I see it discussed sometimes in AI safety groups.
There are, for example, safety oriented teams at both Google Research and DeepMind.
But I agree it could be discussed more.
lifelonglearner
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You’re right that I expect there is a large group of both people and money who I expect to be interested in this because it’s on the blockchain which forms part of my reasoning. It also allows for better interoperability with existing Ethereum assets, which helps if you thinking making ICs liquid is important (which I do).
What I instead meant by the second point, however, is that moving funding to existing IC holders seems like it would be harder to do with traditional finance methods and easier with blockchain tech.
I haven’t worked enough with traditional finance protocols, but it seems like the process of querying all holders of the IC and then making payments to all of them could be more costly and complex, even when using something popular like Stripe.
I agree that they probably have a good system in place for electronic tabulation, but museums generally don’t trade art at high speeds across many, many actors.
And it seems desirable to have ICs trade at volume and speed, which I think museums probably don’t have the specialized infra for, but blockchain does.
Having electronic tabulation means that you can allow transfers to happen quickly, and you can also disburse funds more quickly to holders of the ICs.
I would imagine that keeping a consistent record of who holds a physical item would take longer to verify and maintain.
I’ve been chatting with someone else who’s been looking for an MVP of ICs to match some private funders and project creators.
We’ve also been in talks to collaborate with Gitcoin, a popular quadratic funding platform on Ethereum.
The short list of reasons is:
We both have fairly extensive blockchain dev experience
There’s a lot of new capital and value creation in the blockchain space, and people are looking to fund public good projects. The community there is quite receptive to new market paradigms.
Transfers on Ethereum are fast and fungible with many other assets.
I think having a symbolic object could also be cool as well (and definitely welcome other projects looking to do them!), but the problem we’re more focused on is:
Letting project creators issue them at scale and let them be highly divisible.
Allowing funders to retroactively fund IC holders.
Both of the above two things are much harder to keep track of with a physical object.
Oh, awesome, thanks for sharing this useful bit of context!
Thank you so much for taking the time to do this! Very informative and helpful!
Thanks for linking my Murphyjitsu write-up!
Slight correction to TAP’s: They’re typically referred to as “Trigger Action Plans” (and not ‘potentials’).
Just want to respond that I’d be interested in doing this sort of thing for a short period of time (a few months) to test to waters.
Thank you for writing this up. I haven’t spent cycles thinking this through, but my first glance says that this hits a lot of obvious avenues, which seems good.
I think I had a disjoint model of most of the things above, but it was all scattered and not consolidated. Putting them together (so that learning more, coordination, donating, gruntwork are all here) was a good way for me to update my own thoughts.
I’m sure what their respective funding constraints are.
Should there be a “not” in the middle here, or are you just saying that you have good info on their funding situation?
Awesome, thanks for taking the time to give more background on your thinking process!
It was helpful to see your overall thoughts on ways CFAR can make a case for EA’s to attend, given their understanding of measuring impact.
Hi Evan!
You bring up some good points about quantifying CFAR’s relative impact, which I would like to see them address in the near-future, especially given their connection to EA.
It sounds like your own CFAR experience wasn’t exactly helpful in the way you expected it to be. Could you talk a little more about that? I’d be interested in hearing how your actual results stacked up with your expectations.
Lastly, as just a little note, university here in the US is more expensive than Canada, in case you were wondering.
A year at a public university for an in-state student is about $9,000, while a year at a private institution averages about $32,000.
(It is around $3,000 for 1 year at a 2-year college, but I’m not sure that’s what you had in mind when you talked about universities. The courses offered at the 2-year college tend to have less of the high-level courses in the fields you mentioned above, like CS, econ, and moral philosophy)
Link here (http://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance/how-much-does-it-cost-study-us)
FYI one of the links seems broken for the website?
Appears to prefix effectivealtruism