Jan_Kulveit

• Jan_Kulveit 15 Jul 2019 7:45 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: algekalipso's comment on: Get-Out-Of-Hell-Free Necklace

  I’ve sug­gested some­thing similar for hap­piness (https://​​www.less­wrong.com/​​posts/​​7Kv5cik4JWoayHYPD/​​non­lin­ear-per­cep­tion-of-hap­piness ). If you don’t want to in­tro­duce the weird asym­me­try where nega­tive counts and pos­i­tive not, what you get out of that could be some­what sur­pris­ing—it pos­si­bly re­cov­ers more “com­mon folk” al­tru­ism where helping peo­ple who are already quite well off could be good, and if you al­low more spec­u­la­tive views on the space on mind-states, you are at risk of re­cov­er­ing some­thing closely re­sem­bling some sort of “bud­dhist util­i­tar­ian calcu­lus”.

• Jan_Kulveit 12 Jul 2019 22:26 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Denise_Melchin's comment on: EA Fo­rum 2.0 Ini­tial Announcement

  As hu­mans, we are quite sen­si­tive to signs of so­cial ap­proval and dis­ap­proval, and we have some ‘elephant in the brain’ mo­ti­va­tion to seek so­cial ap­proval. This can some­times mess up with epistemics.

  The karma rep­re­sents some­thing like sen­ti­ment of peo­ple vot­ing on a par­tic­u­lar com­ment, weighted in a par­tic­u­lar way. For me, this of­ten did not seemed to be a sig­nal adding any new in­for­ma­tion—when fol­low­ing the fo­rum closely, usu­ally I would have been able to pre­dict what will get down­voted or up­voted.

  What seemed prob­le­matic to me was 1. a num­ber of times when I felt hes­i­ta­tion to write some­thing be­cause part of my S1 pre­dicted it will get down­voted. Also I did not wanted to be primed by karma when read­ing other’s com­ments.

  On a com­mu­nity level, over­all I think the qual­ity of the karma sig­nal is roughly com­pa­rable to face­book likes. If peo­ple are mak­ing im­por­tant de­ci­sions, eval­u­at­ing pro­jects, as­sign­ing prices… based on it, it seems plau­si­ble it’s ac­tively harm­ful.

• Jan_Kulveit 12 Jul 2019 11:10 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: aarongertler's comment on: EA Fo­rum 2.0 Ini­tial Announcement

  It’s not an in­stance of com­plain, but take it as a dat­a­point: I’ve switched off the karma dis­play on all com­ments and my ex­pe­rience im­proved. The karma sys­tem tends to mess up with my S1 pro­cess­ing.

  It seems plau­si­ble karma is caus­ing harm in some hard to per­ceive ways. (One spe­cific way is by peo­ple up­dat­ing on karma pat­tern mis­tak­ing them for some voice of the com­mu­nity /​ ea move­ment /​ … )

• Jan_Kulveit 15 Jun 2019 10:22 UTC

  19 points

  on: Is there an anal­y­sis that es­ti­mates pos­si­ble timelines for ar­rival of easy-to-cre­ate pathogens?

  I would ex­pect if or­ga­ni­za­tions work­ing in the area have re­views of ex­pected tech­nolo­gies and how they en­able in­di­vi­d­u­als to man­u­fac­ture pathogens, which is likely the back­ground nec­es­sary for con­struct­ing timelines, they would not pub­lish too spe­cific doc­u­ments.

• Jan_Kulveit 14 Jun 2019 23:06 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: casebash's comment on: What new EA pro­ject or org would you like to see cre­ated in the next 3 years?

  If peo­ple think this is gen­er­ally good idea I would guess CZEA can make it run­ning in few weeks. Most of the work likely comes from cu­rat­ing the con­tent, not from set­ting up the service

• Jan_Kulveit 9 Apr 2019 0:24 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Habryka's comment on: Long-Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  To clar­ify—agree with the benefits of split­ting the dis­cus­sion threads for read­abil­ity, but I was un­en­thu­si­as­tic about the mo­ti­va­tion be vot­ing.

• Jan_Kulveit 9 Apr 2019 0:02 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: RyanCarey's comment on: Long-Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  I don’t think karma/​vot­ing sys­tem should be given that much at­ten­tion or should be used as a highly visi­ble feed­back on pro­ject fund­ing.

• Jan_Kulveit 8 Apr 2019 23:16 UTC

  40 points

  in reply to: Igor Terzic's comment on: Long-Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  I don’t think any­one should be try­ing to per­suade IMO par­ti­ci­pants to join the EA com­mu­nity, and I also don’t think giv­ing them “much more di­rectly EA con­tent” is a good idea.

  I would pre­fer Math Olympiad win­ners to think about long-term, think bet­ter, and think in­de­pen­dently, than to “join the EA com­mu­nity”. HPMoR seems ok be­cause it is not a book try­ing to con­vince you to join a com­mu­nity, but mostly a book about ways how to think, and a good read.

  (If they read­ers even­tu­ally be­come EAs af­ter rea­son­ing in­de­pen­dently, it’s likely good; if they for ex­am­ple come to the con­clu­sion there are mayor flaws in EA and it’s bet­ter to en­gage with the move­ment crit­i­cally, it’s also good.)

• Jan_Kulveit 6 Apr 2019 17:05 UTC

  30 points

  in reply to: Halffull's comment on: How x-risk pro­jects are differ­ent from startups

  I don’t think risk of this type is given too much weight now. In my model, con­sid­er­a­tions like this got at some point in the past rounded of to some over-sim­plified meme like “do not start pro­jects, they fail and it is dan­ger­ous”. This is wrong and led to some coun­ter­fac­tual value get­ting lost.

  This was to some ex­tent re­ac­tion to the pre­vi­ous mood, which was more like “bring in new peo­ple; seed groups; start pro­jects; grow ev­ery­thing”. Which was also prob­le­matic.

  In my view we are look­ing at some­thing like pen­du­lum swings, where we were some­where at the ex­treme po­si­tion of not many pro­jects started re­cently, but the mo­men­tum is in di­rec­tion of more pro­jects, and the sec­ond deriva­tive is high. So I ex­pect many pro­jects will ac­tu­ally get started. In such situ­a­tion the im­por­tant thing is to start good pro­jects, and avoid anti-uni­corns.

  IMO the risk was maybe given too much weight be­fore, but is given too lit­tle weight now, by many peo­ple. Just look at many of the re­cent dis­cus­sions, where se­cu­rity mind­set seem rare, and many want to move fast for­ward.

• Jan_Kulveit 6 Apr 2019 16:54 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Halffull's comment on: How x-risk pro­jects are differ­ent from startups

  Dis­cussing spe­cific ex­am­ples seems very tricky—I can prob­a­bly come up with a list of maybe 10 pro­jects or ac­tions which come with large down­side/​risks, but I would ex­pect list­ing them would not be that use­ful and can cause con­tro­versy.

  Few hy­po­thet­i­cal ex­am­ples

  • in­fluenc­ing mayor in­ter­na­tional reg­u­la­tory or­gani­sa­tion in a way lead­ing to cre­at­ing some sort of “AI safety cer­tifi­ca­tion” in a situ­a­tion where we don’t have the ba­sic re­search yet, cre­at­ing false sense of se­cu­rity/​fake sense of understanding

  • cre­at­ing a highly dis­torted ver­sion of effec­tive al­tru­ism in a mayor coun­try e.g. by bad pub­lic outreach

  • co­or­di­nat­ing effec­tive al­tru­ism com­mu­nity in a way which leads to in­creased ten­sion and pos­si­bly splits in the community

  • pro­duc­ing and re­leas­ing some in­fo­haz­ard research

  • in­fluenc­ing im­por­tant play­ers in AI or AI safety in a harm­ful lev­er­aged way, e.g. by bad strate­gic ad­vice

How x-risk pro­jects are differ­ent from startups

• Jan_Kulveit 26 Mar 2019 0:54 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Habryka's comment on: EA Pro­jects eval­u­a­tion platform

  My im­pres­sion is you have in mind some­thing differ­ent than what was in­tended in the pro­posal.

  What I imag­ined was ‘prim­ing’ the ar­gu­ment-map­pers with prompts like

  • Imag­ine this pro­jects fails. How?

  • Imag­ine this pro­ject works, but has some un­in­tended bad con­se­quences. What they are?

  • What would be a strong rea­son not to as­so­ci­ate this pro­ject with the EA move­ment?

  (and the op­po­sites). When writ­ing their texts the two peo­ple would be com­mu­ni­cat­ing and look­ing at the ar­gu­ments from both sides.

  The hope is this would pro­duce more com­plete ar­gu­ment map. One way to think about it, is each per­son is ‘re­spon­si­ble’ for the pro/​con sec­tion, try­ing to make sure it cap­tures as much im­por­tant con­sid­er­a­tions as pos­si­ble.

  It seems quite nat­u­ral for peo­ple to think about ar­gu­ments in this way, with “sides” (some­times even sin­gle au­thors ex­pose com­plex ar­gu­ments in the “di­alogue” way).

  There are pos­si­ble benefits—re­lated to why ‘de­bate’ style is used in justice

  • It lev­els the play­ing field in in­ter­est­ing ways (when com­pared to pub­lic de­bate on the fo­rum). In the pub­lic de­bate, what “counts” is not just ar­gu­ments, but also dis­cus­sion and so­cial skills, sta­tus of par­ti­ci­pants, moods and emo­tions of the au­di­ence, and similar fac­tor. The pro­posed for­mat would mean both the pos­i­tives and nega­tives have “ad­vo­cates” ideally of “similar de­bate strength” (anony­mous vol­un­teer). This is very differ­ent from a pub­lic fo­rum dis­cus­sion, where all kinds of “elephant in the brain” bi­ases may in­fluence par­ti­ci­pants and bias judge­ments.

  • It re­moves some of the so­cial costs and pains as­so­ci­ated with pro­ject dis­cus­sions. Idea au­thors may get dis­cour­aged by nega­tive feed­back, down­votes/​karma, or similar.

  Also, just look­ing at how dis­cus­sions on the fo­rum look now, it seems in prac­tice it is easy for peo­ple to look at things from pos­i­tive or nega­tive per­spec­tives: cer­tainly I have seen ar­gu­ments struc­tured like (sev­eral differ­ent ways how some­thing fails + why is it too costly if it suc­ceeded + spec­u­la­tion what harm it may cause any­way).

  Over­all: in my words, I’m not sure whether your view is ‘in the space of ar­gu­ment-map­ping, not­ing in the vicinity of de­bate, will work—at least when done by hu­mans and ap­plied to real prob­lems’. Or ‘there are op­tions in this space which are bad’ - where I agree some­thing like bul­let-pointed lists of pos­i­tives and nega­tives where the peo­ple writ­ing them would not com­mu­ni­cate seems bad.

• Jan_Kulveit 22 Mar 2019 10:02 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Brendon_Wong's comment on: EA Pro­jects eval­u­a­tion platform

  My im­pres­sion was based mostly on our con­ver­sa­tions sev­eral months ago—quot­ing the notes from that time

  lot of the dis­cus­sion and de­bate de­rives from differ­ing as­sump­tions held by the par­ti­ci­pants re­gard­ing the po­ten­tial for bad/​risky pro­jects: Ben­jamin/​Bren­don gen­er­ally point out the lack of data/​sig­nal in this area and be­lieve launch­ing an open pro­ject plat­form could provide data to re­duce un­cer­tainty, whereas Jan is more con­ser­va­tive and pri­ori­tizes cre­at­ing a rigor­ous cu­ra­tion and eval­u­a­tion sys­tem for new pro­jects.

  I think it is fair to say you ex­pected very low risk from cre­at­ing an open plat­form where peo­ple would just post pro­jects and seek vol­un­teers and fund­ing, while I ex­pected with min­i­mum cu­ra­tion this cre­ates sig­nifi­cant risk (even if the risk is com­ing from small frac­tion of pro­jects). Sorry if I rounded off sug­ges­tions like “let’s make an open plat­form with­out care­ful eval­u­a­tion and see” and “based on the pro­ject ideas lists which ex­isted sev­eral years ago the amount of harm­ful pro­jects seems low” to “wor­ry­ing about them is pre­ma­ture”.

  Read­ing your re­cent com­ment, it seems more care­ful, and point­ing out large nega­tive out­comes are more of a prob­lem with x-risk/​long-term ori­ented pro­jects.

  In our old dis­cus­sions I also ex­pressed some doubt about your or al­tru­ism.vc abil­ity to eval­u­ate x-risk and similar pro­jects, where your re­cent post states that pro­jects that im­pact x-risks by do­ing some­thing like AI safety re­search has not yet ap­plied to the EA An­gel Group.

  I guess part of the dis­agree­ment comes from the fact that I have fo­cus on x-risk and the long-term fu­ture, and I’m more in­ter­ested both in im­prov­ing the pro­ject land­scape in these ar­eas, and more wor­ried about nega­tive out­comes.

  If open plat­forms or similar eval­u­a­tion pro­cess also ac­cept miti­gat­ing x-risk and similar pro­pos­als, in my opinion, un­for­tu­nately the bar how good/​ex­pert driven eval­u­a­tions you need is higher, and un­for­tu­nately sig­nals like “this is a com­pe­tent team” which VCs would mainly look at are not enough.

  Be­cause I would ex­pect the long-term im­pact will come mainly from long-term, meta-, ex­plo­ra­tory or very am­bi­tious pro­jects, I think you can be ba­si­cally right about low ob­vi­ous risk of all the pro­jects his­tor­i­cally posted on hack­pad or pro­posed to al­tru­ism.vc, and still miss the largest term in the EV.

  Milan asked this ques­tion and I an­swered it.

  Thanks—both of that hap­pened af­ter I posted my com­ment, and also I still do not see the num­bers which would help me es­ti­mate the ra­tio of pro­jects which ap­plied and which got funded. I take as mildly nega­tive sig­nal that some­one had to ask, and this info was not in­cluded in the post, which so­lic­its pro­ject pro­pos­als and vol­un­teer work.

  In my model it seems pos­si­ble you have some­thing like chicken-and-egg prob­lem, not get­ting many great pro­pos­als, and the group of un­named an­gels not fund­ing many pro­pos­als com­ing via that pipeline.

  If this is the case and the ac­tual num­ber of suc­cess­fully funded pro­jects is low, I think it is nec­es­sary to state this clearly be­fore invit­ing peo­ple to work on pro­pos­als. My vague im­pres­sion was we may dis­agree on this, which seems to in­di­cate some quite deep dis­agree­ment about how fun­ders should treat pro­jects.

  I’m not en­tirely sure what your rea­sons are for hav­ing this opinion, or what you even mean

  The whole con­text was, Ryan sug­gested I should have sought some feed­back from you. I ac­tu­ally did that, and your co-founder noted that he will try to write the feed­back on this to­day or to­mor­row, on 11th of Mar—which did not hap­pen. I don’t think this is large prob­lem, as we had already dis­cussed the topic ex­ten­sively.

  When writ­ing it I was some­what up­set about the mode of con­ver­sa­tion where crit­ics do ask whether I tried to co­or­di­nate with some­one, but just as­sume I did not. I apol­o­gize for the bad way it was writ­ten.

  Over­all my sum­mary is we prob­a­bly still dis­agree in many as­sump­tions, we did in­vest some effort try­ing to over­come them, it seems difficult for us to reach some con­sen­sus, but this should not stop us try­ing to move for­ward.

• Jan_Kulveit 22 Mar 2019 2:30 UTC

  4 points

  on: EA Pro­jects eval­u­a­tion platform

  Sum­mary im­pres­sions so far: ob­ject-level

  • It seems many would much pre­fer ex­pe­di­ency in me­dian pro­ject cases to ro­bust­ness and safety in rare low fre­quency pos­si­bly large nega­tive im­pact cases. I do not think this is the right ap­proach, when the in­ten­tion is also to eval­u­ate long-term ori­ented, x-risk, meta-, cause-X, or highly am­bi­tious pro­jects.

  • I’m afraid there is some con­fu­sion about pro­ject failure modes. I’m more wor­ried about pro­jects which would be suc­cess­ful in hav­ing a team, work­ing suc­cess­fully in some sense, chang­ing the world, but achiev­ing large nega­tive im­pact in the end.

  • I feel sad about the re­peated claims the pro­posal is rigid, costly or large-scale. If some­thing would not work in prac­tice it could be eas­ily changed. Spend­ing some­thing like 5h of time on a pro­ject idea which likely was re­sult of much longer de­liber­a­tion and which may lead to thou­sands hours of work seems rea­son­able. Para­dox­i­cally, just the dis­cus­sion about whether the pro­ject is costly or not likely already had higher cost than what set­ting the whole pro­posed in­fras­truc­ture for the pro­ject + phases 1a,1d,1c would cost.

  Meta:

  • I will .not have time to par­ti­ci­pate in the dis­cus­sion in next few days. Thanks for the com­ments so far.

• Jan_Kulveit 22 Mar 2019 0:30 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: sudhanshu_kasewa's comment on: EA Pro­jects eval­u­a­tion platform

  Thanks Sun­dan­shu! Sorry for not re­ply­ing sooner, I was a bit over­whelmed by some of the nega­tive feed­back in the com­ments.

  I don’t think step 1b. has the same bot­tle­neck as cur­rent grant eval­u­a­tor face, be­cause it is less de­pen­dent on good judge­ment.

  With your pro­posal, I think part of it may work, I would be wor­ried about other parts. With step 2b I would fear no­body would feel re­spon­si­ble for pro­duc­ing the con­tent.

  With 3a or any au­to­matic steps like that, what does that lack is some sort of (rea­son­ably) trusted ex­pert judge­ment. In my view this is ac­tu­ally the most crit­i­cal step in case of x-risk, long-term, meta-, and similarly difficult to eval­u­ate pro­pos­als.

  Over­all

  • I’m scep­ti­cal the karma or similar au­to­mated sys­tem is good for track­ing what is ac­tu­ally im­por­tant here

  • I see some beauty in au­toma­tion, but I don’t see it ap­plied here in the right places

• Jan_Kulveit 21 Mar 2019 22:55 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: aarongertler's comment on: EA Pro­jects eval­u­a­tion platform

  FWIW, part of my mo­ti­va­tion for the de­sign, was

  1. there may be pro­jects, mostly in long-term, x-risk, meta- and out­reach spaces, which are very nega­tive, but not in an ob­vi­ous way

  2. there may be ideas, mostly in long-term and x-risk, which are infohazard

  The prob­lem with 1. is most of the EV can be caused by just one pro­ject, with large nega­tive im­pact, where the down­side is not ob­vi­ous to no­tice.

  It seems to me stan­dard startup think­ing does not ap­ply here, be­cause star­tups gen­er­ally can not go way bel­low zero.

  I also do not trust ar­bi­trary set of fo­rum users to han­dle this well.

  Over­all I be­lieve the very lightweight un­struc­tured pro­cesses are trad­ing some gain in speed and con­ve­nience in most cases for some de­creased ro­bust­ness in worst cases.

  In gen­eral I would feel much bet­ter if the sim­ple sys­tem you want to try would avoid pro­jects in long-term, x-risk, meta-, out­reach, lo­cal­iza­tion, and “search­ing for cause X” ar­eas.

• Jan_Kulveit 21 Mar 2019 19:42 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: RyanCarey's comment on: EA Pro­jects eval­u­a­tion platform

  It is pos­si­ble my read­ing of your post some­what blended with some other parts of the dis­cus­sion, which are in my opinion quite un­char­i­ta­ble read­ing of the pro­posal. Sorry for that.

  Ac­tu­ally from the list, I talked about it and shared the draft with peo­ple work­ing on EA grants, EA funds, and Bren­don, and his­tor­i­cally I had some in­ter­ac­tions with BERI. What I learned is peo­ple have differ­ent pri­ors over ex­is­tence of bad pro­jects, ra­tio of good pro­jects, num­ber of pro­jects which should or should not get funded. Also opinions of some of the fun­ders are at odds with opinions of some peo­ple I trust more than the fun­ders.

  I don’t know, but it seems to me you are ei­ther a bit un­der­es­ti­mat­ing the amount of con­sul­ta­tion which went into this, or over­es­ti­mat­ing how much agree­ment is there be­tween the stake­hold­ers. Also I’m try­ing to fac­tor in the in­ter­ests of the pro­ject founders, and over­all I’m more con­cerned whether the im­pact in the world would be good, and what’s good for the whole sys­tem.

  De­spite re­peated claims the pro­posal is very heavy, com­plex, rigid, etc. I think the pro­posed pro­ject would be in fact quite cheap, lean, and flex­ible (and would work). I’m also quite flex­ible in mod­ify­ing it in any di­rec­tion which seems con­sen­sual.

• Jan_Kulveit 21 Mar 2019 18:49 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Denise_Melchin's comment on: EA Pro­jects eval­u­a­tion platform

  You are miss­ing one ma­jor cat­e­gory here: pro­jects which are sim­ply bad be­cause they do have ap­prox­i­mately zero im­pact, but aren’t par­tic­u­larly risky. I think this cat­e­gory is the largest of the the four.

  I agree that’s likely. Please take the first para­graphs more as mo­ti­va­tion than pre­cise de­scrip­tion of the cat­e­gories.

  Which pro­jects have a chance of work­ing and which don’t is of­ten pretty clear to peo­ple who have ex­pe­rience eval­u­at­ing pro­jects quite quickly (which is why Oli sug­gested 15min for the ini­tial in­ves­ti­ga­tion above).

  I think we are com­par­ing ap­ples and or­anges. As far as the out­put should be some pub­li­cly un­der­stand­able rea­son­ing be­hind the judge­ment, I don’t think this is doable in 15m.

  It sounds to me a bit like your model of ideas which get pro­posed is that most of them are pretty valuable. I don’t think this is the case.

  I don’t have strong prior on that.

  To do this well they need to have a good men­tal map of what kind of pro­jects have worked or not worked in the past,...

  From a pro­ject-man­age­ment per­spec­tive, yes, but with slow and bad feed­back loops in long-term, x-risk and meta ori­ented pro­jects, I don’t think it is easy to tell what works and what does not. (Even with pro­jects work­ing in the sense they run smoothly and are pro­duc­ing some visi­ble out­put.)

• Jan_Kulveit 21 Mar 2019 17:47 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Denise_Melchin's comment on: EA Pro­jects eval­u­a­tion platform

  I’m not sure if we agree or dis­agree, pos­si­bly we par­tially agree, par­tially dis­agree. In case of nega­tive feed­back, I think as a fun­der, you are in greater risk of peo­ple over-up­dat­ing in the di­rec­tion “I should stop try­ing”.

  I agree friends and so­cial neigh­bour­hood may be too pos­i­tive (that’s why the pro­posed ini­tial re­views are anony­mous, and one of the re­view­ers is sup­posed to be nega­tive).

  When fun­ders give gen­eral opinions on what should or should not get started or how you value or not value things, again, I think you are at greater risk of hav­ing too much of an in­fluence on the com­mu­nity. I do not be­lieve the knowl­edge of the fun­ders is strictly bet­ter than the knowl­edge of grant ap­pli­cants.

• Jan_Kulveit 21 Mar 2019 13:24 UTC

  −2 points

  in reply to: RyanCarey's comment on: EA Pro­jects eval­u­a­tion platform

  On a meta-level

  I’m happy to up­date the pro­posal to re­flect some of the sen­ti­ments. Openly, I find some of them quite strange—e.g. it seems, co­a­lesc­ing the steps into one para­graph and as­sum­ing all the re­sults (re­views, dis­cus­sion, “au­thor­i­ta­tive” sum­mary of the dis­cus­sion) will just hap­pen may make it look more flex­ible. Ok, why not.

  Also it seems you and Oli seem to be wor­ried that I want to re­cruit peo­ple who are cur­rently not do­ing some high-im­pact di­rect work … in­stead of just ask­ing a cou­ple of peo­ple around me, which would of­ten mean peo­ple already do­ing im­pact­ful vol­un­teer work.

  Meta-point is, I’m not sure if you or Oli re­al­ize how big part of solving

  new EA pro­jects eval­u­a­tion pipeline

  is in con­sen­sus-build­ing. Ac­tu­ally I think the land­scape of pos­si­ble ways how to do eval­u­a­tions looks like in such a way that it is very hard to get con­sen­sus on what the “strongest form” is. I’m quite happy to cre­ate a bunch of pro­pos­als, e.g.

  • with re­mov­ing fi­nal ex­pert evaluation

  • re­mov­ing ini­tial reviews

  • re­mov­ing pub­lic fo­rum discussions

  • writ­ing an un­re­al­is­tic as­sump­tion that the ini­tial re­views will take 15m in­stead of hours,

  • sug­gest­ing that the vol­un­teers will be my busy friends (whose vol­un­tary work does not count?)

  • em­pha­sis­ing pub­lic feed­back more, or less

  • giv­ing stronger or weaker voice to ex­ist­ing fun­ders.

  I have stronger prefer­ence for the plat­form to hap­pen than for one op­tion in any sin­gle of these choices. But what is the next step? After think­ing about the land­scape for a some time I’m quite skep­ti­cal any par­tic­u­lar com­bi­na­tion of op­tions would not have some large draw­back.

  On the ob­ject level:

  Re: fun­der in­volve­ment

  Cross-post­ing from an­other thread

  Another pos­si­ble point of dis­cus­sion is whether the eval­u­a­tion sys­tem would work bet­ter if it was tied to some source of fund­ing. My gen­eral in­tu­ition is this would cre­ate more com­plex in­cen­tives, but gen­er­ally I don’t know and I’m look­ing for com­ments.

  I think it much harder to give open feed­back if it is closely tied with fund­ing. Feed­back from fun­ders can eas­ily have too much in­fluence on peo­ple, and should be very care­ful and nu­anced, as it comes from some po­si­tion of power. I would ex­pect adding fi­nan­cial in­cen­tives can eas­ily be detri­men­tal for the pro­cess. (For self-refer­en­tial ex­am­ple, just look on this dis­cus­sion: do you think the fact that Oli dis­likes my pro­posal and sug­gest LTF can back some­thing differ­ent with $20k will not cre­ate at least some un­con­scious in­cen­tives?)

  We had some dis­cus­sion with Bren­don, and I think his opinion can be rounded to “there are al­most no bad pro­jects, so to worry about them is pre­ma­ture”. I dis­agree with that. Also, given the Bren­don’s an­gel group is work­ing, eval­u­at­ing and fund­ing pro­jects since Oc­to­ber, I would be cu­ri­ous what pro­jects were funded, what was the to­tal amount of fund­ing al­lo­cated, how many ap­pli­ca­tions they got.

  Based on what I know I’m un­con­vinced that Bren­don or BERI should have some out­sized in­fluence how eval­u­a­tions should be done; part of the point of the plat­form would be to serve broader com­mu­nity.