Having done a bunch of this, yes, great idea. You can have pretty spectacular impact, because the motivation boost and arc of “someone believes in me” is much more powerful than the one you get from funding stress.
My read is that good-taste grants of this type are dramatically, dramatically more impactful than those by larger grantmakers, e.g. I proactively found and funded the upskilling grant of a math PhD who found glitch tokens, which was for a while the third most upvoted research on the alignment forum. This cost $12k for I think one year of upskilling, as frugal geniuses are not that rare if you hang out in the right places.
However! I don’t think that your proposed selection mechanism is much good. It replaces applications with promotion, and will cause lots of researchers who don’t get funded to spend cycles or be tugged around by campaigns, and your final winners will be hit by goodhart’s curse. Also, this depends on the average AF participant not just being good at research, but at judging who will do good research.
I do think it’d be net positive, but I think you can do a lot better
How could a nomination and voting system be improved? And especially, who should get a vote? Should it be Alignment Forum members, or users registered before a certain date, or Lesswrong users?
If you’re doing a mechanism rather than concentrated agency, @the gears to ascension’s proposal seems much more promising to me as it relies much more on high-trust researchers rather than lots of distributed less informed votes.
Could there be an entirely different approach to finding fellows? How would you do it?
The other angles I see are:
Make another funder like AISTOF. This is imo the best funder in the space, far better grantee experience, up with the best in terms of taste. It works by a donor selecting one high agency person they trust (JueYan, a VC) and giving them a remit to find grantees fitting a profile, then mostly not intervening and just getting regular reports for how funds are spend to help them judge how much to add. I imagine there’s someone in your network who you’d trust to track down and assess people much better than a popularity contest (though they might still contact top researchers for takes on technical details).
Make a somewhat more organized fellowship, like the one @Mateusz Bagiński has a sketch for around understanding, explaining, and solving the hard problems in alignment, with many of the people being directly invited and some extra infrastructure being provided.
Select people directly, based on your own reading and observations.
Maybe the list of perfect candidates already exists, waiting to get funded?
I have a list of people I’m excited about! And proactively gardened projects with founders lined up too.[1] Happy to talk if you’re interested in double-clicking on any of these, booking link DMed.
What should be the amount? Thiel gave 200k. Is it too much for 2 years? Too little?
I recommend less, spread over more people, though case-by-case is OK. Probably something like $75k a year gets the vast majority of the benefit, but you can have a step where you ask their current salary and use that as an anchor. Alternatively, I think there’s strong benefit to giving many people a minimal safety net. Being able to call on even $20-25k/year for 3 years would be a vast weight off many people’s shoulders, if you’re somewhat careful and live outside a hub it’s entirely possible to do great work on a shoestring, and this actually provides some useful filters.
I have spent down the vast majority of my funds over the last 5 years so can’t actually support anyone other than the smallest grants without risking running out of money before the world ends and needing to do something other than full time trying to save the world.
Having done a bunch of this, yes, great idea. You can have pretty spectacular impact, because the motivation boost and arc of “someone believes in me” is much more powerful than the one you get from funding stress.
My read is that good-taste grants of this type are dramatically, dramatically more impactful than those by larger grantmakers, e.g. I proactively found and funded the upskilling grant of a math PhD who found glitch tokens, which was for a while the third most upvoted research on the alignment forum. This cost $12k for I think one year of upskilling, as frugal geniuses are not that rare if you hang out in the right places.
However! I don’t think that your proposed selection mechanism is much good. It replaces applications with promotion, and will cause lots of researchers who don’t get funded to spend cycles or be tugged around by campaigns, and your final winners will be hit by goodhart’s curse. Also, this depends on the average AF participant not just being good at research, but at judging who will do good research.
I do think it’d be net positive, but I think you can do a lot better
If you’re doing a mechanism rather than concentrated agency, @the gears to ascension’s proposal seems much more promising to me as it relies much more on high-trust researchers rather than lots of distributed less informed votes.
The other angles I see are:
Make another funder like AISTOF. This is imo the best funder in the space, far better grantee experience, up with the best in terms of taste. It works by a donor selecting one high agency person they trust (JueYan, a VC) and giving them a remit to find grantees fitting a profile, then mostly not intervening and just getting regular reports for how funds are spend to help them judge how much to add. I imagine there’s someone in your network who you’d trust to track down and assess people much better than a popularity contest (though they might still contact top researchers for takes on technical details).
Make a somewhat more organized fellowship, like the one @Mateusz Bagiński has a sketch for around understanding, explaining, and solving the hard problems in alignment, with many of the people being directly invited and some extra infrastructure being provided.
Select people directly, based on your own reading and observations.
I have a list of people I’m excited about! And proactively gardened projects with founders lined up too.[1] Happy to talk if you’re interested in double-clicking on any of these, booking link DMed.
I recommend less, spread over more people, though case-by-case is OK. Probably something like $75k a year gets the vast majority of the benefit, but you can have a step where you ask their current salary and use that as an anchor. Alternatively, I think there’s strong benefit to giving many people a minimal safety net. Being able to call on even $20-25k/year for 3 years would be a vast weight off many people’s shoulders, if you’re somewhat careful and live outside a hub it’s entirely possible to do great work on a shoestring, and this actually provides some useful filters.
I have spent down the vast majority of my funds over the last 5 years so can’t actually support anyone other than the smallest grants without risking running out of money before the world ends and needing to do something other than full time trying to save the world.