Hey there~ I’m Austin, currently building https://manifund.org. Always happy to meet people; reach out at akrolsmir@gmail.com, or find a time on https://calendly.com/austinchen/manifold !
Austin
Karma: 3,797
Thanks for posting this! I appreciate the transparency from the CEA team around organizing this event and posting about the results; putting together this kind of stuff is always effortful for me, so I want to celebrate when others do it.
I do wish this retro had a bit more in the form of concrete reporting about what was discussed, or specific anecdotes from attendees, or takeaways for the broader EA community; eg last year’s MCF reports went into substantial depth on these, which really enjoyed. But again, these things can be hard to write up, perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of good enough, and I’m grateful for the steps that y’all have already taken towards showing your work in public.
Thanks for the questions! Most of our due diligence happens in the step where the Manifund team decides whether to approve a particular grant; this generally happens after a grant has met its minimum funding bar and the grantee has signed our standard grant agreement (example). At that point, our due diligence usually consists of reviewing their proposal as written for charitable eligibility, as well as a brief online search, looking through the grant recipient’s eg LinkedIn and other web presences to get a sense of who they are. For larger grants on our platform (eg $10k+), we usually have additional confidence that the grant is legitimate coming from the donors or regrantors themselves.
In your specific example, it’s very possible that I personally could have missed cross-verifying your claim of attending Yale (with the likelihood decreasing the larger the grant is for). Part of what’s different about our operations is that we open up the screening process so that anyone on the internet can chime in if they see something amiss; to date we’ve paused two grants (out of ~160) based on concerns raised from others.
I believe we’re classified as a public charity and take on expenditure responsibility for our grants, via the terms of our grant agreement and the status updates we ask for from grantees.
And yes, our general philosophy is that Manifund as a platform is responsible for ensuring that a grant is legitimate under US 501c3 law, while being agnostic about the impact of specific grants—that’s the role of donors and regrantors on our platform.
I’d really appreciate you leaving thoughts on the projects, even if you decided not to fund them. I expect that most project organizers would also appreciate your feedback, to help them understand where their proposals as written are falling short. Copy & paste of your personal notes would be great!
Hey! It is not too late; in fact, people can continue signing up to claim and direct funds anytime before phase 3.
(I’m still working on publishing the form; if it’s not up today, I’ll let y’all know and would expect it to be up soon after)
It’s hard to say much about the source of funding without leaking too much information; I think I can say that they’re a committed EA who has been around the community a while, who I deeply respect and is generally excited to give the community a voice.
FWIW, I think the connection between Manifest and “receiving funding from Manifund or EA Community Choice” is pretty tenuous. Peter Wildeford who you quoted has both raised $10k for IAPS on Manifund and donated $5k personally towards a EA community project. This, of course, does not indicate that Peter supports Manifest to any degree whatsoever; rather, it shows that sharing a funding platform is a very low bar for association.
Appreciate the questions! In general, I’m not super concerned about adversarial action this time around, since:
I generally trust people in the community to do the right thing
The money can’t be withdrawn to your own pocket, so the worst case is that some people get to direct more funding than they properly deserve
The total funding at stake is relatively small
We reserve the right to modify this, if we see people trying to exploit things
Specifically:
I plan to mostly rely on self-reports, plus maybe quick sanity checks that a particular person actually exists.
Though, if we’re scaling this up for future rounds, a neat solution I just thought of would be to require people to buy in a little bit, eg they have to donate $10 of their own money to unlock the funds. This would act as a stake towards telling the truth—if we determine that someone is misrepresenting their qualifications then they lose their stake too.
Haha, I love that post (and left some comments from our past experience running QF). We don’t have clever tricks planned to address those shortcomings; I do think collusion and especially usability are problems with QF in general (though, Vitalik has some proposal on bounded pairwise QF that might address collusion?)
We’re going with QF because it’s a schelling point/rallying flag for getting people interested in weird funding mechanisms. It’s not perfect, but it’s been tested enough in the wild for us to have some literature behind it, while not having much actual exposure within EA. If we run this again, I’d be open to mechanism changes!We don’t permit people to create a bunch of accounts to claim the bonus multiple times; we’d look to prevent this by tracking the signup behavior on Manifund. Also, all donation activity is done in public, so I think there will be other scrutiny of weird funding patterns.
Meanwhile I think sharing this on X and encouraging their followers to participate is pretty reasonable—while we’re targeting EA Community Choice at medium-to-highly engaged EAs, I do also hope that this would draw some new folks into our scene!
Yes, we’re happy to allocate funds to the org that ran that initiative for them to spend unrestricted towards other future initiatives!
Yes, community members can donate in any proportion to the projects in this round. The math of quadratic funding roughly means that your first $1 to a project receives the largest match, then the next $3, then the next $5, $7, etc. Or: your match to a project is proportional to the square root of how much you’ve donated.
You can get some intuition by playing with the linked simulator; we’ll also show calculations about current match rates directly on our website. But you also don’t have to worry very much about the quadratic funding equation if you don’t want to, and you can just send money to whatever projects you like!
Glad you like it! As you might guess, the community response to this first round will inform what we do with this in the future. If a lot of people and projects participate, then we’ll be a lot more excited to run further iterations and raise more funding for this kind of event; I think success with this round would encourage larger institutional donors to want to participate.
It currently seems unlikely that we could raise a sizable matching pool (or initial funding pool) from small donations; I think like $100k at a minimum for making this kind of thing worth running. If people want to send small donations, I’d encourage those to go directly to the projects we host!
re: ongoing process, the quadratic funding mechanism typically plays out across different rounds—though I have speculated about an ongoing version before.We don’t have specific, formal plans to use the microregrantor decisions in this round for other purposes, but of course if we notice people leaving thoughtful comments and giving excellent donations in this round, we’ll take notice and consider them for future regranting and other opportunities!
Also, all the granting decisions here will be done in public, so I highly encourage other EA orgs to use the data generated for their own purposes (eg evaluating potential new grantmakers).
He was not.
Indeed, I spoke loosely and the sentence would have been more accurate if I had replaced “57 speakers” with “57 special guests”, for which I apologize. I don’t consider this to be a major distinction, however, and have used these terms fairly interchangeably throughout event planning. It’s a quirk of how we run Manifest, where there are many blurry boundaries.
Most, but not all of our “special guests” presented a session[1]. Not all of the sessions were presented by special guests: Manifest allowed any attendee to book a room to run a talk/session/workshop/event of their choice (though, we the organizers did arrange many of the largest sessions ourselves.) Most special guests did not receive housing or travel assistance; I think we provided this to 10-15 of them. Not all of our special guests even received complimentary tickets: some, such as Eliezer, Katja, Nate and Sarah, paid for their tickets before we reached out to them; we’re very grateful for this! And we also issued complimentary tickets to many folks, without listing them as special guests.
What is true about all our special guests is that we chose them for being notable people, who we imagined our attendees would like to meet. They were listed on our website and received a differently-colored badge. They were also all offered a spot at a special (off campus) dinner on Saturday night, in addition to those who bought supporter tickets.
- ^
Off the top of my head, these special guests did not give talks: Eliezer Yudkowsky, Katja Grace, Joe Carlsmith, Clara Collier, Max Tabarrok, Sarah Constantin, Rob Miles, Richard Hanania, Nate Soares
- ^
For the EA Phillipines grant, curious if the $43k granted is inclusive of two donations made through Manifund? On https://manifund.org/projects/support-a-thriving-and-talented-community-of-ea-filipinos- , there were two large donations of 43000/4 = 10750, and I know that at least Anton was a participant in MCF.
This is totally fine fwiw (we’re very happy to have these on Manifund!), I’m just checking so we don’t double-assign credit for these donations.
Some reflections on the Manifest 2024 discourse:
I’m annoyed (with “the community”, but mostly with human nature & myself) that this kind of drama gets so much more attention than eg typical reviews of the Manifest experience, or our retrospectives of work on Manifund, which I wish got even 10% of this engagement. It’s fun to be self-righteous on the internet, fun to converse with many people who I respect, fun especially when they come to your defense (thanks!), but I feel guilty at the amount of attention this has sucked up for everyone involved.
This bit from Paul Graham makes a lot more sense to me now:
> When someone contradicts you, they’re in a sense attacking you. Sometimes pretty overtly. Your instinct when attacked is to defend yourself. But like a lot of instincts, this one wasn’t designed for the world we now live in. Counterintuitive as it feels, it’s better most of the time not to defend yourself. Otherwise these people are literally taking your life.
Kudos to all y’all who are practicing the virtue of silence and avoiding engaging with this.While it could have been much, much better written, on net I’m glad the Guardian article exists. And not just in a “all PR is good PR” sense, or even a “weak opponents are superweapons” sense; I think there’s a legitimate concern there that’s worthy of reporting. I like the idea of inviting the journalists to come to Manifest in the future.
That said, I am quite annoyed that now many people who didn’t attend Manifest, may think of it as “Edgelordcon”. I once again encourage people who weren’t there to look at our actual schedule, or to skim over some of the many many post-Manifest reports, to get a more representative sense of what Manifest is like or about.
If Edgelordcon is what you really wanted, consider going to something like Hereticon instead of Manifest, thanks.
Not sure how many people already know this but I formally left Manifold a couple months ago. I’m the most comfortable writing publicly out of the 3 founders, but while I’m still on the company board, I expect Manifold vs my own views to diverge more over time.
Also, Rachel and Saul were much more instrumental in making Manifest 2024 happen than me. Their roles were approximately co-directors, while I’m more like a producer of the event. So most of the credit for a well-run event goes to them; I wish more people engaged with their considerations, rather than mine. (Blame for the invites, as I mentioned, falls on me.)
EA Forum is actually pretty good for having nuanced discussion: the threading and upvote vs agreevote and reactions all help compared to other online discourse. Kudos to the team! (Online text-based discourse does remain intrinsically more divisive than offline, though, which I don’t love. I wish more people eg took up Saul on his offer to call with folks.)
Overall my impression of the state of the EA community has ticked upwards as a result of this all this. I’m glad to be here!
Some of my favorite notes amidst all this: Isa, huw, TracingWoodgrains, and Nathan Young on their experiences, Richard Ngo against deplatforming, Jacob and Oli on their thoughts, Bentham’s Bulldog and Theo Jaffee on their defenses of the event, and Saul and Rachel on their perspectives as organizers.
Yeah—in practice, I know that conference invites are consequential (and we discussed this as a team, eg very abbreviated Apr 22 meeting notes). I use the words “scaled up house party” to try to implant a bit of how bizarre it feels to me that, like, something that was just an idea in my head 1.5 years ago, now has attracted many of my favorite writers in the world, received multiple major media mentions, and is viewed as consequential. I also think that there’s something special about our invite process which leads to the feeling of “how it feels to attend Manifest”, and I and many attendees are overall quite happy with the outcome—TracingWoodgrains talks more about this here. While I want to continue to improve on how we shape who comes to Manifest, I also don’t want to kill the golden goose.
While Manifest is a forecasting festival, I’m not sure I’m really trying to build up the field of forecasting in general, rather than something more specific and tautological like “the Manifest community”. Even more than EA, forecasting is a formless vague entity, without a clear leader or in/out distinction.
I agree the comment is reductive; many sentences are, due to the fractal nature of information. I generally wrote trying to balance correctness with informativeness with “actually publishing the damn post, rather than being maximally defensive”.
In any case, I appreciate that you linked to our finances, and that you like how we publish our numbers openly to the world!
Thanks; I also appreciate you sharing your rationale here. I think this makes sense from your perspective, and while I think Manifest and Manifold in fact would be great experiences for people of all kinds, including underrepresented folks, I totally understand if we haven’t proven this to you at this point. Next time I’m in NYC, I’d enjoy speaking with you or other members of EA NYC, if you’d like that!
(I also want to note that my views shouldn’t reflect on “forecasting” any more than they reflect on “EA”; see Ozzie and Peter Wildeford’s comments for what forecasting more broadly is like. I’m in the awkward position of having run a platform for many forecasters, but not participating much as a forecaster myself.)
Thanks for this writeup! I especially found the linked doc, in the category of “nuts and bolts of event organizing”, to be quite interesting and helpful; as a sometimes-organizer myself, it’s cool to read about the design decisions and rationale that goes into other events. I was also impressed to see that you self-funded this event with ~$5.7k—I’d be interested in providing some retroactive funding to help cover this, if you want to put up this retrospective doc on https://manifund.org/ !
To preface, I don’t think this point is load-bearing/cruxy to the question of “is Manifold EA?” or “is Manifold a large player in the EA space?”, which itself is also something of a side point.
I was referring specifically to Manifold Markets as the we in “We’ve received some EA funding, but most of our funding comes from venture capital sources.”—right afterwards I agree that Manifund (aka Manifold for Charity) is an EA org.
Manifold Markets has received ~2.9M in investment and ~1.5M in grants, which were the figures I had in mind when I said “most of our funding comes from VC”. One complicating factor is that of the investment, 1M came from a FTX Future Fund regrant, structured as an equity investment through Alameda Research. Does that count as EA funding or VC? Idk, I think that counts in both categories, but if you characterize that as exclusively EA funding I agree it would be fair to say “Manifold has received more in EA funding than in venture capital”.
Just for the record, I actually invited Brian a few days before he launched AFTF; I proposed a debate afterwards. I would have enjoyed listening to his explanation of the e/acc position even outside a debate context; I think his past background as being solidly EA, eg organizing his university’s EA group, means that he has a unique perspective on this. (And he did end up giving a separate talk, which was very on theme for Manifest—“The Economics of Envy”.) So from my perspective it was less of a case of “diplomatic immunity” and more me genuinely wanting to hear from him.
If this describes you, I’d also love to help (eg with funding) -- reach out to me at austin@manifund.org!