I think the concern here is not about “unaligned retro funders” who consciously decide to do harmful things. It doesn’t take malicious intent to misjudge whether a certain effort is ex-ante beneficial or harmful in expectation.
I wonder, though, when I play this through in my mind, I can’t quite see almost any investor investing anything but tiny amounts into a project on the promise that there might be at some point a retro funder for it.
Suppose investors were able to buy impact certificates of organizations like OpenAI, Anthropic, Conjecture, EcoHealth Alliance etc. These are plausibly very high-impact organizations. Out of 100 aligned retro funders, some may judge some of these organizations to be ex-ante net-positive. And it’s plausible that some of these organizations will end up being extremely beneficial. So it’s plausible that some retro funders (and thus also investors) would pay a lot for the certificates of such orgs.
Okay, but if you’re not actually talking about “malicious” retro funders (a category in which I would include actions that are not typically considered malicious today, such as defecting against minority or nonhuman interests), the difference between a world with and without impact markets becomes very subtle and ambiguous in my mind.
Like, I would guess that Anthropic and Conjecture are probably good, though I know little about them. I would guess that early OpenAI was very bad and current OpenAI is probably bad. But I feel great uncertainty over all of that. And I’m not even taking all considerations into account that I’m aware of because we still don’t have a model of how they interact. I don’t see a way in which impact markets could systematically prevent (as opposed to somewhat reduce) investment mistakes that today not even funders as sophisticated as Open Phil can predict.
Currently, all these groups receive a lot of funding from the altruistic funders directly. In a world with impact markets, the money would first come from investors. Not much would change at all. In fact I see most benefits here in the incentive alignment with employees.
In my models, each investor makes fewer grants than funders currently do because they specialize more and are more picky. My math doesn’t work out, doesn’t show that they can plausibly make a profit, if they’re similarly or less picky than current funders.
So I could see a drop in sophistication as relatively unskilled investors enter the market. But then they’d have to improve or get filtered out within a few years as they lose their capital to more sophisticated investors.
Relatively speaking, I think I’m more concerned about the problem you pointed out where retro funders get scammed by issuers who use p-hacking-inspired tricks to make their certificates seem valuable when they are not. Sophisticated retro funders can probably address that about as well as top journals can, which is already not perfect, but more naive retro funders and investors may fall for it.
One new thing that we’re doing to address this is to encourage people to write exposés of malicious certificates and sell their impact. Eventually of course I also want people to be able to short issuer stock.
Okay, but if you’re not actually talking about “malicious” retro funders (a category in which I would include actions that are not typically considered malicious today, such as defecting against minority or nonhuman interests), the difference between a world with and without impact markets becomes very subtle and ambiguous in my mind.
I think it depends on the extent to which the (future) retro funders take into account the ex-ante impact, and evaluate it without an upward bias even if they already know that the project ended up being extremely beneficial.
I think the concern here is not about “unaligned retro funders” who consciously decide to do harmful things. It doesn’t take malicious intent to misjudge whether a certain effort is ex-ante beneficial or harmful in expectation.
Suppose investors were able to buy impact certificates of organizations like OpenAI, Anthropic, Conjecture, EcoHealth Alliance etc. These are plausibly very high-impact organizations. Out of 100 aligned retro funders, some may judge some of these organizations to be ex-ante net-positive. And it’s plausible that some of these organizations will end up being extremely beneficial. So it’s plausible that some retro funders (and thus also investors) would pay a lot for the certificates of such orgs.
Okay, but if you’re not actually talking about “malicious” retro funders (a category in which I would include actions that are not typically considered malicious today, such as defecting against minority or nonhuman interests), the difference between a world with and without impact markets becomes very subtle and ambiguous in my mind.
Like, I would guess that Anthropic and Conjecture are probably good, though I know little about them. I would guess that early OpenAI was very bad and current OpenAI is probably bad. But I feel great uncertainty over all of that. And I’m not even taking all considerations into account that I’m aware of because we still don’t have a model of how they interact. I don’t see a way in which impact markets could systematically prevent (as opposed to somewhat reduce) investment mistakes that today not even funders as sophisticated as Open Phil can predict.
Currently, all these groups receive a lot of funding from the altruistic funders directly. In a world with impact markets, the money would first come from investors. Not much would change at all. In fact I see most benefits here in the incentive alignment with employees.
In my models, each investor makes fewer grants than funders currently do because they specialize more and are more picky. My math doesn’t work out, doesn’t show that they can plausibly make a profit, if they’re similarly or less picky than current funders.
So I could see a drop in sophistication as relatively unskilled investors enter the market. But then they’d have to improve or get filtered out within a few years as they lose their capital to more sophisticated investors.
Relatively speaking, I think I’m more concerned about the problem you pointed out where retro funders get scammed by issuers who use p-hacking-inspired tricks to make their certificates seem valuable when they are not. Sophisticated retro funders can probably address that about as well as top journals can, which is already not perfect, but more naive retro funders and investors may fall for it.
One new thing that we’re doing to address this is to encourage people to write exposés of malicious certificates and sell their impact. Eventually of course I also want people to be able to short issuer stock.
I think it depends on the extent to which the (future) retro funders take into account the ex-ante impact, and evaluate it without an upward bias even if they already know that the project ended up being extremely beneficial.
Yes, that’ll be important!