I can't wait for the follow ups!
Reply
Ruffienne 6 hr ago
This is the most exciting and innovative thing I have encountered in months. It's gone way,
way beyond my expectations. Kudos once again, Scott.
Reply
LGS 6 hr ago
Decent list. Compared to some other EA-adjacent funding, this was relatively light on "$X to
my friend for personal growth, because they are awesome and after personal growth they will
affect the world for the better". That's a good thing. But it still had a bit of this
category/pattern, which is a bad thing.
For example, getting money to apply for faculty positions in CS is pretty useless -- the
interviewing universities will refund all the plane tickets anyway.
Reply
DAS 6 hr ago
I support further experiments in connecting EA to political structures. For instance, there are
many serious ongoing openings for engagement in the U.S. that should be appealing to the
EA community, some of these likely among the very highest-leverage near-term opportunities
to improve lives across the world at scale. Just some of these include: better vaccine
distribution; the opportunity to provide aid to poorer countries at a scale of hundreds of
billions of dollars to help them through the pandemic; augmenting sanctions policies so fewer
people starve to death; ending various foreign escapades (the U.S. is complicit in a blockade
of Yemen that has the potential to cause hundreds of thousands of surplus deaths) and more.
And it can be striking how much difference can be made with relatively modest engagement,
especially in light of the magnitudes of the potential outputs.
Reply
DAS 6 hr ago
I support further experiments in connecting EA to political structures. For instance, there are
many serious ongoing openings for engagement in the U.S. that should be appealing to the
EA community, some of these likely among the very highest-leverage near-term opportunities
to improve lives across the world at scale. Just some of these include: better vaccine
distribution; the opportunity to provide aid to poorer countries at a scale of hundreds of
billions of dollars to help them through the pandemic; augmenting sanctions policies so fewer
people starve to death; ending various foreign escapades (the U.S. is complicit in a blockade
of Yemen that has the potential to cause hundreds of thousands of surplus deaths) and more.
And it can be striking how much difference can be made with relatively modest engagement,
especially in light of the magnitudes of the potential outputs.
Reply
DAS 5 hr ago
Numeracy, sorting out priorities based on even a vague sense of utilitarian impact, is an
underdeveloped skill in DC. And EA community would do well to learn more about
politics, legislation, rule-making, etc to come to understand highest-leverage
mechanisms for potential influence and how to manipulate them. (I say this as what I
suppose one might call an American analog to the Australian grantee.)
Reply
Ash Lael 2 hr ago
Yes, absolutely! It’s politics and nothing is guaranteed, but I consistently find it shocking
how much impact just basic engagement with the political process can have.
Reply
Doug 5 hr ago
This is a fantastic initiative and I really hope it becomes a template for others.
Reply
Delia Grace 5 hr ago
Thanks to Scott and all the generous donors on behalf of me, Delia Grace, and the pigs,
farmers and pork-lovers in Uganda! Very exciting to be part of such an eclectic and talented
group
Reply
Yovel Rom 4 hr ago
Hey Scott,
I submitted AI related grant, and I can't be sure if it was rejected, LTFF did not start working
on it, or my spam filter ate their mails.
It would be great if you could send status updates about such grants.
Thanks in advance!
Reply
polscistoic 4 hr ago
This was an astonishingly fast submission, review and grant allocation process, compared to
how this is traditionally done. Impressive, not least taking into account the large number and
diversity of the projects seeking a grant. Based only on reading this blog post, it seems that
the review process succeeded in selecting exiting projects. Made me think if there are more
detailed tips or tricks concerning how Scott organised and implemented the decision-making
process, that could be useful for other public or private organisations (or wealthy individuals)
funding research. Consider this a suggestion for a possible future blog post.
Reply
Marvin 4 hr ago
"Why would somebody working on biochemistry want to talk to someone working on political
activism..." Well, why would anyone talk about those topics on the same blog? It is all part of
the codex, while all fields of research have their specific tools, they also useful tools of the
general craft. As a PhD-student, I really like the events where you get to talk to PhD-students
from other fields, because you have a good opportunity to learn about the field of others, and
more importantly, learn how your field is seen by others and try to give it a more
positive/reasonable image to the person talking to you.
Reply
Ran Writes Book Review · 3 hr ago
This is awesome
Reply
AlchemyAllegory 2 hr ago
Incredible work, huge praise to the applicants and the work of Scott and the reviewers picking
out these exciting projects. Very interested to hear about how the various projects progress.
Reply
Makin 2 hr ago
Great work, and thanks for the effort (except suing chicken factories, come on)!
Reply
Russell Hogg 2 hr ago
This whole post makes me almost weep with happiness!
Reply
Loweren Writes Optimized Dating · 2 hr ago
Congratulations to winners! I was asking the PI in my new lab if I can apply as well, but he said
this wouldn't be the right time. Maybe next year.
Reply
rocky 1 hr ago
"Other times a reviewer was concerned that if you were successful, your work might be used
by terrorists / dictators / AI capabilities researchers / Republicans and cause damage in ways
you couldn't foresee. " -- I cannot believe that you actually wrote this. Very disappointed.
(Not in the grants, in what how you chose to write the intro.)
Reply
J Eves 1 hr ago · edited 8 min ago
Scott's making fun of people who think Republicans and AI capabilities researchers are
as bad as dictators and terrorists. It's a classic Scott joke, I laughed.
Reply
Serge Sonder 1 hr ago
Is there any way to support the next ACX grant with private donations? I am sure many of your
readers would love to participate in such a high-impact and diverse portfolio of projects
Reply
Henk B Writes Henkalicious · 46 min ago
On a different note, I would like to invite you to visit by blog. I am Dutch and writing in English.
It would be great to get feedback, both regarding my English and the general writing style of
my blog. I would greatly appreciate it.
henkb.substack.com
Reply
Important Tender 45 min ago
As an Australian, happy to see the grant to "NA", especially after browsing AshLael's
comments history.
Reply
Oleksandr Nikitin Writes The Cortex · 17 min ago · edited 8 min ago
> they're smart enough to know about XYZ Grants which is better suited for them, which
means they're mostly banking on XYZ funding and using you as a backup
Um, doesn't this confuse "smart enough" with "experienced with applying for grants"?
Sure, if it's considered a norm to apply for N grants in parallel, this means an experienced
grant reviewer would encounter N times more applications like that, and it's reasonable to
assume this as the default, and to try to adjust for this kind of selection bias.
But as a person who had applied for the first time, this sounds... surprising, to say the least.
Intuitively, it sounds intrusive and rude to just spam every grant program out there. Is this
really expected and OK?
Would really appreciate comments from an experienced grant reviewer.
Still, thanks a lot for highlighting this point! Will keep it in mind.
(I've never previously considered grants as a realistic source of funding -- coming from the
industry background, and given anecdotal evidence about the amount of bureacracy from
friends who successfully received ones. Decided to apply only because the initial post was so
much more welcoming and really different from what I've heard about grants previously)
Reply
1 new reply

Ready for more?

pablo@stafforini.com Subscribe

© 2021 Scott Alexander. See privacy, terms and information collection notice

Publish on Substack
Astral Codex Ten is on Substack – the place for independent writing