@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.