These are very much a personal take, I’m not sure if others on the fund would agree.
Buying extra time for people already doing great work. A lot of high-impact careers pay pretty badly: many academic roles (especially outside the US), some non-profit and think-tank work, etc. There’s certainly diminishing returns to money, and I don’t want the long-termist community to engage in zero-sum consumption of Veblen goods. But there’s also plenty of things that are solid investments in your productivity, like having a comfortable home office, a modern computer, ordering takeaway or having cleaners, enough runway to not have financial insecurity, etc.
Financial needs also vary a fair bit from person to person. I know some people who are productive and happy living off Soylent and working on a laptop on their bed, whereas I’d quickly burn out doing that. Others might have higher needs than me, e.g. if they have financial dependents.
As a general rule, if I’d be happy to fund someone for $Y/year if they were doing this work by themselves, and they’re getting paid $X/year by their employer to do this work, I think I should be happy to pay the difference $(Y-X)/year provided the applicant has a good plan for what to do with the money. If you think you might benefit from more money, I’d encourage you to apply. Even if you don’t think you’ll get it: a lot of people underestimate how much their time is worth.
Biosecurity. At the margins I’m about equally excited by biosecurity as I am about mitigating AI risks, largely because biosecurity currently seems much more neglected from a long-termist perspective. Yet the fund makes many more grants in the AI risk space.
We have received a reasonable number of biosecurity applications in recent rounds (though we still receive substantially more for AI), but our acceptance rate has been relatively low. I’d be particularly excited about seeing applications with a relatively clear path to impact. Many of our applications have been for generally trying to raise awareness, and I think getting the details right is really crucial here: targeting the right community, having enough context and experience to understand what that community would benefit from hearing, etc.
These are very much a personal take, I’m not sure if others on the fund would agree.
Buying extra time for people already doing great work. A lot of high-impact careers pay pretty badly: many academic roles (especially outside the US), some non-profit and think-tank work, etc. There’s certainly diminishing returns to money, and I don’t want the long-termist community to engage in zero-sum consumption of Veblen goods. But there’s also plenty of things that are solid investments in your productivity, like having a comfortable home office, a modern computer, ordering takeaway or having cleaners, enough runway to not have financial insecurity, etc.
Financial needs also vary a fair bit from person to person. I know some people who are productive and happy living off Soylent and working on a laptop on their bed, whereas I’d quickly burn out doing that. Others might have higher needs than me, e.g. if they have financial dependents.
As a general rule, if I’d be happy to fund someone for $Y/year if they were doing this work by themselves, and they’re getting paid $X/year by their employer to do this work, I think I should be happy to pay the difference $(Y-X)/year provided the applicant has a good plan for what to do with the money. If you think you might benefit from more money, I’d encourage you to apply. Even if you don’t think you’ll get it: a lot of people underestimate how much their time is worth.
Biosecurity. At the margins I’m about equally excited by biosecurity as I am about mitigating AI risks, largely because biosecurity currently seems much more neglected from a long-termist perspective. Yet the fund makes many more grants in the AI risk space.
We have received a reasonable number of biosecurity applications in recent rounds (though we still receive substantially more for AI), but our acceptance rate has been relatively low. I’d be particularly excited about seeing applications with a relatively clear path to impact. Many of our applications have been for generally trying to raise awareness, and I think getting the details right is really crucial here: targeting the right community, having enough context and experience to understand what that community would benefit from hearing, etc.