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.
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.