We will convene a regular working group to more proactively iterate and improve the mechanism design focused on risk mitigation. We intend for this group to function for the foreseeable future. Anyone is welcome to join this group via our Discord.
We will attempt to gain consultation from community figures that have expressed interest in impact markets (Paul Christiano, Robin Hanson, Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Vitalik Buterin). This should move the needle towards more community consensus.
We will continue our current EA Forum contest. We will not run another contest in July.
We will do more outreach to other projects interested in this space (Gitcoin, Protocol Labs, Optimism, etc.) to make sure they are aware of these issues as well and we can come up with solutions together.
Do we think that impact markets are net-negative?
We – the Impact Markets team of Denis, Dony, and Matt – have been active EAs for almost a combined 20 years. In the past years we’ve individually gone through a prioritization process in which we’ve weighed importance, tractability, neglectedness, and personal fit for various projects that are close to the work of QURI, CLR, ACE, REG, CE, and others. (The examples are mostly taken from my, Denis’s, life because I’m drafting this.) We not only found that impact markets were net-positive but have become increasingly convinced (before we started working on them) that they are the most (positively!) impactful thing in expectation that we can do.
We have started our work for impact markets because we found that it was the best thing that we could do. We’ve more or less dedicated our lives to maximizing our altruistic impact – already a decade ago. We were not nerdsniped into it and adjusted our prioritization to fit.
We’re not launching impact certificates to make ourselves personally wealthy. We want to be able to pay the rent, but once we’re financially safe, that’s enough. Some of us have previously moved countries for earning to give.
Why do we think impact markets are so good?
Impact markets reduce the work of funders – if a (hits-based) funder hopes for 10% of their grantees to succeed, then they cut down on the funders’ work by 10x. The funders pay out correspondingly higher rewards which incentivize seed investors to pick up the slack. This pool of seed investors can be orders of magnitude larger than current grant evaluators and would be made up of individuals from different cultures, with different backgrounds, and different networks. They have access to funding opportunities that the funders would not have learned of, they can be confident in these opportunities because they come out of their existing networks, and they can make use of economies of scale if the projects they fund have similar needs. These opportunities can also be more and smaller than opportunities that it would’ve been cost-effective for a generalist funder to evaluate.
Thus impact markets solve the scaling problem of grantmaking. We envision that the result will be an even more vibrant and entrepreneurial EA space that makes maximal use of the available talent and attracts more talent as EA expands.
What do we think about the risks?
The risks are real – we’ve spent June 2021 to March 2022 almost exclusively thinking about the downsides, however remote, to position us well to prevent them. But abandoning the project of impact markets because of the downsides seems about as misguided to us as abandoning self-driving cars because of adversarial-example attacks on street signs.
A wide range of distribution mismatches can already happen due to the classic financial markets. Where an activity is not currently profitable, these don’t work, but there have been prize contests for otherwise nonprofitable outcomes for a long time. We see an impact market as a type of prize contest.
Other things being equal, simpler approaches are easier to communicate …
Attributed Impact may look complicated but we’ve just operationalized something that is intuitively obvious to most EAs – expectational consequentialism. (And moral trade and something broadly akin to UDT.) We may sometimes have to explain why it sets bad incentives to fund projects that were net-negative in ex ante expectation to start, but the more sophisticated the funder is, the less likely it is that we need to expound on this. There’s also probably a simple version of the definition that can be easily understood. Something like: “Your impact must be seen as morally good, positive-sum, and non-risky before the action takes place.”
If there is no way to prevent anyone from becoming a retro funder …
We already can’t prevent anyone from becoming a retro funder. Anyone with money and a sizable Twitter following can reward people for any contributions that they so happen to want to reward them for – be it AI safety papers or how-tos for growing viruses.
Even if we hone Attributed Impact to be perfectly smooth to communicate and improve it to the point where it is very hard to misapply it, that hypothetical person on Twitter can just ignore it. Chances are they’ll never hear of it in the first place.
The price of a certificate tracks the maximum amount of money that any future retro funder will be willing to pay for it …
The previous point applies here too. Anyone on Twitter with some money can already outbid others when it comes to rewarding actions.
An additional observation is that the threshold for people to seed-invest into projects seems to be high. We think that very few investors will put significant money into a project that is not clearly in line with what major retro funders already explicitly profess to want to retro-fund only because there may later be someone who does.
Suppose that a risky project that is ex-ante net-negative ends up being beneficial …
There are already long-running prize contests where the ex ante and the ex post evaluation of the expected impact can deviate. These don’t routinely seem to cause catastrophes. If they are research prizes outside EA, it’s also unlikely that the prize committees will always be sophisticated enough that contenders will trust them to evaluate their projects according to its ex ante impact. Even the misperception that a prize committee would reward a risky project is enough to create an incentive to start the project.
And yet we very much do not want our marketplace to be used for ex ante net-negative activities. We are eager to put safeguards in place above and beyond what any other prize contest in EA has done. As soon as any risks appear to emerge, we are ready to curate the marketplace with an iron fist, to limit the length of resell chains, to cap the value of certificates, to consume the impact we’re buying, and much more.
What are we actually doing?
We are not currently working on a decentralized impact marketplace. (Though various groups in the Ethereum space are, and there is sporadic interest in the EA community as well.)
This is our marketplace. It is a React app hosted on an Afterburst server with a Postgres database. We can pull the plug at any time.
We can hide or delete individual certificates. We’re ready to make certificates hidden by default until we approve them.
You can review the actual submissions that we’ve received to decide how risky the average actual submission is.
We would be happy to form a curation committee and include Ofer and Owen now or when the market grows past the toy EA Forum experiment we have launched so far.
We have allowed submissions that are directly related to impact markets (and received some so that we don’t want to back down from our commitment now), but we’re ready to exclude them in future prize rounds.
We would never submit our own certificates to a prize contest that we are judging, but we’d also be open to not submitting any of our impact market–related work to any other prize contests if that’s what consensus comes to.
An important safety mechanism that we have already started implementing is to reward solutions to problems with impact markets. A general ban on using such rewards would remove this promising mechanism.
We don’t know how weak consensus should be operationalized. Since we’ve already launched the marketplace, it seems to us that we’ve violated this requirement before it was put into place. We would welcome a process by which we can obtain a weak consensus, however measured, before our next prize round.
“A naive implementation of this idea would incentivize people to launch a safe project and later expand it to include high-risk high-reward interventions” – That would have to be a very naive implementation because if the actual project is different from the project certified in the certificate, then the certificate does not describe it. It’s a certificate for a different project that failed to happen.
We’ve considered a wide range of mechanisms and ended up most optimistic about this one.
When it comes to prediction markets on funding decisions, I’ve thought about this in two contexts in the past:
During the ideation phase, I found that it was already being done (by Metaculus?) and not as helpful because it doesn’t provide seed funding.
In Toward Impact Markets, I describe the “pot” safety mechanism that, I surmised, could be implemented with a set of prediction markets. The implementation that I have in mind that uses prediction markets has important gaps, and I don’t think it’s the right time to set up the pot yet. But the basic idea was to have prediction markets whose payouts are tied to decisions of retro funders to buy a particular certificate. That action resolves the respective market. But the yes votes on the market can only be bought with shares in the respective cert or by people who also hold shares in the respective cert and in proportion to them. (In Toward Impact Markets I favor the product of the value they hold in either as determinant of the payout.)
But maybe you’re thinking of yet another setup: Investors buy yes votes on a prediction market (e.g. Polymarket, with real money) about whether a particular project will be funded. Funders watch those prediction markets and participants are encouraged to pitch their purchases to funders. Funders then resolve the markets with their actual grants and do minimal research, mostly trust the markets. Is that what you envisioned?
I see some weaknesses in that model. I feel like it’s rather a bit over 10x as good as the status quo vs. our model, which I think is over 100x as good. But it is an interesting mechanism that I’ll bear in mind as a fallback!
We would never submit our own certificates to a prize contest that we are judging, but we’d also be open to not submitting any of our impact market–related work to any other prize contests if that’s what consensus comes to.
Does this mean that you (the Impact Markets team) may sell certificates of your work to establish an impact market on that very impact market?
But abandoning the project of impact markets because of the downsides seems about as misguided to us as abandoning self-driving cars because of adversarial-example attacks on street signs.
I think the analogy would work better if self-driving cars did risky things that could cause a terrible accident, in order to prevent the battery from running out reach the destination sooner.
Attributed Impact may look complicated but we’ve just operationalized something that is intuitively obvious to most EAs – expectational consequentialism. (And moral trade and something broadly akin to UDT.)
I think the following concern (quoted from the OP) is still relevant here:
For that approach to succeed, retro funders must be familiar with it and be sufficiently willing and able to adhere to it. However, some potential retro funders are more likely to use a much simpler approach, such as “you should buy impact that you like”.
Other things being equal, simpler approaches are easier to communicate, more appealing to potential retro funders, more prone to become a meme and a norm, and more likely to be advocated for by teams who work on impact markets and want to get more traction.
You later wrote:
We may sometimes have to explain why it sets bad incentives to fund projects that were net-negative in ex ante expectation to start, but the more sophisticated the funder is, the less likely it is that we need to expound on this.
Does your current plan not involve explaining to all the retro funders that that they should consider the ex-ante EV as an upper bound?
We already can’t prevent anyone from becoming a retro funder. Anyone with money and a sizable Twitter following can reward people for any contributions that they so happen to want to reward them for – be it AI safety papers or how-tos for growing viruses.
I don’t see how this argument works. Given that a naive impact market incentivizes people to treat extremely harmful outcomes as if they were neutral (when deciding what projects to do/fund), why should your above argument cause an update towards the view that launching a certain impact market is net-positive? How does the potential harm that other people can cause via Twitter etc. make launching a certain impact market be a better idea than it would otherwise be?
We think that very few investors will put significant money into a project that is not clearly in line with what major retro funders already explicitly profess to want to retro-fund only because there may later be someone who does.
Why? Conditional on impact markets gaining a lot of traction and retro funders spending billions of dollars in impact markets 5 years from now, why wouldn’t it make sense to buy many certificates of risky projects that might end up being extremely beneficial (according to at least one relevant future retro funder)?
An important safety mechanism that we have already started implementing is to reward solutions to problems with impact markets. A general ban on using such rewards would remove this promising mechanism.
Do you intent to allow people to profit from outreach interventions that attract new retro funders? (i.e. by allowing people to sell certificates of such outreach interventions.)
“A naive implementation of this idea would incentivize people to launch a safe project and later expand it to include high-risk high-reward interventions” – That would have to be a very naive implementation because if the actual project is different from the project certified in the certificate, then the certificate does not describe it. It’s a certificate for a different project that failed to happen.
I disagree. I think this risk can easily materialize if the description of the certificate is not very specific (and in particular if it’s about starting an organization, without listing specific interventions.)
First of all, what we’ve summarized as “curation” so far could really be distinguished as follows:
Making access for issuers invite-only, maybe keeping the whole marketplace secret (in combination with #2) until we find someone who produces cool papers/articles and who we trust and then invite them.
Making access for investors/retro funders invite-only, maybe keeping the whole marketplace secret (in combination with #1) until we find an impact investor or a retro funder who we trust and then invite them.
Read every certificate either before or shortly after it is published. (In combination with exposé certificates in case we make a mistake.)
Let’s say #3 is a given. Do you think the marketplace would fulfill your safety requirements if only #1, only #2, or both were added to it?
Does your current plan not involve explaining to all the retro funders that that they should consider the ex-ante EV as an upper bound?
It involves explaining that. What we wrote was to argue that Attributed Impact is not as complicated as it may sound but rather quite intuitive.
How does the potential harm that other people can cause via Twitter etc. make launching a certain impact market be a better idea than it would otherwise be?
If you want to open a bazaar, one of your worries could be that people will use it to sell stolen goods. Currently these people sell the stolen goods online or on other bazaars, and the experience may be a bit clunky. By default these people will be happy to use your bazaar for their illegal trade because it makes life slightly easier for them. Slightly easier could mean that they get to sell a bit more quickly and create a bit more capacity for more stealing.
But if you enact some security measures to keep them out, you quickly reach the point where the bazaar is less attractive than the alternatives. At that point you already have no effect anymore on how much theft there is going on in the world in aggregate.
So the trick is to tune the security measures just right that they make the place less attractive than alternatives to the thieves and yet don’t impose prohibitively high costs on the legitimate sellers.
Do you intent to allow people to profit from outreach interventions that attract new retro funders? (i.e. by allowing people to sell certificates of such outreach interventions.)
My intent so far was to focus on text that is accessible online, e.g., articles, papers, some books. There may be other classes of things that are similarly strong candidates. Outreach seems like a bad fit to me. I’ve so far only considered it once when someone (maybe you) brought it up as something that’d be a bad fit for an impact market and I agreed.
I disagree. I think this risk can easily materialize if the description of the certificate is not very specific (and in particular if it’s about starting an organization, without listing specific interventions.)
Also very bad fit for an impact market as we envision it. To be a good fit, the object needs to have some cultural rights along the lines of ownership or copyright associated with it so market participants can agree on an owner. It needs to have a start and an end in time. It need so generate a verifiable artifact. Finally, it should not try super hard to try to fit something into that mold that doesn’t fit. There are a bunch of examples in my big post. So a paper, article, book, etc. (a particular version of it) is great. Something ongoing like starting an org is not a good fit. Something where you influence others and most of your impact is leveraging behavior change of others is really awkward because you can’t credibly assign an owner.
First of all, what we’ve summarized as “curation” so far could really be distinguished as follows:
Making access for issuers invite-only, maybe keeping the whole marketplace secret (in combination with #2) until we find someone who produces cool papers/articles and who we trust and then invite them.
Making access for investors/retro funders invite-only, maybe keeping the whole marketplace secret (in combination with #1) until we find an impact investor or a retro funder who we trust and then invite them.
Read every certificate either before or shortly after it is published. (In combination with exposé certificates in case we make a mistake.)
Let’s say #3 is a given. Do you think the marketplace would fulfill your safety requirements if only #1, only #2, or both were added to it?
An impact market with invite-only access for issuers and investors seems safer than otherwise. But will that be a temporary phase after which our civilization ends up with a decentralized impact market that nobody can control or shut down, and people are incentivized to recruit as many new retro funders as they can? In the Toward Impact Markets post (March 2022) you wrote:
We are fairly convinced that the blockchain-based solution is going to be the culmination of our efforts one day, but we’re ambivalent over which MVP will allow us to test the market more quickly and productively.
That came after the sentence “A web2 solution like that would have a few advantages too:”, after which you listed three advantages that have nothing to do with safety.
But if you enact some security measures to keep them out, you quickly reach the point where the bazaar is less attractive than the alternatives. At that point you already have no effect anymore on how much theft there is going on in the world in aggregate.
I don’t think the analogy works. Right now, there seems to be no large-scale retroactive funding mechanisms for anthropogenic x-risk interventions. Launching an impact market can change that. An issuer/investor/funder who will use your impact market would probably not use Twitter or anything else to deal with retroactive funding if you did not launch your impact market. The distribution mismatch problem applies to those people. (In your analogy there’s a dichotomy of good people vs. thieves, which has no clear counterpart in the domain of retroactive funding.) Also, if your success inspires others to launch/join competing impact markets, you can end up increasing the number of people who use the other markets.
Going Forward
We will convene a regular working group to more proactively iterate and improve the mechanism design focused on risk mitigation. We intend for this group to function for the foreseeable future. Anyone is welcome to join this group via our Discord.
We will attempt to gain consultation from community figures that have expressed interest in impact markets (Paul Christiano, Robin Hanson, Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Vitalik Buterin). This should move the needle towards more community consensus.
We will continue our current EA Forum contest. We will not run another contest in July.
We will do more outreach to other projects interested in this space (Gitcoin, Protocol Labs, Optimism, etc.) to make sure they are aware of these issues as well and we can come up with solutions together.
Do we think that impact markets are net-negative?
We – the Impact Markets team of Denis, Dony, and Matt – have been active EAs for almost a combined 20 years. In the past years we’ve individually gone through a prioritization process in which we’ve weighed importance, tractability, neglectedness, and personal fit for various projects that are close to the work of QURI, CLR, ACE, REG, CE, and others. (The examples are mostly taken from my, Denis’s, life because I’m drafting this.) We not only found that impact markets were net-positive but have become increasingly convinced (before we started working on them) that they are the most (positively!) impactful thing in expectation that we can do.
We have started our work for impact markets because we found that it was the best thing that we could do. We’ve more or less dedicated our lives to maximizing our altruistic impact – already a decade ago. We were not nerdsniped into it and adjusted our prioritization to fit.
We’re not launching impact certificates to make ourselves personally wealthy. We want to be able to pay the rent, but once we’re financially safe, that’s enough. Some of us have previously moved countries for earning to give.
Why do we think impact markets are so good?
Impact markets reduce the work of funders – if a (hits-based) funder hopes for 10% of their grantees to succeed, then they cut down on the funders’ work by 10x. The funders pay out correspondingly higher rewards which incentivize seed investors to pick up the slack. This pool of seed investors can be orders of magnitude larger than current grant evaluators and would be made up of individuals from different cultures, with different backgrounds, and different networks. They have access to funding opportunities that the funders would not have learned of, they can be confident in these opportunities because they come out of their existing networks, and they can make use of economies of scale if the projects they fund have similar needs. These opportunities can also be more and smaller than opportunities that it would’ve been cost-effective for a generalist funder to evaluate.
Thus impact markets solve the scaling problem of grantmaking. We envision that the result will be an even more vibrant and entrepreneurial EA space that makes maximal use of the available talent and attracts more talent as EA expands.
What do we think about the risks?
The risks are real – we’ve spent June 2021 to March 2022 almost exclusively thinking about the downsides, however remote, to position us well to prevent them. But abandoning the project of impact markets because of the downsides seems about as misguided to us as abandoning self-driving cars because of adversarial-example attacks on street signs.
A wide range of distribution mismatches can already happen due to the classic financial markets. Where an activity is not currently profitable, these don’t work, but there have been prize contests for otherwise nonprofitable outcomes for a long time. We see an impact market as a type of prize contest.
Attributed Impact may look complicated but we’ve just operationalized something that is intuitively obvious to most EAs – expectational consequentialism. (And moral trade and something broadly akin to UDT.) We may sometimes have to explain why it sets bad incentives to fund projects that were net-negative in ex ante expectation to start, but the more sophisticated the funder is, the less likely it is that we need to expound on this. There’s also probably a simple version of the definition that can be easily understood. Something like: “Your impact must be seen as morally good, positive-sum, and non-risky before the action takes place.”
We already can’t prevent anyone from becoming a retro funder. Anyone with money and a sizable Twitter following can reward people for any contributions that they so happen to want to reward them for – be it AI safety papers or how-tos for growing viruses.
Even if we hone Attributed Impact to be perfectly smooth to communicate and improve it to the point where it is very hard to misapply it, that hypothetical person on Twitter can just ignore it. Chances are they’ll never hear of it in the first place.
The previous point applies here too. Anyone on Twitter with some money can already outbid others when it comes to rewarding actions.
An additional observation is that the threshold for people to seed-invest into projects seems to be high. We think that very few investors will put significant money into a project that is not clearly in line with what major retro funders already explicitly profess to want to retro-fund only because there may later be someone who does.
There are already long-running prize contests where the ex ante and the ex post evaluation of the expected impact can deviate. These don’t routinely seem to cause catastrophes. If they are research prizes outside EA, it’s also unlikely that the prize committees will always be sophisticated enough that contenders will trust them to evaluate their projects according to its ex ante impact. Even the misperception that a prize committee would reward a risky project is enough to create an incentive to start the project.
And yet we very much do not want our marketplace to be used for ex ante net-negative activities. We are eager to put safeguards in place above and beyond what any other prize contest in EA has done. As soon as any risks appear to emerge, we are ready to curate the marketplace with an iron fist, to limit the length of resell chains, to cap the value of certificates, to consume the impact we’re buying, and much more.
What are we actually doing?
We are not currently working on a decentralized impact marketplace. (Though various groups in the Ethereum space are, and there is sporadic interest in the EA community as well.)
This is our marketplace. It is a React app hosted on an Afterburst server with a Postgres database. We can pull the plug at any time.
We can hide or delete individual certificates. We’re ready to make certificates hidden by default until we approve them.
You can review the actual submissions that we’ve received to decide how risky the average actual submission is.
We would be happy to form a curation committee and include Ofer and Owen now or when the market grows past the toy EA Forum experiment we have launched so far.
This is our current prize round.
We have allowed submissions that are directly related to impact markets (and received some so that we don’t want to back down from our commitment now), but we’re ready to exclude them in future prize rounds.
We would never submit our own certificates to a prize contest that we are judging, but we’d also be open to not submitting any of our impact market–related work to any other prize contests if that’s what consensus comes to.
An important safety mechanism that we have already started implementing is to reward solutions to problems with impact markets. A general ban on using such rewards would remove this promising mechanism.
We don’t know how weak consensus should be operationalized. Since we’ve already launched the marketplace, it seems to us that we’ve violated this requirement before it was put into place. We would welcome a process by which we can obtain a weak consensus, however measured, before our next prize round.
Miscellaneous notes
Attributed Impact also addresses moral trade.
“A naive implementation of this idea would incentivize people to launch a safe project and later expand it to include high-risk high-reward interventions” – That would have to be a very naive implementation because if the actual project is different from the project certified in the certificate, then the certificate does not describe it. It’s a certificate for a different project that failed to happen.
If the main problem you want to solve is “scaling up grantmaking”, there are probably many other ways how to do it other than “impact markets”.
(Roughly, you can amplify any “expert panel of judges” evaluations with judgemental forecasting.)
We’ve considered a wide range of mechanisms and ended up most optimistic about this one.
When it comes to prediction markets on funding decisions, I’ve thought about this in two contexts in the past:
During the ideation phase, I found that it was already being done (by Metaculus?) and not as helpful because it doesn’t provide seed funding.
In Toward Impact Markets, I describe the “pot” safety mechanism that, I surmised, could be implemented with a set of prediction markets. The implementation that I have in mind that uses prediction markets has important gaps, and I don’t think it’s the right time to set up the pot yet. But the basic idea was to have prediction markets whose payouts are tied to decisions of retro funders to buy a particular certificate. That action resolves the respective market. But the yes votes on the market can only be bought with shares in the respective cert or by people who also hold shares in the respective cert and in proportion to them. (In Toward Impact Markets I favor the product of the value they hold in either as determinant of the payout.)
But maybe you’re thinking of yet another setup: Investors buy yes votes on a prediction market (e.g. Polymarket, with real money) about whether a particular project will be funded. Funders watch those prediction markets and participants are encouraged to pitch their purchases to funders. Funders then resolve the markets with their actual grants and do minimal research, mostly trust the markets. Is that what you envisioned?
I see some weaknesses in that model. I feel like it’s rather a bit over 10x as good as the status quo vs. our model, which I think is over 100x as good. But it is an interesting mechanism that I’ll bear in mind as a fallback!
Does this mean that you (the Impact Markets team) may sell certificates of your work to establish an impact market on that very impact market?
I think the analogy would work better if self-driving cars did risky things that could cause a terrible accident, in order to
prevent the battery from running outreach the destination sooner.I think the following concern (quoted from the OP) is still relevant here:
You later wrote:
Does your current plan not involve explaining to all the retro funders that that they should consider the ex-ante EV as an upper bound?
I don’t see how this argument works. Given that a naive impact market incentivizes people to treat extremely harmful outcomes as if they were neutral (when deciding what projects to do/fund), why should your above argument cause an update towards the view that launching a certain impact market is net-positive? How does the potential harm that other people can cause via Twitter etc. make launching a certain impact market be a better idea than it would otherwise be?
Why? Conditional on impact markets gaining a lot of traction and retro funders spending billions of dollars in impact markets 5 years from now, why wouldn’t it make sense to buy many certificates of risky projects that might end up being extremely beneficial (according to at least one relevant future retro funder)?
Do you intent to allow people to profit from outreach interventions that attract new retro funders? (i.e. by allowing people to sell certificates of such outreach interventions.)
I disagree. I think this risk can easily materialize if the description of the certificate is not very specific (and in particular if it’s about starting an organization, without listing specific interventions.)
First of all, what we’ve summarized as “curation” so far could really be distinguished as follows:
Making access for issuers invite-only, maybe keeping the whole marketplace secret (in combination with #2) until we find someone who produces cool papers/articles and who we trust and then invite them.
Making access for investors/retro funders invite-only, maybe keeping the whole marketplace secret (in combination with #1) until we find an impact investor or a retro funder who we trust and then invite them.
Read every certificate either before or shortly after it is published. (In combination with exposé certificates in case we make a mistake.)
Let’s say #3 is a given. Do you think the marketplace would fulfill your safety requirements if only #1, only #2, or both were added to it?
It involves explaining that. What we wrote was to argue that Attributed Impact is not as complicated as it may sound but rather quite intuitive.
If you want to open a bazaar, one of your worries could be that people will use it to sell stolen goods. Currently these people sell the stolen goods online or on other bazaars, and the experience may be a bit clunky. By default these people will be happy to use your bazaar for their illegal trade because it makes life slightly easier for them. Slightly easier could mean that they get to sell a bit more quickly and create a bit more capacity for more stealing.
But if you enact some security measures to keep them out, you quickly reach the point where the bazaar is less attractive than the alternatives. At that point you already have no effect anymore on how much theft there is going on in the world in aggregate.
So the trick is to tune the security measures just right that they make the place less attractive than alternatives to the thieves and yet don’t impose prohibitively high costs on the legitimate sellers.
My intent so far was to focus on text that is accessible online, e.g., articles, papers, some books. There may be other classes of things that are similarly strong candidates. Outreach seems like a bad fit to me. I’ve so far only considered it once when someone (maybe you) brought it up as something that’d be a bad fit for an impact market and I agreed.
Also very bad fit for an impact market as we envision it. To be a good fit, the object needs to have some cultural rights along the lines of ownership or copyright associated with it so market participants can agree on an owner. It needs to have a start and an end in time. It need so generate a verifiable artifact. Finally, it should not try super hard to try to fit something into that mold that doesn’t fit. There are a bunch of examples in my big post. So a paper, article, book, etc. (a particular version of it) is great. Something ongoing like starting an org is not a good fit. Something where you influence others and most of your impact is leveraging behavior change of others is really awkward because you can’t credibly assign an owner.
An impact market with invite-only access for issuers and investors seems safer than otherwise. But will that be a temporary phase after which our civilization ends up with a decentralized impact market that nobody can control or shut down, and people are incentivized to recruit as many new retro funders as they can? In the Toward Impact Markets post (March 2022) you wrote:
That came after the sentence “A web2 solution like that would have a few advantages too:”, after which you listed three advantages that have nothing to do with safety.
I don’t think the analogy works. Right now, there seems to be no large-scale retroactive funding mechanisms for anthropogenic x-risk interventions. Launching an impact market can change that. An issuer/investor/funder who will use your impact market would probably not use Twitter or anything else to deal with retroactive funding if you did not launch your impact market. The distribution mismatch problem applies to those people. (In your analogy there’s a dichotomy of good people vs. thieves, which has no clear counterpart in the domain of retroactive funding.) Also, if your success inspires others to launch/join competing impact markets, you can end up increasing the number of people who use the other markets.