Former professional poker player
Crypto enthusiast
Aspiring hedonic utilitarian
Mckiev
Karma: 53
How did the first run go? Are you planning to do more groups?
I meant real projects, so that potential donors could fund them directly. Both Manifund and Nonlinear Network gathered applications, but evaluating them remains a challenging task. Having a project publicly endorsed by LTFF, would have been a strong signal to potential funders in my opinion
I’d love to see a database of waitlisted grant applications publicly posted and endorsed by LTFF, ideally with the score that LTFF evaluators have assigned. Would you consider doing it?
By waitlisted, I mean those that LTFF would have funded if it wasn’t funding constrained.
sismo.io has a working opensource implementation that allows proving your inclusion into groups of choice without revealing anything else. (I’m not associated with them to be clear) User knows exactly what he proves and can easily determine the list of people who could prove the same statement. (this is my dilettante understanding)
Probably it can be implemented with a more efficient algorithm, but I’m not sure whether this optimization is worth the time to implement.
Do you know about groups who would be interested?
sismo.io has an opensource implementation based on zero knowledge proofs and ethereum wallets. I think ethereum wallets are a more convenient asymmetric cryptography implementation then e.g. pgp, hence it would probably be easier to get people to use them.
I have an interested-user-level knowledge of internals, but I’d be very keen to dive deep in case it could be useful.
Do you know of a group that is actively interested in such a system? I doubt it’s possible to convince people to do it otherwise, since key management remains painful if done safely.
Zero Knowledge Proofs allow proving that you are a part of a certain group without revealing who exactly. This can allow credible whistleblowing. For example, if some ML company issues a list of it’s employees linked to ethereum wallets (or any other cryptographic key pair of choice), then any of it’s employees would have an option to whistleblow on unsafe practices, while being 100% sure it’s impossible to know who made this post.
This seem awesome to me and I wonder if anyone else shares my fascination and think this could be useful
Glad to hear that you are increasing capacity! In regards to understanding donor concerns and pitching them: seems like it should be relatively easy to hire someone for this role (unlike hiring a grant evaluator)
Thank you for pointing me to this post, now I better understand the situation. I hope you’ll figure out how to distribute approved grants faster, and also how raise more funds—I’d love to see most net-positive longtermist grants funded, and believe it’s achievable.
I think you laid out a very compelling reason to donate to LTFF and I’m sorry I didn’t see it earlier. Am I unusual in this regard? What share of current LTFF donors do you think are up to date on this?
Judging by the stats page LTFF currently has 2M in the bank, which is an evidence against being funding constrained. If LTFF have distributed ~all the funds and managers put up a post saying e.g. : “here are 20 more grants totalling 10M we’d really like to see funded”, the argument would have sounded more persuasive, and i would predict the funding gap could get closed relatively quickly by some crypto magnate.
I appreciate the author starting this conversation and would really love to see comment from LTFF here
It was heartwarming to read the shoutout, I appreciate it!
Did LTFF decline you grant application? Have you applied to manifund.org?
I’m sorry I didn’t express myself clearly. By “select people carefully”, I meant selecting for correct motivations, that you have tried to filter for using the subsistence salary. I would prefer using some other selection mechanism (like references), and then provide a solid paycheck (like MIRI does).
It’s certainly noble to give away everything beyond 30k like Singer and MacAskill do, but I think it should be a choice rather than a requirement.
Well, such a low pay creates additional mental pressure to resist temptation to get 5-10x money in a normal job. I’d rather select people carefully, but then provide them with at least a ~middle class wage
Did anyone consider ELOing the longtermist projects for “Retrospective grant evaluations”. Seems like it could be relatively fast by crowdsourcing comparisons, and orthogonal to other types of estimates
Decentralizing speeding cameras
What if anyone could buy a certified speed camera that can be installed on a building a or a moving car?
Wouldn’t it instantly solve all traffic violations and so massively reduce death toll, if the hardware is cheap enough, which is probably the case in 2023?
Mckiev’s Quick takes
The main upside of a DAO is that the storage of funds and each grant distribution is protected by the algorithm that has been embedded in the smart contract, instead of being trusted to some entity (e.g. bank or crypto trading firm). The movement of funds is also maximally transparent for any person on the internet. I think it is a big benefit in some cases (although, not in every case)
To be clear, I’m don’t support of the actual proposal that the author have laid out int his next post, but I support the idea of experimenting with DAOs for EA and certain it would happen at some point
My idea would be to implement mvp for Badge Collecting for EAs: e.g. badge on EA forum showing that you have been at EAG or EAGx. Or GWWC pledge giver etc. Kind of like https://poap.xyz/
At a first pass it can be made as a chrome extension that would display these badges to users who have opted in, and without any blockchain whatsoever ;)
I think it’s just fun to show off your involvement with the community. More importantly it would be one more step towards developing online reputation system
In the future this system can be extended in more sophisticated ways. E.g. badges that can be displayed on demand, or only to a subset of users. Or badges that contain more data that just “been there”. I don’t feel comfortable sharing amount of personal donations with everyone, but maybe the frequency could be fine? Or maybe sharing the donation trends over time could be encouraging?
I’m only familiar with python and have zero web coding skills: anyone is up to join?
I wonder what is the relationship between a prize pool size and accuracy of predictions. It seems that EA community can easily 10x the size of a reward if it would be helpful for such a cool project. At this size the prizes seem more like a token on appreciation than a tool to motivate participation
I find tax codes in the US (and basically every other country) very frustrating, not because the tax is big, but for all the bureaucratic burden
I thought I could circumvent the whole problem by putting most of my hard-to-deal-with assets into a charitable fund, and then not worry about taxes there at all. However, DAFs don’t quite solve the issue since they are very limited in where I can invest. There are also options such as “Charitable Trusts” and “Private Foundations,” but they seem to create lots of overhead.
Is there an option that I’m missing? In an ideal case, I would like to have fully functioning brokerage and crypto exchange accounts where I can make any transactions tax-free, given that all of the money I earn must be donated in the end.