Seconded. I’ve loaned someone else money and heard of other loans, and it seems to have worked out pretty well.
Ozzie Gooen
Karma: 1,387
Would this basically be an incubator? Would it be for EAs only? (If not, what would distinguish it from other business incubators?)
Please do give ideas! Even simple ones are appreciated.
Related: Some “Top Charity Ideas” by Charity Entrepreneurship: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ykwQCpBxL3qPKAAqx/top-charity-ideas-2019-charity-entrepreneurship
An old LessWrong thread on startup ideas: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YbCc3NRrr5avvWSHT/who-wants-to-start-an-important-startup
Evaluations-on-Demand
There have been several attempts at making public cost-effectiveness models, but they are often made by people who are working on the relevant research. For instance, organization in area X making an estimate to show that X is cost-effective.
It would be nice to have another agency agree to make their own models, or to go through existing models and check them for validity, similar to a penetration tester.
An EA Fiscal Sponsor
There are several reasons why small orgs may want nonprofit status or similar. Official nonprofit status can take many months to get in the US, and cost $10-30k of attorney fees.
One solution is to get Fiscal Sponsorship from another trusting org, but I don’t believe many EA orgs are focussed on being the Fiscal Sponsor of many new and small groups.
There are already many groups that act primarily as fiscal sponsors for other orgs, so it is a pretty tried-and-true model. https://fiscalsponsordirectory.org
With all of the EA Funds and CEA community grants coming out, I could imagine a lot of groups may want to become more formal organizations.
An org/project that basically provides easy access to a whole bunch of vetted remote talent for EA organizations.
Our ability to scale current direct workers seems important, and one possible way is by augmenting them with lots of remote help. The costs to set up contractor relationships are considerable, so it often doesn’t make sense to set up a relationship if an organization would just use it for themselves.
This organization would interview & organize work with many specialized skillsets, and help provide them on demand.
Some ideas of ways to help:
Research assistance
Writing help
Presentation help
Minor web work
Bookkeeping
Lawyers
[Question] What new EA project or org would you like to see created in the next 3 years?
I think that there’s a pretty compelling case for Cari & Dustin to give everything to Open Phil. The main reason is that Open Phil is already evaluating and funding the other options, and will continue to do so. They are funding many moonshots (AI risk), and are basically funding many smaller grants (through things like regranting programs with BERI and CEA).
If they were to give directly to moonshots or other projects, that would just mean moving the decision from Open Phil staff to Cari & Dustin individually, which seems weird to me. They could hire other people to do this, but at that point they are basically making a competitor to Open Phil.
Should they sponsor an Open Phil equivalent/competitor? My guess is that this would most make sense if this other organization were sufficiently different and/or specialized; though in these cases, I’d expect Open Phil would be happy with them and consider funding them directly; they would be less of an equivalent and more of a collaborating group. If they were too similar they would compete for talent; I think much of the best talent is at Open Phil, so this would be a struggle for them.
From what I understand, Holden really doesn’t have complete power. If his influence were too high, that could be modified while keeping the main Open Phil relationship the same.
The general structure of “I’m rich, so I’ll make one, and only one, group to decide, on a high level, what to do with my money” seems pretty reasonable and common to me.
Separately, I’d of course like to see other mega-billionaires also come in, but that’s somewhat of a separate issue.
I’d agree it’s a good start. Now that we have it, I would probably be particularly excited about next steps include further thinking and details of applications.
Kudos for doing this!
Question: Do you have thoughts on what updates we can make with this information? Are there any changes you think EAs should make from these updates?
I think this work is interesting, but it’s not obvious to me what decisions it’s particularly useful for.
Basically, though it’s a bit extra short when weighted for what we can change. Transformative narrow AI or other transformative technologies could also apply.
Another thing to note: I’m optimizing on a time-horizon of around 10-30 years. Making a business first could easily take 6-20 years.
I feel pretty flattered to be even vaguely categorized with all of those folks, but I think it’s pretty unlikely of working out that well (it almost always is). If I was pretty sure (>30%) I could make a company as large as Apple/Twitter/Tesla/YC, I’d be pretty happy to go that route.
I’ve chatted to hundreds of entrepreneurs and tried this, arguably, twice before. That said, if later it’s predicted that going the more direct business way would be better for total expected value, I could definitely be open to changing later.
“Metaculus − 70k, Ozzie Gooen − 70k, Jacob Lagerros − 27k. These are small companies that need funding; why are you acting as grant-givers here rather than as special interest investors?”
I’m not sure why you think all of these are companies. Metaculus is a company, but the other two aren’t.
Personally, I think it would be pretty neat if this group (or a similar one) were to later set up the legal infrastructure to properly invest in groups where that would make sense. But this would take quite a bit of time (both fixed costs and marginal costs), and if there are only a few groups per year (one, in this case, I believe) is probably not worth it.
I honestly think this was one of the more obvious ones on the list. 39k for one full year of work is a bit of a steal, especially for someone who already has the mathematical background, video production skills, and audience. I imagine if CEA were to try to recreate that it would have a pretty hard time, plus the recruitment would be quite a challenge.
Happy to chime in here.
I’ve previously worked at Ought for a few months and have helped them make Mosaic. I’ve been talking a decent amount with different Ought team members. We share broad interests of how to break down reasoning, but are executing this in very different ways. Mosaic works in breaking down a very large space of problems into tiny text subproblems. I’m working on a prediction application, which works by having people predict probabilities of future events, and separately share information about their thinking. I think that essentially no one who sees both applications would consider them to be equivalent.
I’m doing very similar work as part of my research at FHI. The plan is not to attempt to become a business or monetize in the foreseeable future. I’ve been around the startup scene a lot before, and have come to better understand the limitations of getting money in business ways. In almost all cases, from what I can tell, experimental and charitable desires become pushed aside in order to optimize for profits. I’ve considered this with Guesstimate. Originally I thought I could make a business that also would be useful to EAs, but later realized that it would be exceptionally difficult. Most realistic business strategies for sales looked like domain-specific tools, for instance, a real-estate-specific distribution application, which would sell a lot more but be quite useless for EA causes.
In this case, my first and main priority is to experiment/innovate in the space. I think that doing this in the research setting at this point will be the best way to ensure that the work stays focussed on the long-term benefits.
Hypothetically, if in a few years we wind up with something that was optimized for EA uses, but happens to be easily monetizable with low effort, then that could be a useful way of helping to fund things. However, I really don’t want to commit to a specific path at this stage, which is really early on.
It’s a general platform, not specific to any domain. In a similar vein to the Good Judgement Project’s platform, but with other features I think will be useful.
I plan to try it out with some groups in the next few months.
Some other options, in case someone is particularly interested:
Guesstimate is being used by several EAs, and could use some development help. It’s making enough from purchasers to cover basic costs, but not enough for myself to fund significant extra development. It’s open source.
I’ve been working on a new forecasting application written in ReasonML/node/graphql. If that sounds interesting to you, let me know!
Happy to advise and help people contribute to either, though both do have learning curves.
I’d agree. I find these skills undervalued in EA compared to research.
That said, for research tasks, it’s possible to do much of that in existing orgs; so the marginal new org may not be as relevant. If I instead asked, “what new research areas would you want to see investigated” I imagine I may have had a bunch of results.