@Austin I'm quite confused why other donors aren't excited to fund AISC is a major question mark for me as well, so I hope the organizers will address it to the extent possible. It didn't stop me from offering because my offer will only trigger if others collectively offer about 30x what I did, in which case the question mark becomes somewhat less pressing than it is presently.

Made an offer based on strong alumni comments below, as well as a well-written argument for past impact above.

@PauseAI-US Increased the amount of my contribution based on PauseAI US' strong showing as top x-risk votegetter so far in the EA Forum Donation Election (although out of the money at present). That showing signals a breadth of community support that nicely complements the depth of support from Greg and Michael.

I like the idea. Like Austin, I am "unsure if Mikolaj appreciates the scope of what he's trying to take on," but I wanted to modestly signal support for the effort.

My sense is that broad-based public advocacy as well as pause/slow-down advocacy is relatively underfunded, and that this may be in part because of among potential funder ideology.

PauseAI has shown a willingness to talk about stuff (like AI causing mass loss of jobs) that is more legible and politically salient to the public than AI x-risk, even if less desirable to some funders. I think that's ultimately going to be a critical piece of moving the needle on public sentiment and thus public policy in ways that mitigate a broad range of AI-related risks.

Could you say a bit more about how you reached the proposed stipend of $8 USD/hour and how that compares to local salaries for other forms of skilled work?

@Arepo The difference here, I think, is the presence of a third party motivated to undercut the Commissions for a Cause program. That third party is non C4C commissioned agents, for whom C4C is a lead generation / advertising program that some of their competitors engage in. So the question for them would be how they can get enough of the halo effect of C4C at a significantly lower cost. I think we see something vaguely similar with weak animal-welfare certifications; consumers may treat charitable element as a binary checkbox and not dig into the specifics that determine whether it is performative nonsense or legit.

One data point: I am reminded several times a year in mailings from my realtor that she gives a fraction of her commissions to some foundation associated with her brokerage that works somehow on housing-related issues. I assume the amount is nominal, and that the foundation is ~useless. (The master foundation seems to be the one described here: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/realogy-charitable-foundation-celebrates-10-year-anniversary-and-225-million-in-total-funds-raised-and-donated-248828831.html) But this suggests some awareness on the part of major commission-based players that promising some charitable benefit in exchange for business could move consumer behavior. $2.4MM/year for an outfit with ~250K agents is peanuts, though.

You may want to ask @Austin to raise your maximum funding a bit so you don't lose out on the quadratic funding round through the Community Choice program.

Pushing to minimum funding: this work seems established enough and to have generated enough results to get some funding in this round. I also considered the practical difficulty of a group in Nigeria self-funding or obtaining other third-party funding. In the end, it's important to have EA perspectives coming from LMICs.

To follow up on this, did CEA deny a funding application, or is there a reason your group needs more funding than CEA would provide?

Pushing to minimum based on some deference to original ACX grant + work done since then + Jordan's skin in the game as evidenced by self-funding.

Pushing to minimum threshold, mainly in deference to the people in Somalia who have already donated. In light of income/asset levels in Somalia, that's a meaningful level of community support reflecting the donors' belief that this project is viable. The SAWS Facebook page has been posting since at least 3020 with about 1K likes, 1.2K followers, showing that the grantee has skin in the game and is not merely going wherever the funding is.

Pushing to minimum threshold based on Henri's endorsement below. Given his role with Ge Effektivt, he should be in a good position to assess this. The rationale in his comment -- pointing to success of a similar idea in another country and synergies with volunteer effort -- are also convincing.

Is this the Somali Animal Welfare Society that is leading the project?

https://www.facebook.com/welfaresomali

You might want to talk to @Austin about the possibility of raising your funding goal, if you have room for more funds. You may lose funding you'd get through the quadratic funding portion of EA Community Choice otherwise.

Added funding up to minimum level.

Rationale: I give a good deal of weight to sweat equity / skin in the game, and Brad has this on Profit-for-Good like projects in spades. This incarnation doesn't run into one of the big structural problems that I forsee with building many Profit-for-Good businesses from the ground up. Specifically, there is no entity here with a deep treasury who is willing to run at a loss for a while to crowd out the P4G competitor. Rather, in this context, what the consumer is getting from the Commissions for a Cause agent is the same insurance product at the same price.

A remaining concern: The low barriers to entry make the model easy to copy if successful, so high-impact charities would likely be competing with US children's hospitals, animal shelters, and other very popular charities. Still, the insurance market is massive enough that capturing a sliver of value is still valuable, and I don't weight most non-high impact charities' value at zero.

@TonyGao My sense is that experienced professionals are in relative undersupply, while there is a stronger supply of junior people in their 20s

@Idiriis Thanks for the response! (I'm going to offer $10 now....for context, this is both a "vote" for you under the quadratic funding mechanism and a way of telling myself to look again once I've seen all the projects)

@Daniel-Wernstedt Thanks! I suspect Google Translate does no favors for my own experience of the website, but I'm not the target audience :)

How many people have come to past events? Do you have any stories of how involvement with your group has made its members more effective (e.g., changed giving patterns, taken new jobs, etc.)?

Upvoted for very strong and legible results in past round of this program.

Who are the intended students -- do they already work in animal-rights law, or will many of them hopefully be transitioning into this work?

Some random advice: required continuing legal education (CLE) is a surprisingly big moneymaker in the US, although I don't know about other countries. Some lawyers can get reimbursed from their law firms, while others might feel that if they have to pay for CLE they would rather support an animal-rights charity than the usual suspects. In the US, you dont have to choose CLE topics related to your work. So I'm wondering if providing shorter CLE-eligible courses could be a moneymaker for your org at some point.

Have you applied for funding elsewhere, and if so what was the response?

Why do you think your website would substantially benefit from UX/design/SEO work? Do you have a link (not seeing one on mobile at least)?

How much funding have you received from the Somali community so far?

(The rationale for this question is that the Somali community is likely to be a better judge of this project's viability in Somalia than I am! So I'm looking for evidence of community buy-in. Given that, I'm at least as interested in the number of donors as the amount raised.)

Upvoted for clear plan and budget, history of past successes (both in running events & obtaining commitments), cost-effective area of operation, and being closely connected to the communities where you operate.

I've gotten the sense that animal welfare is a seriously funding constrained, rather than primarily talent constrained, cause area. A bigger talent pool is always better, but could you say more about the specific needs for more talent in this field?

What does your program cost to execute per participant, and how do you measure outcomes?

(This may be a mobile-user-only problem, but I didn't realize you were in Angola until I read Jessika's comment. You may want to add that early in your proposal, as I think it is a plus for your project.)

I appreciate the irony of using a Manif**d platform to fund the creation a community-controlled OG Manifold-like experience. :)

How much do you estimate it costs to run one ballot initiative in a medium-size state (or whatever metric makes sense?)

I ask because Big Ag is well funded, which makes me worry that you'd need lots of money to actually get something passed. That doesn't mean you shouldn't proceed! But there are some ideas that are good if and only if they can achieve a fairly high level of funding, and don't scale well at lower funding levels. It seems plausible that this might be one of them.

Making a small offer for social-proof purposes. [I am generally hesitant to fund AI safety stuff, mainly because (a) there seems to be a lot of money in the space, (b) there is more risk of projects ending up net-negative than in other cause areas, (c) I feel less qualified to evaluate, and and (d) in light of these factors I am more inclined to defer to a project not having other funding on board. But I'm convinced that the social-proof element here outweighs my hesitancy at the small offer level.]

@aaron It really isn't clear what value you'd be adding to the process as the non-technical person.

@briico Thanks, Emily! That makes sense. I think what I'm suggesting here is that evaluating the cost-effectiveness for the project as-stated ($25K for 50) is easier because we can factor in the direct benefits to the 50 participants, which are less speculative than the potential for future expansion. If it scales down to -- say, $7.5K for five participants due to fixed elements of staffing costs -- then the benefit comes predominantly from information value / benefit to potentially scaling the intervention down the road. By the classic EA metric, $7,500 is 1.5 lives worth of bednets ~ I take that mode of analysis seriously but not literally by the way. It's tragic that cost-effective global health is so underfunded that the bar is that high . . .

If the argument for funding is heavily linked to increasing the probability of future, more cost-effective rounds, then it's a somewhat more complex analysis for the donor. Most notably, we have to think about the probability that you'll be able to get funding for expansion down the road. So any evidence you could share about ability to get non-EA funding would be helpful, as that would allow an update on the "likelihood that expansion will happen" factor in the back-of-envelope cost-effectiveness calculation.

@Austin (Thanks, Austin.) That answer addresses my concern. I think it is pretty likely they should cut the swag for the executive branch employees, and somewhat likely for the congressional folks. I had to give back a $25 gift as a young executive branch attorney many years ago, and the whole thing was annoying. (It was an apology gift for being stuck in an elevator, clearly not an attempt to influence me!) In any event, knowing that the budgeted cost of swag = $10 is helpful insofar as it removes the possibility that a decision against swag would radically change program cost. I think I implicitly had the cost of print-on-demand swag, rather than ~600 pc at once, in the back of my head.

What is the current situation with other funding? Also, what is the current plan if you obtain the funding you have now but not much more than that?

It's not clear to me what would happen if EA Philippines is unable to get funding for staff other than the temporary part-time stipends described in the proposal. In such a world, I don't think the original proposal really helps users assess the effectiveness of an offer they might make in the hundreds-to-low-thousands range. (That's not intended as a criticism of the proposal; it can be very hard to convey cost-effectiveness at many different funding levels.)

I'm going to make a small offer as a signal here. Theory of change looks good, I like the uncompensated work Emily has already put in on this.

My main reservation at this point is that I'm not sure how well this proposal scales downward near the minimum. It seems there would be enough fixed or semi-fixed costs that I'm less excited about a more significant financial contribution with five participants than (say) 25.

I'm nudging this closer to the new minimum based on positive things I've read about Jeroen's work + some evidence that it is driving donations as described above. I decided not to push it all the way to the minimum because I would like to see 10% from a third donor or collection of donors as social evidence that this is worth funding, especially in the stripped-down configuration focusing more on shorter content. Also, I should stop doing math while playing fetch with my dog...

A technical question: Have you run this plan by an appropriate expert in government ethics and lobbying? Off the top of my head, it seems like accepting the kit with swag would not be acceptable for employees of the executive branch, as PauseAI would likely be a prohibited source (an organization trying to influence official action in some capacity) and the fair market value probably exceeds $20 [e.g., https://www.doi.gov/ethics/gifts (these are executive-branch wide regs)]. Glancing at the House's gift rules, many gifts with a FMV under $50 can be accepted, but there is a long list of rules and you might find a number of offices erring on the side of declining a kit with swag. [https://ethics.house.gov/house-ethics-manual/gifts#_Gifts_Worth_Less]

What have you accomplished so far, either on this or in related work, that supports a conclusion that you'll succeed on this if funded?

What exactly are you hoping to produce? "Core open source protocols and software" seems rather broad and lacking in focus.

Do graduate programs tend not to offer need-based fee waivers for international students?

@xl Based on offers that were submitted, the system only accepted those that specified a valuation of at least $10K. It sold each 0.6 percent of certs for each $60. Your offer of $60 for 12 percent of certs wasn't a good offer for the system to take -- pricing them there would have raised only $500 total.

I'm guessing someone would sell you $60 at the $10K valuation if you want to offer that.

(The whole valuation concept doesnt make much sense to me with this proposal.)

If @rabbott06 and @aaronl were amenable, I'd support dropping the minimum funding down to $500 so this one would go through. (Probably the minimum valuation should drop too, if the retrofunders would be deciding how much they'd have been willing to pay for the impact of a $500 donation.)

NCD = non-communicable disease, right?

I'm curious about how this is going and how many researchers have used it, now that it has been a few months since opening.

Has there been any recent progress on this, or a decision from EAIF or other possible funders?

Can you break down (at a high level) how much of the budget would go to each of the major goals?

I'm a little surprised to see the minimum to proceed at over 2/3 of the total ask at 15k given that there are two major translations plus two implementations. Is there a reason you think this project's synergies are such that it should be nearly all or nothing?

Could you clarify what a "designer" is? Maybe that is more obvious to people with a development background, but I don't know if you mean art, UI, or something else.

Shamelessly offering $5 at a sky high valuation, maybe ~ global net worth (but I was too lazy to count the zeros). Given my prediction that few certs will get funded, I seek to maximize the odds of having at least one of mine get bought!

@Hein Thanks, I think it does. After some further reflection, I don't think I have enough background and expertise about what's out there to evaluate the chances this would fill an important void, including the extent to which the specific combination here would improve over someone reading other materials on sentientism, longtermism, FDT, and S-risks (some of which incorporates 2 or maybe even 3 of them, even if the combo of all four in one book would be unique). So I'll leave this one for others. Thanks again for the response!

@saeedahmad Thanks! (By the way, the $1 offer is a signal to my fellow micrograntors and other grantors that this is roughly in my top 25 percent and that I'd be interested in considering more of my buget if others were. The way the system works, making an offer locks that money until the project deadline..which is now the same for most projects. For someone like me with a small budget that has been provided to me by Manifund, I don't want to lock more than a dollar or two in something unless/until I have enough evidence to think it will reach minimum funding.)

@MattArnold Thanks for the response -- apologies for my low specificity, as I was trying to get all my questions out last night because a lot of proposals were closing in a few days (now extended). Should have said "lead to impact that the outfits that have committed to consider buying impact certificates would value" or "lead to impact that I would significantly value, as a micrograntor with $500, enough to put this proposal ahead of others -- including those whose target beneficiaries are extremely disadvantaged and/or vulnerable." I apologize for my wording suggesting that there would be zero impact for those who watched the videos.

I do tend to treat most direct positive impacts on a relatively small number of individuals who seem likely to be relatively privileged as if they were zero (although that does not actually make them zero). The reasons for that largely relate to my discomfort with certain excesses of EA meta spending and the desire to build a hedge around potentially self-serving funding rationales. Based on your comments I don't think those particular concerns would be present here.

Could you say more about how "provid[ing] evidence-based recommendations for improving public health surveillance and response to epidemic-prone diseases" might lead to a "Reduction in epidemic disease outbreaks (Measles, Dengue and Diphtheria) by 50% through efficient and reliable reporting of data on these priority diseases"? It seems like there would be a lot of intermediate steps and assumptions that would be necessary for this causal chain.

This third-party market idea needs "Engineers [who] modify the climate to profit between what is forecast, what is desired, and what can be altered using aerosols, space shades, etc." This doesn't sound at all realistic for engineer participants to practically accomplish given current technology.

Why is creating a daily "support or oppose AI" survey necessary or particularly helpful to achieving the goal of demonstrating the dashboard technology?

@istinetz 1B figure is in a WHO report: https://www.who.int/news/item/27-02-2007-neurological-disorders-affect-millions-globally-who-report. A sizable fraction of that may be headache -- I didn't read the report -- but many types of headaches are in fact neurological disorders and can be significantly disabling in some cases.

CE site says: SEED GRANT: $110,000 / MONEY FUNDRAISED TO DATE (AUG 2023): $114,300. Does the latter number include the seed grant? If so, has your organization's fundraising picture changed since August 2023? Given that scaling potential is an important part of the value proposition here, I'm looking to see if your organization has been able to secure enough interest from other donors that scaling is a realistic possibility.

How do you think recording / distributing the sessions will lead to impact? Is there a plan for promoting the videos to get wider viewership and/or viewership by the "right" people? (I notice that most of the linked videos have about 70 views, which is giving me a fairly high cost-per-view metric here.)

In the possible disaster scenarios, what would be expected stock and resupply of wood chips be? I'm sure that some would exist at the time of the disaster, but aren't they ordinarily made through electric-powered woodchippers? More could be produced by human effort, but presumably calories are in low supply in these scenarios, so that could be a downside of reliance on manpower/womanpower.

Can you give us a sense of what kinds of journals you might submit to with $5-$10K in funding, with a lower amount of funding, and with no funding? (Also, I would consider lowering your "minimum funding" if possible at this point; it sounds like a smaller grant would allow you to submit to at least some better journals, so I'm not sure why you'd decline a smaller sum).

Not sure I agree with that, @aaronl. Thomas doing the work, standing alone, has near-zero value. If the work product doesn't get to people in a position to implement, it is ~ the metaphorical tree in the forest that falls when there is no one to hear it. I think it's fair to consider the additional likelihood / magnitude of impact from better publication placement here.

The critical question, it seems to me, is the strength of the four proposed recipients of the loans. Totally understand if you can't be too specific due to security or confidentiality concerns, but what can you tell us about the proposed recipients?

It seems that this technology could be commercialized and produce significant revenue. Have you attempted to obtain funding through traditional for-profit sources? If you were unsuccessful, and other biotech firms have declined to conduct this kind of research, why do you think that is the case?

Could you say more about what you'd do with the additional $2500 if the ECHR doesn't rule in your favor? Also, could you explain why you think it beneficial to line up this funding now rather than in the event of a favorable decision? I can think of several possible explanations, but think due diligence calls for ruling out the alternative of waiting for the decision.

Since studies eat money, do you have a plan for how you might raise additional funding once the very early stage funding dries up? It seems the value here is bound up with enabling future studies, so understanding the funding environment and costs of potential future studies seems important in evaluating whether to fund the foundational research.

Why do you think charitable funding is necessary and appropriate for this idea? There's a large market out there for educational technology projects, so I'm trying to decide if the absence of buy-in from traditional for-profit investors would be a negative signal. / As an aside, if I had and were interested in putting significant money into something like this, I think it probably should be structured as an equity investment or limited-recourse loan, rather than an outright grant. As a micrograntor, I don't have significant money so that question does not arise here. An alternative would be to commit to releasing the work product under a permissive license.

Could you say a bit more about what specific niche you think this book would fill, why already existing books do not meet that need, and who the specific target audience is?

How much of the value for AI Safety Tokyo's first year do you think is fairly attributable to your work? (I am assuming this is a retrogrant for your salary, which is fine, but in that case it seems that we should be careful to retrocompensate you only for your own share of the impact.) In theory, anyone who contributed to the impact could post their own certificates for sale, and if we all paid on counterfactual impact, we would end up significantly overpaying for the sum total of impact produced.

I really like that you've put your own "sweat equity" into this before asking for funding. I am a little concerned about sustainability to the extent the current model depends heavily on your unpaid labor. If you can obtain funding for costs (such that you don't have to also contribute money on top of your time), do you expect to be in a position to continue volunteering so much time? Or is continued success and expansion contingent on finding a grant to cover your time and/or someone else's time?

Do you think the attempted replications you have done so far have had measurable impact? If so, how are you measuring that? If not, what do you think the missing ingredient for impact is?

This is a pretty well-known problem. Could you say more about what distinguishes your proposed work from prior/ongoing attempts to break the publishers' hegemony? Or, alternatively, what prior/ongoing attempts are similar to what you're trying to do, and how you decided that they were good models to follow / had produced results?

This seems like a lot to do for a newish, small, funding-constrained organization? Normally, I would expect to see such an organization try to do one, or at most two, discrete things and focus on executing them well. Could you say a bit more about why you decided to tackle so many significant projects at once?

There seems to be some potential tension here between "given a parcel, what’s the maximal housing I’m allowed to build on it" being a difficult question due to mystifying land use regulations, and some sort of useful product being obtainable with $15K in funding. Could you say a bit more about how the regs are both mystifying enough to be a problem for landowners and yet amenable to coding with a high degree of accuracy? [I'm a lawyer, but know basically nothing about land use reform.]

I think it is likely that the ability and prestige of the chosen academic will be rather cruxy here (prestige often being important to getting published in a higher-tier journal & getting people to even read the work). For those of us who don't regularly go shopping for academics to draft papers, is there any way to predict those qualities in the likely author?

What is the most likely thing you would do with a little bit of extra funding? The "funding utilization" section feels rather generic, making it hard for me to assess the counterfactual impact of additional funding on top of whatever current funding you have.

I don't understand the business model here. For play-money markets, the play money needs to be valuable enough that people will do deep enough dives to generate useful predictions. For real-money markets, the real money seemingly has to come from either from less-skilled-than-average participants, or from donors who want information. Unlike sports betting or even political betting, I don't foresee there being a ton of whales to supply less-informed money that skilled predictors can win. Unless there are donors propping up the markets, the bottom half of the predictors are still likely to be rather rational people; that means they will likely exit as soon as they realize they are more likely the source of revenue rather than likely to win money.