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So You Want To Run A

Microgrants
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Program
Feb 9, 2022 94 131
I.

Medical training is a wild ride. You do four years of undergrad in some bio subject, ace
your MCATs, think you’re pretty hot stuff. Then you do your med school preclinicals,
study umpteen hours a day, ace your shelf exams, and it seems like you're pretty much
there. Then you start your clinical rotations, get a real patient in front of you, and you
realize - oh god, I know absolutely nothing about medicine.

This is also how I felt about running a grants program.

I support effective altruism, a vast worldwide movement focused on trying to pick good
charities. Sometimes I go to their conferences, where they give lectures about how to
pick good charities. Or I read their online forum, where people write posts about how
to pick good charities. I've been to effective altruist meetups, where we all come
together and talk about good charity picking. So I felt like, maybe, I don't know, I
probably knew some stuff about how to pick good charities.

And then I solicited grant proposals, and I got stuff like this:

A. $60K to run simulations checking if some chemicals were promising antibiotics.

B. $60K for a professor to study the factors influencing cross-cultural gender norms
C. $50K to put climate-related measures on the ballot in a bunch of states.
D. $30K to research a solution for African Swine Fever and pitch it to Uganda
E. $40K to replicate psych studies and improve incentives in social science

Which of these is the most important?

Part of my brain keeps helpfully suggesting "Just calculate how much expected utility
people get from each!" I can check how many people die of antibiotic-resistant
infections each year (Google says either 30K, 500K, or 1M, depending on which source
you trust). That's a start! But the chance of these simulations discovering a new
antibiotic is - 10%? 1%? 0.00001%? In silico drug discovery never works and anyone with
half a brain knows that? The compounds being tested are dumb compounds? Even if
they worked, bacteria would just develop more resistance in a week? Pharma companies
would capture all the value from any new antibiotics and make it impossible for poor
people to afford them? Five much better labs have already tried this and all the low-
hanging fruit has been picked? Screening for new antibiotics is a great idea but actually
it costs $4.50 and this is outrageously overpriced?

And that's an easy one. What about B? If the professor figures out important things
about what influences gender norms, maybe we can subtly put our finger on the scale.
Maybe twenty years later, women across the Third World will have equal rights,
economic development will be supercharged, and Saudi Arabia will be a Scandinavian-
style democracy with a female Prime Minister. But maybe the professor won't find
anything interesting. Or maybe they will find something interesting, but it will all be
stuff like "it depends what kind of rice they cultivated in 4000 BC" and there won't be
any subtle finger-putting-on-scale opportunities. Or maybe the professor will find
something great, but nobody will listen to her and nothing will happen. Or maybe Third
World countries will get angry at our meddling and hold coups and become even more
regressive. Or maybe we'll overshoot, and Saudi Arabia will become really woke, and
we'll have to listen to terrible takes about how the Houthi rebels are the new face of
nice guy incel misogyny.

Which is higher-value, A or B? Probably more women suffer under oppressive gender

norms than people die of antibiotic-resistant infections, but dying is probably worse
than inequality, and there's a clearer path from antibiotic -> recovery than from
research paper -> oppressive countries clean up their act. What about second order
effects? If women have more equality in Saudi Arabia, maybe an otherwise
unrecognized female genius will discover a new antibiotic. But if we have more
antibiotics, someone who would otherwise have died of a bacterial infection might
liberate women in Saudi Arabia. Aaagh!

Part of my brain helpfully suggests "Do a deep dive and answer these questions! This is
the skill you are supposedly good at!" Quantifying these questions sounds crazy, but I
am nothing if not crazy for quantifying things. It could work.

…except that I had 656 applications like this, and everyone told me it was important to
get back to people within a month or two. I don't think I could fully explore the
subtleties of the antibiotic proposal in that time - let alone 656 proposals, most of which
were even less straightforward.
II.

There’s a well-known solution to this kind of thing:

THE SIMPSONS - SHARY BOBBINS - "DO A HALF ASS JOB" …

Just make a ballpark guess and then get on with your life.

The problem is: this grants program could be the most important thing I’ll ever do.
Maybe everything else, all my triumphs and failures, will end up less important than
getting this one grants program right.

GiveWell estimates that if you donate to their top charity, Against Malaria Foundation,
you can probably save a life for about $5000. ACX Grants raised $1.5 million. Donated
to AMF, that’s enough to save 300 lives. I didn’t donate it to AMF. I believed that small-
batch artisanal grant-making could potentially outperform the best well-known
megacharities - or at least that it was positive value in expectation to see if that was
true. But if your thesis is “Instead of saving 300 lives, which I could totally do right now,
I’m gonna do this other thing, because if I do a good job it’ll save even more than 300
lives”, then man, you had really better do a good job with the other thing.

Robin Dunbar claims that humans have a capacity to handle 150 social relationships.
Count up my friends, family members, coworkers, and acquaintances, and there will
probably be about 150 who I can remember consistently and have some vague emotional
connection to. If I made some mistake that killed all those people - all my friends,
relatives, everyone I know - then in some “objective” sense, that would be about as bad
as screwing up this grants program in some way that made it only half as good as the
malaria counterfactual.

This isn’t what really bothers me. My brain refuses to believe it, so I don’t really care.
The part that really bothers me is that I know a lot of middle-class people who are
struggling. Somebody who’s $10,000 in credit card debt, and it’s making their life
miserable. Someone else who posts a GoFundMe for a $5,000 medical bill. Another
person who’s burned out at their $40,000 a year job and would probably have vastly
better health if they could take a few months off and then job-search from a place of
financial stability.

If on average these people need $10,000 each, my $1.5 million could help 150 of them.
Most of these wouldn’t literally save lives, but a few might - I saw a patient once who
attempted suicide for want of $5,000. And it would sure brighten a lot of people’s years.

So: $60,000 could test some promising antibiotics, or fund a book on gender norms. But
it could also cure twelve Africans who would otherwise die of malaria, or save 5-10
Americans struggling under dead-end jobs and unpayable debts.

I tried not to think too hard about this kind of thing; I’m nervous it would make me so
crazy that I’d run away from doing any kind of charity at all, and then everyone would
be worse off. Even more, I’m worried it would scare me into taking only the most
mainstream and best-established opportunities, whereas I really do think a lot of value
is in weird charity entrepreneurship ideas that are hard to quantify.

But I couldn’t push it out of my mind far enough to do a half-assed job on the grants
round, which meant confronting some of those problems head-on.

III.

…by which I mean “passing them off to other people”.

All those effective altruism conferences might not have given me infallible grant-
making heuristics, but they did mean I knew a lot of grantmakers. I begged the
institutional EA movement for help, and they lent me experts in global poverty, animal
welfare, and the long-term future. I was able to draw on some other networks for
experts in prediction markets and meta-science.

There wasn't as ready-made an EA infrastructure for biology, so I jury-rigged a Biology

Grants Committee out of an ex-girlfriend who works in biotech, two of her friends, a
guy who has good bio takes in the ACX comments section, and a cool girl I met at a
party once who talked my ear off about bio research. Despite my desperation, I lucked
out here. One of my ex’s friends turned out to be a semiprofessional bio grantmaker.
The guy from the comments section was a bio grad student at Harvard. And the girl
from the party got back to me with a bunch of detailed comments like “here’s the
obscure immune cell which will cause a side effect these people aren’t expecting” or “a
little-known laboratory in Kazakhstan has already investigated this problem”.

These people really came through. Don’t take my word for it - trust the data. The five of
their opinions correlated with each other at r = 0.55, whereas my uninformed guesses
only correlated with them at r = 0.15. This made me feel much more confident I was
picking up something real.

But even the “experts” weren’t perfectly aligned. There were three proposals where one
evaluator assigned the highest possible rating, and another assigned the lowest
possible. Sometimes these were differences of scientific opinion. Other times they were
more fundamental. One person would say "This idea would let you do so many cool
things with viruses" and another person would say "This idea would let you do so many
cool things with viruses, such as bioterrorism".

Still, with their help I started to feel like I was finally on top of this.

IV.

Then I got the rug pulled out from under my feet again.

I was chatting online with my friend Misha about one the projects my Bio Grants
Committee had recommended. He asked: given that they got funding from XYZ
incubator a few years ago, why are they asking you for more funding now? XYZ
incubator is known for funding their teams well, so they must have lost faith in these
people. Some reports from a few years ago included the name of an impressive guy on
their executive team, but more recent reports don’t mention him. The simplest
explanation is that something went wrong, their executives expected rough going, their
incubator got cold feet, and now they’re turning to a rube like you to help them pick up
the pieces.

I was kind of flabbergasted. I had a very nice report from my Bio Committee telling me
that all the science here was sound, the cells they were working with were very nice
cells, etc. But here was a whole new dimension I hadn’t considered. Misha explained
that he was an angel investor - not even some kind of super-serious VC, just a guy who
invested his own money - and this kind of thing was standard practice in his field.
I’ll be honest. I know a lot of you are VCs. You read and support my blog, and I
appreciate it. Some of the grant money I distributed came from VCs, which was very
generous. But I always imagined you guys as kind of, you know, wandering into work,
sipping some wine, saying “Hmmm, these guys have a crypto company, crypto seems
big this year, I like the cut of their jib, make it so,” and then going home early. I owe you
an apology. VC-ing is a field as intense and complicated and full of pitfalls as medicine
or statistics or anything else.

As a grant-maker, I was basically trying to be a VC, only without the profit motive. But
that meant I was staking $1.5 million on my ability to practice a very difficult field
which, until five minutes previous, I hadn’t realized existed.

I solved this problem the same way I had solved my previous few problems: I begged
Misha for help, and he agreed to serve on my grant evaluation team. But this kind of
thing kept happening. Every time I thought I knew approximately how many different
variables I needed to consider, my ship accidentally got blown off course into an entire
undiscovered new continent of variable-considering, full of golden temples and angry
cannibals.

I’m not going to write up the whole travelogue, but here are ten things worth thinking
about if you’re considering a grants program of your own:

(1): Many applicants ask for a random amount of money, and it’s your job to decide if you
should give more or less.

For example, I originally said my grants would max out at 50-100K, and many people
asked for 50-100K grants. Some of these people needed more than 50-100K, but figured
any little bit helped. Others needed less than 50-100K, but figured they’d ask for more
and let me bargain them down. Others had projects that scaled almost linearly, such
that 50K could do ten times as much good as 5K, but only a tenth as much as 500K.
They asked for 50-100K too.

Suppose I gave a dozen organizations $50K. It would be really suspicious if a dozen

organizations just happened to all be equally effective at spending the marginal dollar!
The people screening new antibiotics and the people untangling cross-cultural gender
roles really have exactly equal expected value? Realistically it shouldn’t be at all
surprising if one of them was ten or a hundred times more valuable than the other! So
maybe instead of giving both of them $50K, I should give one of them $100K and the
other one nothing.
There was a strong temptation for me to make lots of different grants, because then I
would feel like a good person who’s helped many different causes. In many cases, I
succumbed to this temptation: realistically I don’t know which of those two causes is
better, and realistically I don’t know enough about how each of them scales with money
to second-guess the grant-writers who requested approximately $50K each.

But also, after making all my other choices, I nixed the five or six least promising
grants, the ones I secretly knew I had only done to feel like a diverse person who gives
to diverse cause areas, and gave all their money to the oxfendazole project, which most
evaluators agreed was the most promising.

(2) Most people are terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE grantwriters

It’s fascinating! They’re all terrible in different ways!

One person’s application was the very long meandering story of how they had the idea -
“so i was walking down the street one day, and I thought…” - followed by all the people
they had gone to for funding before me, and how each person had betrayed them.

Another person’s application sounded like a Dilbert gag about meaningless corporate
babble. “We will leverage synergies to revolutionize the paradigm of communication for
justice” - paragraphs and paragraphs of this without the slightest explanation of what
they would actually do. Everyone involved had PhDs, and they’d gotten millions of
dollars from a government agency, so maybe I’m the one who’s wrong here, but I read it
to some friends deadpan, it made them laugh hysterically, and sometimes they still
quote it back at me - “are you sure we shouldn’t be leveraging synergies to revolutionize
our paradigm first?” - and I laugh hysterically.

Several applications were infuriatingly vague, like “a network to encourage talented

people”. I, too, think talented people should be encouraged. But instead of answering
the followup questions - how do you find the talented people? why would they join your
network? what will the network do to encourage them? - the application would just
dribble out a few more paragraphs about how under-encouraged the talent was these
days.

A typical pattern was for someone to spend almost their entire allotted space explaining
why an obviously bad thing was bad, and then two or three sentences discussing why
their solution might work. EG five paragraphs explaining why depression was a very
serious disease, then a sentence or two saying they were thinking of fighting it with
some kind of web app or something.
Several applications very gradually made it clear that they had not yet founded the
charitable organization they were talking about, they had no intention of doing so, and
they just wanted to tell me they thought I should found it, or somehow expected my
money to cause the organization to exist.

This proved to be a sort of skeleton key to diagnose a whole genus of grant-writing

pathologies: I think some people don’t understand, on a deep level, that between the
steps “people donate money to cause” and “cause succeeds”, there’s an additional step of
“someone takes the money and does some specific thing with it”. Or they thought it
could be abstracted away - surely you just hire some generic manager type. Yeah, these
grant applications are auditions for that job, and you failed.

One person, in the process of explaining why he needed a grant, sort of vaguely
confessed to a pretty serious crime. I don’t have enough specifics that I feel like I can
alert police, and it’s in a different country where I don’t speak the language. Still, this is
a deeper grantwriting failure than I imagined possible.

(3): Your money funges against the money of all the other grants programs your applicants are
applying to.

Right now AI alignment has lots of cash. If there’s a really good AI alignment charity,
Open Philanthropy Project and Founders Fund and Elon Musk and Jaan Tallinn will all
fight each other to throw money at it. So if a seemingly really good AI alignment charity
asked me for money, I would wonder - why haven’t they gotten money from a big
experienced foundation?

Maybe they asked and the big experienced foundations said no - but then, do I think
I’m in a position to second-guess the experts? Or maybe they don’t know the big
experienced foundations exist, which suggests they’re pretty new here - not necessarily
a fatal flaw, but something to think about. Or maybe they’re asking the big experienced
foundations too, but they figured they’d use me as a backup.

How is this actionable? First, sometimes I was able to ask the big experienced
foundations if they’d seen a grant application, and if so what they thought. But second,
if I had a great global poverty proposal and a great AI safety proposal, and I thought
they were both equally valuable, the correct course was to fund global poverty and ask
the Long Term Future Fund to fund the AI safety one.

(what actually happened was that the Long Term Future Fund approached me and said
“we will fund every single good AI-related proposal you get, just hand them to us, you
don’t have to worry about it”. Then I had another person say “hand me the ones Long
Term Future Fund doesn’t want, and I’ll fund those.” Have I mentioned it’s a good time
to start AI related charities?)

Sometimes an experienced grantmaker would tell me that some specific application

would be catnip for the XYZ Foundation, and we could forward it on to them instead of
funding it ourselves. This made me nervous, because what if they were wrong and this
great proposal slipped through the cracks? - but usually I trusted them.

(4) There are lots of second-order effects, but you’ll go crazy if you think about them too hard

Suppose a really good artist comes to you and asks for a grant. You think: “Art doesn’t
save too many lives. But this art would be really good, and get really famous, and then
my grants program would get really famous for funding such a great thing, and then lots
more funders and applicants would participate the next time around.”

Or suppose some promising young college kid asks you for a grant to pursue their cool
project. Realistically the project won’t accomplish much, but she’ll learn a lot from it.
And she seems like the sort of person who could be really impressive when she gets
older. Is it worth giving her a token amount to “encourage her”? (my impression is that
Tyler Cowen would say “Hell yes!” and that this is central to his philosophy of
grantmaking). What about buying the right to boast “I was the first person to spot this
young talent!” thirty years later when she wins her Nobel, which brings glory to your
grants program down the line? What about buying her goodwill, so that when she’s
head of the NSF one day you can ask a favor of her? Doesn’t that promote your values
better than just giving money to some cool project?

(but remember that $10K = saving two Africans from malaria, or relieving one
American’s crushing credit card debt. That’s quite a price to “encourage young talent”,
isn’t it?)

What if there’s a project you don’t think will succeed, but which is very close to a field
you want to encourage? Do you fund it in order to build the field or lure other people
in? What about a project you do think will do good, but which is very close to
something bad?

The experienced grantmakers I worked with mostly suggesting weighing these kinds of
considerations less. They take too much precise foreknowledge (this art will become
famous, this young student will become an impressive luminary, my grants will move
lots of people into this field) when realistically you don’t even have enough
foreknowledge to predict if your grant will work at all.
Still, Tyler Cowen does this and it works for him. My only recommendation is to make a
decision and stick to it, instead of going crazy thinking too hard.

(5) Being advised by George Church is not as impressive as it sounds

One applicant mentioned that his bio project was advised by George Church - Harvard
professor, National Academy of Sciences member, one of TIME Magazine’s “100 Most
Influential People In The World”, and generally amazing guy. I was astonished that a
project with Church’s endorsement was pitching to me, and not to Peter Thiel or Elon
Musk or someone.

Then I got another Church-advised project. And another.

What finally cleared up the mystery is that one of my Biology Grants Evaluation
Committee members also worked for George Church, and clarified that Church has
seven zillion grad students, and is extremely nice, and is bad at saying no to people, and
so half the biology startups in the world are advised by him. There are lots of things like
this. Remember: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure!

(6): Everyone is secretly relying on everyone else to do the hard work.

Sometimes people gave me pitches like “[Fintech billionaire] Patrick Collison gave us
our first $X, but he didn’t fund us fully because he wanted to diversify our income
streams and demonstrate wider appeal. Can you fill the rest of our funding for the
year?” This was a pretty great pitch, because Patrick is very smart, has a top-notch
grant-making infrastructure, and shares many of my values. I was pretty desperate to be
able to rely on something other than my wits alone, and Patrick’s seal of approval was a
tempting proxy. I tried to give all these people a fair independent evaluation, because
otherwise it would defeat the point of Patrick making them seek alternative funding
sources. But it sure did get them to the top of the pile.

Then people started sending me requests like “Please give us whatever you can spare,
just so that when we’re pitching to some other much richer person, we can say that
other grantmakers such as yourself are on board.” This made me really nervous. It was
bad enough risking my own money (and the money of my generous donors). But risking
my reputation was something else entirely. If all grantmakers secretly relied on other
grantmakers to avoid the impossibly complex question of figuring out who was good,
then my decisions might accidentally move orders of magnitude more money than I
expected. It’s all nice and well to replace your own judgment with Patrick Collison’s.
But what if someone tried to replace their own judgment with mine?
I have no solution here except to type up this 5000 word essay on how I really don’t
know what I’m doing and you shouldn’t trust me. Those who have ears to hear, let them
listen!

(7) If you can’t rely on other grantmakers, you’ll rely on credentials

I still think that credentialism - the thing where you ignore all objective applications of
a person’s worth in favor of what college they went to - is bad. But now I understand
why it’s so tempting.

I’d previously been imagining - you’re some kind of Randian tycoon, sitting serenely in
your office, reviewing resumes for your 1001st software engineering drone. You can
easily check how they do on various coding exams, Project Euler, peer ratings,
whatever, but instead you go with the one who went to Harvard, because you’re a
f@#$ing elitist.

Now I’m imagining - you’re a startup founder or mid-level hiring manager or

something, getting thrown into the deep end, asked to make a hire for your company
despite having no idea what you’re doing. If you get it wrong, the company’s new
product will flop and everyone will blame you. One software engineer claims to be an
expert in non-Euclidean para-computing, whatever that is, and the other claims to be an
expert in ultravectorized peta-fragmentation, or something to that effect. You Google
both those terms and find that StackOverflow has removed the only question about
them because it’s “off-topic”. The Standardized Coding Exam That Everyone Has Taken
Which Allows Objective Comparison turns out not to exist. Project Euler exists, but you
worry if you asked them about it they would think you’re crazy and obsessive. So you go
with the one who has a Computer Science degree from Harvard, because at least he’s
probably not literally lying about the fact that he knows what a computer is.

(it’s not that everyone is an imposter with no idea what they’re doing. But everyone
starts out that way, and develops their habits when they’re in that position, and then
those habits stick.)

(8) You will suffer heartbreak

I’d been on a couple of dates with someone a month or two before the grants program.
Then in the chaos of sorting through applications, I forgot to follow up.

Halfway through the grant pile, I found an application from my date. It was pretty good,
but I felt like it would be too much of a conflict of interest. I sent them an email: “Sorry,
I don’t feel like I can evaluate this since we’re dating”.
The email back: “I don’t consider us to still be dating”. This remains the most stone-
cold rejection I have ever gotten.

(9) If you can’t rely on other grantmakers or credentials, you’ll rely on prejudices and heuristics

Here are some of mine: your new social network won’t kill Facebook. Your new
knowledge database won’t kill Wikipedia. No one will ever use argument-mapping
software. No matter how much funding your clever and beautiful project to enforce
truth in media gets, the media can just keep being untruthful. The more requests for
secrecy are in a proposal, the less likely it is to contain anything worth stealing.
Subtract one point for each use of the words “blockchain”, “ML”, and “BIPOC”.

A lot of these italicized sections here are trying to get at the same point: when you’re
truly lost in a giant multidimensional space that requires ten forms of expertise at once
to make real progress, you’ll retreat to prejudices and heuristics. That’s what
credentialism is, that’s what relying on other grantmakers is, and - when you have
neither Harvard nor Patrick Collison to save you, you’ll rely on that one blog post you
read that one time saying X never works.

(10) …but your comparative advantage might be in not doing any of this stuff

See my post from yesterday, Heuristics That Almost Always Work.

What’s your story for why you need a microgrants program? Why not just donate to
GiveWell or OpenPhil or some other charity or foundation you respect?

(technically OpenPhil doesn’t accept individual donations, but if you break into their
office and leave $1.5 million on a desk, what are they going to do?)

If your story is “I have a comparative advantage in soliciting grant proposals” or “I have

a comparative advantage in soliciting funders” or even “it takes the excitement of a
personal grants program to incentivize me to do charity at all”, then fine, whatever.

But if your story is “I think I have a comparative advantage in assessing grants” - then
consider actually having a comparative advantage in assessing grants.

If you only fund teams with a lot of Harvard PhDs who already have Patrick Collison’s
seal of approval, you don’t have much of a comparative advantage. You could be
replaced by a rock saying “FUND PRESTIGIOUS PEOPLE WHO OTHER
PRESTIGIOUS PEOPLE LIKE”. I don’t want to say they’re sure to get funding - one of
life’s great mysteries is how many foundations are desperate for great causes to fund,
how many great causes are desperate for funding, and how the market still doesn’t
always clear. And if everyone galaxy-brains themselves into not funding the obvious
best teams, then the obvious best teams never get funded. And the surest way not to do
that is to stop galaxy-braining and fund the obvious best teams.

Still, given that your money is somewhat fungible with other people’s money, one way
to have an outsized impact is to outperform that rock. That means trying to find
undervalued projects. Which means not just using the same indicators of value as
everyone else: credentials, popular cause areas, endorsements. It means taking chances,
trying to cultivate long-term talent, trying to spot the opportunities you’re uniquely
placed to see and other people are most likely to miss.

This is a dangerous game - most of the time you try to beat Heuristics That Almost
Always Work, you fail. Still, part of what you’re doing in setting yourself up as a grants
evaluator is claiming to be able to do this (unless you have another story in mind, like
that you’re good at soliciting proposals or leveraging your personal brand to get
funding). The overall grantmaking ecosystem needs some people to take the obvious
high-value opportunities, and other people to seek out the opportunities whose value
isn’t obvious. If you want to be the latter, good luck.

The other way the HTAAW post is relevant here: beware of information cascades. If you
give someone a grant because they have good credentials and two other grantmakers
approved of them, they’re going to be telling the next guy “We have good credentials
and three other grantmakers approve of us!” This was another worry that pushed me to
put a supra-HTAAW level of work into some grants.

V.

If you solve all these problems, congratulations! You can write a blog post announcing
that you are giving out grants! People you respect will say nice things about you and be
happy!

David Chapman
@Meaningness

Amazing and wonderful! @slatestarcodex’s small grants program

awards. Many/most of these seem both worthy and unlikely to get
funding through established means. Hopepunk in the real world :)
 ACX Grants Results
...
astralcodexten.substack.com

December 29th 2021

10 Retweets 90 Likes

Shruti Rajagopalan
@srajagopalan

ACX @ ⁦ slatestarcodex⁩’s EV-style grant looks fantastic. A very diverse

group. Congrats to all the winners. More about the grant and winners
here.

ACX Grants Results

...
astralcodexten.substack.com

December 29th 2021

 2 Retweets 32 Likes

Then you have to actually give people money.

You know how, whenever there’s a debate about cryptocurrency, some crypto fanboy
gushes about how it makes sending money so much easier? And if you’re like me, you
think “yes, but right now you can just enter a number into Paypal, that already seems
pretty easy to me”?

I take it all back. The crypto future can’t come soon enough. Sending money is terrible.

Paypal charges 2-3% fees. If you’re sending $50K, that’s a thousand dollars. Your bank
might do wire transfers for you, but they have caps on how much you can send, and that
cap may be smaller than your grant. Wires can involve anything from sending in a snail
mail form, to going to the bank in person, to getting something called a “Medallion
Signature Guarantee” which I still have not fully figured out. Sometimes a recipient
would tell me their bank account details, and my bank would say “no, that account does
not exist”, and then we would be at an impasse. If you have double (or God forbid, triple)
digit numbers of recipients, it all adds up.

I solved this the same way I solved everything else - begged friends and connections to
do it for me. The Center For Effective Altruism agreed to take over this part, which was
a lifesaver but created its own set of headaches. They’re a tax-deductible registered
charity, which means they’re not supposed to give money to politics or unworthy
causes. But some of my recipients were doing activism or things that were hard to
explain to the federal government (eg helping a researcher take some time off to re-
evaluate their career trajectory). They asked me to handle those myself, and I muddled
through. Also, registered charity aren’t allowed to let donors influence its grant-making
decisions, so I wasn’t allowed to donate directly to my own grants program; I had to
split it in two and fund my fraction separately, with inconsistent tax-deductibility.

I understand that Molly Mielke is working on a project called Moth Minds that will
take away the headache and make personal grants programs easier. So far her website is
heavy on moth metaphors and light on details, but moth metaphors are also good, and
I’m long-term excited about this.

VI.

More and more people are talking about microgrants programs. Maybe you’re one of
them. So: should you run a grants round?
Your alternative to running a grants round is giving to the best big charities that accept
individual donations. GiveWell tries to identify these, and ends up with things like
Against Malaria Foundation, which they think can save a life for ~$5,000. So to a first
approximation, run a grants round if you think you can do better than this.

Why should you expect to do better than these smart people who have put lots of effort
into finding the best things? GiveWell mostly looks at scale-able and stable projects,
but most microgrants work with small teams of people pursuing idiosyncratic
opportunities. Funding research teams, activist groups, and companies/institutions can
easily outperform direct giving to individuals.

There are very large organizations who handle these kinds of one-off grants. They’re
also smart people who put lots of effort into finding the best things. So why should you
expect to outperform them?

Maybe because they say you can. I talked to some of these big foundation people, and
they were unexpectedly bullish on microgrants. They feel like their organizations are
more limited by good opportunities than by money. If you can either donate your money
or your finding-good-opportunities ability, consider the latter.

How can big foundations be short of good opportunities when the world is so full of
problems? This remains kind of mysterious to me, but my best guess is that they set
some high bar, donate to everything above the bar, and keep the rest of their money in
the hopes that good charities that exceed the bar spring up later - or spend the money
trying to create charities that will one day exceed the bar. Global health charities
sometimes set a bar of “10x more effective than GiveDirectly”, where GiveDirectly is a
charity that gives your money directly to poor people in Africa; other cause areas are
harder to find a bar for but maybe you can sort of eyeball it. This model suggests you
should only donate your finding-good-opportunities ability if you think there’s a chance
you can clear the relevant bar, but there might be pretty high value of information in
seeing whether this is true.

Anyone deeply interested in this question should read Carl Shulman’s Risk-neutral
donors should plan to make bets at the margin at least as well as giga-donors in
expectation and Benjamin Todd’s comment here. But here are some preliminary reasons
why your microgrants program might be worth it:

Because you have a comparative advantage in soliciting proposals. Big effective-altruist

foundations complain that they’re entrepreneurship-constrained. That is, funders give
them lots of money, they’ve already funded most of the charities they think are good up
to the level those charities can easily absorb, and now they’re waiting for new people to
start new good charities so they can fund those too. This is truest in AI alignment,
second-truest in animal welfare and meta-science, and least true in global development
(where there are always more poor people who need money). ACX Grants got some
people who otherwise wouldn’t have connected with the system to get out there and
start projects, or at least to mention that their project existed somewhere that people
could hear it. One of my big hopes is that next year or the year after OpenPhil gives $10
million or something to some charity they learned about because of me. I don’t know if
this will happen but I think the possibility made this grants round worthwhile in
expectation.

Because you have a comparative advantage in getting funding. I might have been in this
category: I think some people trusted me with their money who wouldn’t necessarily
have trusted OpenPhil or GiveWell. But I’m having trouble thinking of many other
scenarios where this would happen.

Because you have a comparative advantage in evaluating grants. This one is tough. The big
foundations have professional analysts and grantmakers. These people are really smart
and really experienced. Why do you think you can beat them at their own game?

One possible answer: you’re also really smart and experienced. Fast Grants is run by
Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison (plus Emergent Ventures with Shruti Rajagopalan); it
wouldn’t surprise me if their particular genius is more valuable than a big foundation’s
increased specialization and resources. If that’s you, then good work, I guess.

A second possible answer: no big foundation exactly captures your beliefs and values.
Scott Aaronson ran a grants round recently and donated entirely to causes involved in
STEM education. Maybe he thinks STEM education is more important than other big
players believe (which actually seems very plausible). Or maybe his value system puts
less emphasis on pleasure vs. suffering compared to the human urge toward deep
understanding of Nature, and he feels incompletely aligned with OpenPhil who eg
donate $786,830 to crustacean welfare.

A third possible answer: you have no absolute advantage, but you do have a comparative
advantage. Scott Aaronson was both a student and professor at one of the math
education groups he donated to, knew people who had been to the others, and had
readers of his (math-focused) blog advise him on others still. I totally believe Aaronson
is at least as qualified to evaluate math education as big foundations are, especially
math-education-as-understood-and-appreciated-by-Scott-Aaronson’s-values. I gave
several grants to prediction markets, something I’m plausibly an expert on.
(which is a bad example, because the small handful of people who know more about
prediction markets than I do are disproportionately employed as OpenPhil
grantmakers. But one day I’ll find a cool new field before OpenPhil does, and then I’ll
give it lots of grants and feel very smug.)

So, all of these are ways your microgrants can potentially add value over a generic gift
to someone else. So why might you not want to start your own grants program?

Sometimes human temptations caught up with me. I funded some grants that were
cool, and made me seem cool for funding them, and made me happy, and supported my
politics and identity commitments - but which, when I judge them by the standards of
“was giving these people $X better than saving $X/5000 lives from malaria or relieving
$X/10,000 people’s life-ruining credit card debts?”, probably fail. Part of the appeal of
GiveWell is that you don’t have to win any spiritual battles against temptation; you
know you’re doing more or less the right thing. Grants programs throw you right into the
middle of spiritual battles, each one you lose counts against your effectiveness rate, and
after you lose enough you’re subtracting value instead of adding it.

So should you run your own grants program, or donate to an existing charity?

If you have any of the above comparative advantages, if you plan to work hard enough
to realize them, and if you win spiritual battles so consistently that you have to fight off
recruiters for your local paladin order - I say try the program.

If not - and especially if you expect to half-ass the evaluation process, or succumb to the
pressure to give to feel-good causes that aren’t really effective - then donate to existing
charities. I really don’t want to make this sound like the loser option: donating to
existing charities is usually the right thing to do, and choosing the less flashy but more
effective option is also a heroic act.

If you’re on the fence, I’d err on the side of doing it, since the upside is potentially very
high and the downside limited.

VII.

There’s one other reason to run a microgrants program: you think it would be fun.

I have no moral objection to this. Nothing along the lines of “wouldn’t it be better to
something something expected utility?” Realistically the highest expected utility thing
is whatever gets you interested enough to donate. If that’s a grants program, do it.

My actual objection is: no it won’t be.

I can’t say this with certainty. Some people are very weird. Some people are masochists.
Some people already have experience in a related field and won’t feel as overwhelmed as
I did.

But I’m already scheming ways to try to capture the positive effects of a grants program
without having to run one myself. If the American way is a “government of laws, and
not of men”, then the ACX way is a government of byzantine highly speculative
institutions instead of men. So I’m thinking about how to replace my role with a impact
certificate-based retroactive public goods funding market, and working on talking to
various interesting people who might be able to make this happen. Once I recover from
the current grants round, I’ll push them harder and see if we can get a prototype by next
fall.

The basic idea would be: you all send in your grant proposals as usual. I (and any other
interested funders) pledge some amount of money (let’s say $250K) to be distributed to
successful projects one year later, ie after they’ve succeeded and made a difference.
Then some group of savvy investors (or people who think they’re savvy investors)
commit the same amount of their money (so $250K in our example) to buying grants, ie
fully funding them in exchange for a meaningless certificate saying they “own” the
grant - if people wanted, this could be an NFT, since that technology excels in
producing meaningless certificates. At the end of some period, maybe a year, I would
come in with my $250K and “give it” to the successful projects, by which I mean to
whoever owned their impact certificates. Think of it as kind of like a prediction market
for which grants will do well. Don’t worry, it’ll make more sense when we do it.

(don’t get too excited though, this will probably be harder than I expect, and maybe
none of it will pan out)

All miserable slogs eventually become pleasant memories (eg high school, travel,
medical residency). I can already sense the same thing happening to ACX Grants. I’m
proud of what we accomplished, and with the pain fading away and only the fruits of
our labor left, I feel like it was good work.

But if you’re wondering whether or not to start a grants program, the most honest
answer I can give is “I tried this once, and now I’m hoping to invent an entirely new
type of philanthropic institution just to avoid doing it again.”

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Chronological

NE - nakedemperor.substack.com Writes The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter · 19 hr ago

“I don’t consider us to still be dating” - Brutal!
What an interesting job. Never having considered it before, I would look at their previous
work and see how much of the grants were wasted on excessive management fees and
bureaucracy instead of actually going on what they were intended.
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Scott Alexander 19 hr ago
AUTHOR
Unfortunately, that's a classic mistake - see https://80000hours.org/2011/11/it-is-
effectiveness-not-overhead-that-matters/
Reply
NE - nakedemperor.substack.com Writes The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter · 19 hr ago
Interesting thanks! I told you I'm a newbie, learning fast though!
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pozorvlak 6 hr ago
I guess the only possible response is "Sorry, I don't feel like I can evaluate this since
you've just brutally dumped me via grant application."
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Will C 19 hr ago · edited 19 hr ago
If you stumbled backwards into the concept of a VC field, I think it's plausible that you
might do well stumbling further into "incubator" territory. A lot of your issues seem to
stem from idiosyncratic persons who haven't written a grant proposal in their lifetimes,
especially not a successful one. The shoe-string version could be a virtual session and a
used copy of a proposal writing textbook mailed to the individual and 3 months before
opening the door. Or you could consider something more personal and intense, Y-
combinator style, or anywhere in between.
Reply
Will C 19 hr ago
Self reply with anectdata: the number of people who would make intelligent use of a
lump sum of cash pales in comparison to the number of people who would benefit
from not worrying about their normal expenses for 3-6 months and some serious
guidance for their unrecognized talents.
Reply
Mo Nastri Writes Mo’s Reads · 11 hr ago
This suggests that one high-leverage opportunity is to write a "good grant
proposals 101". On second thought, I'm not sure if this is good on net...
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Robert McIntyre 19 hr ago · edited 18 hr ago
Why not simply judge whether or not you’d be very happy to fund each grant, and then
just randomly choose grants to fund from among those? Much simpler to administer,
avoids tying yourself in 4D knots, and the losers of this process can then be publicly
posted with no negative signaling risk.
Reply
Robert McIntyre 18 hr ago
Here’s some info on the idea: https://www.nesta.org.uk/feature/ten-predictions-
2019/random-approach-innovation/
Another advantage: minimizes unknown unknown bias — that is, bias that’s baked
into the scientific fields themselves.
Reply
Kenny Easwaran 18 hr ago
I think this absolutely makes a lot of sense - there's some point in the
evaluation process when the difficulty of fine-graining more instances at the
boundary gets much higher than the expected value of getting that decision
right, so you might as well switch to random at that point. And since that point
is where you start getting a lot of the perverse incentives about pitching to the
specific evaluator, by randomizing at this point you can reduce incentives to do
that.
Reply
name99 18 hr ago
Two aphorisms from VC types I know (who have actually made serious
money)
- you bet on people, not companies/technologies
 - usually it's more important to make a decision (any decision), but make it
fast enough, than to make the optimal decision.
Regarding the latter, one of the things that constantly amazes me about
when I see these people in action is precisely this "make a decision fast,
and don't look back" aspect to how they live their lives. This is not a claim
that the decisions are thoughtless, or coin flips; rather
- the appropriate amount of pre-thinking has gone into the issue so that
when the specific circumstances require a decision it's an informed
decision
- excess time is not spent on trivial unimportant decisions (to paraphrase
"just buy the first one that looks good enough on Amazon; it'll probably do
the job, and if not you're out a few dollars which is worth less than
spending five hours on internet shopping research"
But I will be the first to admit that this is not an easy skill to acquire,
especially the learning not to regret whatever decisions turn out
incorrectly (as some inevitably do).
Reply
Peter Gerdes 11 hr ago
That's surely true at some point but I'm not convinced that it is realized
here. It stands out to me that the extra info Scott kept getting was the kind
of info that massively affected his subjective estimate of proposal
success. Isnt it usually only when it only makes small differences that it
makes sense to stop looking for more info?
Indeed, isn't there a common fallacy where ppl stop trying to save money
on big purchases once it drops below some percentage of the price rather
than looking at the absolute size of the effect?
Administering this amount of money seems like something where spending
an extra couple of weeks of full time labor picking better outcomes might
be worth it.
Reply
Melvin 18 hr ago
But if it becomes known you're doing this, then you'll get a lot more submissions of
"just good enough" grants by people who want to exploit the process. Heck, I'd
spend twenty minutes writing a decent-at-first-glance grant proposal if there was a
chance of a free $50K.
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Robert McIntyre 17 hr ago
I really don't get this -- if people could write lots of "just good enough" grants
(which, remember, the line is "Scott feels very very happy funding it at first
blush", not "Scott vaguely feels good about it"), then why wouldn't they also
submit those to the actual grant program? If you can write a decent-at-first
glance proposal maybe you SHOULD get the $50k!
Reply
Caledfwlch Writes Ratblogs · 10 hr ago
The supposed internal reason for feeling good about grants is believing
that they are actually used to achieve the proposed purpose. Melvin here
talks about having zero intention of actually following up with their grant
proposal, and having zero faith in it actually working out. The cause is
unachievable by default
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Robert McIntyre 9 hr ago
People can already write extremely bad-faith grants to the existing
process, though, and they didn't appear to? Why would slightly
tweaking the approval process change who is applying? Do you really
think you'd get an influx of fradulent grants under this scenario?
Reply
Caledfwlch Writes Ratblogs · 8 hr ago
When people write grants they by default assume that their work
will be professionally reviewed (and that's what Scott really tried
to do here). They assume that half assed grants without any real
perspective have approximately zero chance of winning.
Preparing a convincing grant is a lot of work for something that
has zero chance of winning.
However, if people realized that their grants are not checked too
thoroughly, it would push a lot of them to try to pull a scam, as
they now know they have a real chance of getting money. Of
course, this only happens if information about Scott's decision
process somehow becomes known to the general public. And
there's a big difference between "being a bad reviewer" and
"people knowing that you are a bad reviewer". However, there's
still a risk. Like, Scott is doing another public post about grants,
and then some commenter points out that it's clearly obvious
that "grant X" cannot possibly work and everyone who
researched the topic even for a minute would know that. And it
would be a big hit
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John Wittle 2 hr ago
They absolutely do.
 Google "john wittle education grants", try to find my tumblr post
series, or my lesswrong posts, or the time Scott talked about my
comments back on SSC.
Reply
Deiseach 4 hr ago
Yeah, but you have to account for how you spent that $50k. If it's "I bought four
houses" or "I paid my ex-boyfriend" (see Freddie's post here
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/white-journalists-are-terrified-of) then
eventualy you have to pay it back or make some return of money you obtained
deceitfully.
Of course, if you're a professional scammer, you probably spend *another*
twenty minutes weasel-wording the proposal such that "yes I bought four
houses, see the small print, and these houses were for the benefit of the
charity (i.e. me)" gets you technically off the hook.
Reply
Scott Alexander 17 hr ago
AUTHOR
Because if that decreases the quality with which I spend $1 million by 5%, I've
wasted $50,000 = ten lives.
Reply
Robert McIntyre 16 hr ago · edited 16 hr ago
You've already made the point very eloquently in this post that you don't have
enough wisdom/discernment/predictive ability to allocate the grant money to a
level of percision of 5%. By doing the grant at all you've already accepted that
you will misallocate some money, but that's fine because you'll get some big
wins as well and (like an angel investor) you'll "beat the market" by saving more
lives than donating everything to a charity. So I think it's more like:
1) Go the way you did, beat yourself up judging the grants to the point that
you're miserable, misallocate the grant funds by 20% anyway due to bias in
your reviewers. Also, systametically avoid funding some really good grants
because of biases in your experts.
2) Go the random route, misallocate the grant funds by 20% due to your
inability to even do the "smell test" well. Avoid lots of bias for free, maybe pick
up a grant that "everyone knows" can't work, and have a really easy time
administraing the grant. You feel really good and ready to do it again next year.
Imagine if you had done it the random way -- you would have personally had a
better experience and could more heartly recommend the grant process to
other people, instead of saying that it's likely to make you miserable!
Reply
MetalCrow 16 hr ago
Why do you assume the random route has the same level of misallocation
as the route Scott did take? Funding based on feelings seems like it'd very
easily get a higher error rate then funding based on research Scott isn't
super good at.
Reply
Robert McIntyre 16 hr ago · edited 16 hr ago
I mostly just don't trust experts a huge degree. I think it's sort of like
how monkeys throwing darts can do better than a lot of hedge funds.
The key insight is that if you have experts involved they often miss
things that everyone "knows" are impossible. I've seen it in SO many
scenarios that it forms a big part of my intuition but it's hard to
communicate and sounds silly. I also think that randomness has
powerful salubrious effects in avoding weird bias.
I also think Scott has better intuition than he might imagine -- I trust
Scott's gut feeling followed by random allocation more than I trust any
panel of experts.
Reply
MetalCrow 16 hr ago
That's a fair critique of investment management experts (and
mostly true!) but saying you don't trust experts in general is
pretty significant! I mean, i trust a surgeon (an expert in surgery)
to do a better job operating on me then i do a random non-
expert, so i think there's a significant degree in which trust in
experts is an important thing to have. Not total trust, mind you, a
better surgery would probably be done by having an expert AND
a non-expert observer (maybe), but i think having an expert at all
is really important.
I mean, as Scott posted in his examples, how should he
differentiate between 2 biomedicine grants that he knows very
little on without consulting experts? Going based on emotion
here, if you trust Scott to be accurate in his reported abilities,
would just be a coin toss.
Reply
Robert McIntyre 15 hr ago
To respond to your second point: I think Scott should read
the proposals and then use his intuition to either qualify or
disqualify each one. Put the qualifying proposal(s) on the
"to fund" pile. Then when he's done randomly allocate
funds. If both make it to the pile, then they have an equal
chance of being funded. I think in Scotts's case his intuition
will be reasonably accurate, and in any case it's him being
directly responsible for the process and not defering it to
others, and not stressing him out too much so that he and
others do it again. Sometimes you can't differentiate things
well, and that's OK. I don't find the agreement between the
experts to be that useful, it's exactly what you'd expect if
the field itself has biases, and at least for grants it pays to
sometimes buck the trend. I trust Scott's intution to be
simply better for these purposes than experts.
Reply
Robert McIntyre 15 hr ago
The big benefits to this process IMO:
1) it's actually more legible for future iterations of the
grant. If Scott makes these decisions himself, then later
grants will also allocate funds using a similar
(indescribable) style. If he's second-guessing himself
by relying on experts, then the whole program will be
less consistent and less unique year-to-year, which I
think is overall a bad thing. Imagine if there were 50
bloggers all doing this and I'm a donor to the grants: I
would rather just donate to the blogger whose intution I
like best and then have them /actually use their own
mind/ to allocate funds, rather than have them second-
guess themselves and appeal to experts.
2) No signaling risk for the losing applications. Scott
can post all the grants from the "to fund" pile that
didn't get funding on the website, and everyone will
know that it was just luck of the draw for why they lost
out, and may be more inclined to support them.
Reply
Robert McIntyre 15 hr ago
To respond to your first point: I obviously have something
like "trust" -- I ride planes, I drive a car, I use the internet,
and I would address a severe medical problem by (very
reluctantly) using the medical system. All of these things are
built by people and they do work (and in cases like planes
they work very well!) But through experience I've learned to
sharply limit my trust to avoid it "leaking" in ways that aren't
warranted.
For example, I believe that artifacts produced by people like
cars can work well. I don't believe that a group of "auto
experts" would be likely to evaluate grants relating to
improving automobiles better than Scott. I don't expect
them to be able to build cars themselves if they were
stranded on a desert island. I expect that for most of their
beliefs about cars, they haven't put in the effort to truly
evaluate their beleifs against reality. Instead their beliefs are
a copy of whatever their field says, and likely to be all biased
in the same way. In reality It's even worse than that -- I
expect that in a group of car experts about half of them
wouldn't know very much about cars at all!
I believe that something like this is true for practically all
groups, and it's my default assumption. I believe this
because it's p​ roven true in my life over and over again in
many fields in which I AM an expert personally, and I've
actually updated on that information instead of Gell-
Manning my way through the rest of my life.
If you can really understand that investment management
experts aren't good at their jobs on average, why shouldn't
that knowlege propogate to other groups as well?
(note: a few very rare people can genuiely be good at things
and deserve a lot of trust; these are the people who design
the stuff everyone uses. But these are individual people, not
groups. I think Scott is a worthwhile individual person to
judge stuff and that most modifications to this simple
process will just make things worse.)
Reply
Melvin 11 hr ago
> For example, I believe that artifacts produced by
people like cars can work well. I don't believe that a
group of "auto experts" would be likely to evaluate
grants relating to improving automobiles better than
Scott. I don't expect them to be able to build cars
themselves if they were stranded on a desert island. I
expect that for most of their beliefs about cars, they
haven't put in the effort to truly evaluate their beleifs
against reality. Instead their beliefs are a copy of
whatever their field says, and likely to be all biased in
the same way. In reality It's even worse than that -- I
expect that in a group of car experts about half of them
wouldn't know very much about cars at all!
That sounds unreasonably harsh on the auto experts.
 I suggest going down to your local mechanic and
paying him $200 an hour or whatever his rate is just to
talk about cars. I think you'll be astounded by how
much he knows about cars. I would suggest that he
would be much, much better at evaluating ideas about
how to improve than Scott would, and that Scott would
probably choose a bunch of tempting-sounding ideas
which the mechanic would know were laughably
impossible. (Not to pick on Scott, I'm sure it would be
equally one-sided the other way if Scott and your car
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Robert McIntyre 9 hr ago · edited 9 hr ago
It sounds like we have different ideas about how
competent groups of people are in general,
perhaps related to the types of people we've met
in our lives? I'd actually be down to test this if we
could agree to some sort of bet. Do you have any
ideas where you make some prediction about
groups / experts, and we verify it, and you
substantially change your mind if you're wrong? If
it has the potential to change my mind I think we
might have an experiment on our hands.
Reply
Jonathan Paulson 11 hr ago
The reason why that is true in finance is that prices have been
optimized to be fair, so it’s hard to make good or bad choices.
That is…not true of the grant pool, probably even after an initial
pass.
Reply
Scott Alexander 8 hr ago
AUTHOR
I'm not sure it makes sense to say I'm not good enough to allocate to a
level of precision of 5%. If I am terrible but try hard, I might go from a D+
to a D, which is 5% better.
Reply
Robert McIntyre 8 hr ago
Fair enough! (assuming you mean D- to D?) I personally see trying
really hard to evaluate grants more as trading away the bias you know
for the bias you don't know, but I can see how a lot of work, at the
margins, might allow you to predict that a grant won't work because
 it's got some fatal flaw. (but then again, the grant that really gives you
10,000x return will probably be an opportunity that hasn't been
funded yet because it SEEMS like there's something wrong with it but
in reality there isn't.)
But in any case, is that extra work really worth it compared to a more
streamlined approach? I think that at the level of $1.5MM it's
genuinely worth it to burn 5% ($75,000) just to make it easier for you
personally, since it means the difference between you feeling like it
wasn't too hard vs feeling like it was an ordeal. That's important for
establishing things like this as a community tradition. I really wish you
could have written a post saying that the grant is actually fairly easy
and fund to administer and that's worth a lot in and of itself!
Another way to think about it is that lots of charities have MUCH
higher overheads than 5%. If that's the price for making it sustainable
for you then it seems worth it to me.
Reply
Nancy Lebovitz Writes Input Junkie · 6 hr ago
I don't know if this is reasonable, but it could be possible to see
this year as an investment that's mostly about learning how to
evaluate grants, with being effective manifesting in future years.
Reply
Coagulopath 19 hr ago
>VC-ing is a field as intense and complicated and full of pitfalls as medicine or statistics
or anything else.
Here's a really interesting article by Tucker Max about why he got out of venture capital.
https://www.tuckermax.com/why-i-stopped-angel-investing-and-you-should-never-
start/
Short version: it takes way more time than you'd think. To be a successful angel investor,
you pretty much have to know your founders' businesses as well as they do themselves.
"Even though angel investing looks like this casual, easy and fun activity, make no
mistake about it, if you want to avoid losing your shirt, you spend a LOT of time on it:
finding deals, vetting companies you’re interested in, and then once you invest, working
with them like hell to make them succeed.
Just one example: I invested in a custom dog toy company, PrideBites, and have probably
spent at least 500 hours over two years learning about the dog toy space, the dog retail
space, and the complexities of Chinese manufacturing and logistics (so I can better
advise them). Not to mention, another 500+ hours I’ve spent with the team helping them
through all the hundreds of issues that come up. [...]
That’s almost a full time job–and it’s only ONE company. "
(yeah, that's the same Tucker Max who used to write stories about getting loaded on
Everclear, fucking midget strippers, and having diarrhea in hotel lobbies. He's had some
life changes.)
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Mo Nastri Writes Mo’s Reads · 11 hr ago
Nitpick: 1000+ hours over 2 years is roughly a quarter of a full-time job (at least in
my part of the world, not sure about the US). But Max's point is well-taken.
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Ian David Moss 18 hr ago · edited 18 hr ago
Re: the "impact certificate-based retroactive public goods funding market" -- you may
want to check out social impact bonds if you haven't already:
https://golab.bsg.ox.ac.uk/the-basics/impact-bonds/. It sounds like a somewhat similar
concept, albeit without the prediction market component. It does, however, have the
advantage of having been implemented in practice.
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Murali 18 hr ago
You mention Tyler Cowen a couple of times, but one nice lesson from Stubborn
Attachments, is that when uncertainty abounds, look for the option with the largest
upside, which rises above the froth, where upside is defined from an optimistic
perspective. Interestingly, this ties in to a core idea in machine learning 'optimism in the
face of uncertainty'. The one sentence claim there is that, if you are optimistic and try
something either 1) everything works and great things happen or 2) everything goes
wrong, but you learn a lot which you can use to update your world model for future
grants. You can also update everyone else's models, when they see which funded
projects succeeded.
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Moon Moth 17 hr ago
That's a great quote. If I ever snap and become a genocidal dictator, I'm going to put
"optimism in the face of uncertainty" over the gates of my extermination camps.
Reply
Melvin 16 hr ago
That's the spirit!
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Ivan Fyodorovich 18 hr ago
Re: grant-writing, for my fellow scientists out there, the best advice I ever got was to
focus on "knowledge gap". You have to articulate what is the thing we don't know that
you are going to figure out. Then you explain how you will figure it out. This isn't like
some essay where the overall concept builds over the course of X pages; you have to
articulate the knowledge gap explicitly enough that it's crystal clear to someone reading
ten grants in one day. You can even put the pivotal sentence(s) in italics for extra
emphasis.
I tell this to you so that if your ideas are better than mine but your writing is worse, you
can beat me fair and square.
Reply
J C 18 hr ago
I think that making ballpark guesses might have been preferable. Once you rely on
others, you might end up with a selection by committee that looks pretty similar to what
existing orgs are already doing, except that they have more experience doing that. But
your own perspective can't be replicated by others.
The bigger problem is simply that there were too many proposals to sift through. Maybe
a shorter word limit could have helped, as you can always request more info later.
I wonder if it would be reasonable to require some small payment (e.g. $20) to apply. The
proceeds could go to charity or to increase the grants pool, and it could reduce the
nonserious applicants by a lot. Though I also expect there'd be some good applications
that would be put off by this, more negative feelings by people who aren't picked, and
maybe even some legal issues...
Reply
Ed Adamsky 18 hr ago
There may be a local Community Foundation or Charitable Foundation in your area. This
is an entity that allows people to set up their own charitable funds under the legal
umbrella of the main entity. These can be funded in various ways and operated in various
ways, including donor directed. That might be an answer for your money transfer issues.
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Dave92f1 18 hr ago
"This grants program could be the most important thing I’ll ever do."
Almost certainly not. You have a proven ability to write outstanding, insightful blog posts
that get thousands of exceptionally smart people thinking, some of whom will be
influenced to do important good things (or stop doing important bad things).
What are the chances that you're *also* astoundingly good, or even pretty good, at
administering grants programs? Small.
Stick to your knitting. Find someone else who's good at the grants stuff and get them to
do it.
Reply
Mo Nastri Writes Mo’s Reads · 11 hr ago
In the past I would've been persuaded by an argument like yours, but since reading
Scott's https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-
with-made-up-statistics/ I'm not so sure. This, as I read it, is the context behind his
 sentence you quoted; the "could" captures the very large error bars around his
uncertainty on this
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Scott Alexander 8 hr ago
AUTHOR
I think my writing is influential because it causes things like people giving me $1.5
million for grants. I think allocating $1.5 million to charity is inherently worth a *lot*
of writing, especially if it's true that it can save ~300 lives.
Reply
Zach 2 hr ago
I think you're underselling your writing here, which has made a big impact on a
lot of people doing important things; it's hard to say how many lives it's saved,
but it's definitely added a whole lot more than $1.5 million in value to the world,
however you want to measure that. Having said that I think the grant program
was also a great idea simply because these skills seem pretty correlated (or
rather, both highly correlated with understanding and evaluating complex
systems).
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Deiseach 18 hr ago · edited 18 hr ago
"Another person’s application sounded like a Dilbert gag about meaningless corporate
babble. “We will leverage synergies to revolutionize the paradigm of communication for
justice” - paragraphs and paragraphs of this without the slightest explanation of what
they would actually do. Everyone involved had PhDs, and they’d gotten millions of dollars
from a government agency"
As they say, the answer is in the question. They're accustomed to writing proposals for
government grants, which means they have to shovel in all the buzzwords to show
they're hitting the goals for which the grant is established.
My job before my last job was like this; a new thing that came in was a monthly report
from every centre about hitting a bunch of goals set under targets listed in separate
sections in a newly-created overarching statement of achievement.
What it meant in reality was "what did we do this month?" "well, a bunch of the same
stuff we do every month" "okay, pick out three things, then trawl through all the bumpf
and pick out headings to say we did this, that and the other", which I then wrote up with
copious chunks of the jargon scattered on top.
You couldn't say "this month we recruited six new members for our programme", you had
to show how this came under Goal No. 15 of Section 4 of Unit 12. It was feffin' stupid,
everyone involved knew it was feffin' stupid, the ideal was that every centre was sitting
down for a meeting at the start of the month to plan out our New Goals For This Month
but in actuality it was "oh crap, the monthly board meeting is in three days time, quick,
write up a report about our New Goals to be presented there" and I was one of the
people just pulling stuff out of - the air for such reports. But it filled the real aim of the
exercise, which was "here is a Thing we are supposed to be doing, and now we are
Reply ti th t i d d D i Th Thi "
Mo Nastri Writes Mo’s Reads · 10 hr ago
My current job partly involves doing this as well, so your comment is depressingly
familiar.
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Deiseach 6 hr ago
Yeah, any public/civil service job will be the same. I think it's because a lot of
things come from top-down initiatives ("the government has decided that they
will encourage healthy eating, so this is The Year of the Cucumber!") and
because a lot of funding comes from The Government, you have to comply with
the strictures.
So even if your work has damn-all to do with cucumbers, you still have to Show
How This Project Encourages Cucumbers (Growing, Eating, Making Available To
Public, Pickling Or Raw).
Part of the problem is that you get directives and policies set by people who
come out of environments (like academia or business, governments love trying
to run public service along business principles even if it's like cramming a
square peg into a round hole) where it's *natural* for them to use jargon like
"leveraging synergies" so they write up proposals full of this type of guff, which
get converted into policies, which get sent along to your particular organisation
as "this is the model we want you to use".
End result - you can't write basic descriptions of what you actually did, like
"recruited new clients for programme", it has to be the synergistic paradigms
stuff.
Reply
benwave 18 hr ago
I am once again reminded about how amazingly backward the USA is in something as
basic to a market economy as 'making payments to people'. And I guess the entire world,
to be fair. It's just surprising that a country with an image of itself as such a capitalist
Mecca would be so bad about it. Or maybe the fact that the payments systems are so
heavily gatekept is the lesson in itself?
Reply
name99 17 hr ago
When you look at a field that involves literally millions of people and literally billions
of dollars and see issues, it may be that you are some visionary who can see further
than others.
But more likely is that you simply don't understand many of the issues involved, from
security, (un)revocability, and fraud tracking to tax to the law (Patriot Act puts
severe constraints on randomly moving around more than $10,000 to unclearly
verified third parties).
Reply
Melvin 16 hr ago
My understanding is that the main issue with money transfers in the US is that
there's just so damn many banks. In smaller countries it's easier to get all of the
banks to agree to some standard, but the US is overrun by tiny local banks
where the whole computer system is a bunch of Wangs run by some guy called
Steve.
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Torowisko 16 hr ago
That does not excuse large banks solving or being forced to solve that.
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Torowisko 16 hr ago
USA is hilarious behind times. Not even using outdated from of credit card,
from what I heard you still uses checks and bank transfer between different
banks take longer than a single working day.
For reference, in Poland free transfer get within 12h on working day between
any two bank accounts and if you pay extra: within 15 minutes.
Disclaimer: I have never moved 1 500 000 $ or similarly large sums, but as far
as I know large companies use the same system.
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NoPie 8 hr ago
It is because of SEPA system and IBAN (standardized account numbers) in
the EU. This is one good intended feature of the EU.
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Tuna 4 hr ago
Except that the USA is the odd one out. For the longest time, I used to say that
America for some reason was developed in other ways, but had the consumer
banking sector of a developing country. It made sense because the rest of the
developed world was just so much ahead of the USA.
This no longer works, because today most of the developing countries have
better banking than the USA does.
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Seta Sojiro 2 hr ago
 Is it really that easy to move $100,000 in a random developed country?
And what are the rates of fraud?
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1 new reply

Erusian 18 hr ago
> I take it all back. The crypto future can’t come soon enough. Sending money is terrible.
We could also just change the regulations or use various interventions to actually get it
up to standard. FinTech in the US isn't as bad as some places but there are places that
totally eat our lunch. The Chinese have managed to do better without using crypto. Or
the Koreans if you want a democratic version.
> Big effective-altruist foundations complain that they’re entrepreneurship-constrained.
They're wrong and/or lying. The incentive of funders is to encourage people to apply. It
makes them look more selective and puts them in the position of rejecting rather than
soliciting. Sometimes they find a gem and they're all very adept at tearing through large
numbers of applications. A bad application can be quickly dismissed by some admin or
another. Further, people looking for funding will generally do a circuit where they apply to
dozens or hundreds of places.
The other two (an advantage in getting funding and an advantage in evaluating
applications) are the important ones. As you've discovered, there are people who
optimize around being fundable to grants. It's practically a career and there are entire
industries of consultants. The real advantage would be having some ability to identify
people who can accomplish the goals of big charities but don't look traditionally
fundable. The people who get rejected by everyone else. The issue with this is that it's
hard. The thing about Harvard is that 90% of Harvard MBAs are going to be a solid B. A
few might be A+s. But B- is as low as most will go. The general population can range
from A+ to F's and you need to find a way to figure out how to determine it a scale.
Anyway I've never ran a grant program but I've definitely worked as a judge. Will it make
you feelfullbetter
Expand if your experience sounds typical? I'd say applications usually break down
comment
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Melvin 18 hr ago
>We could also just change the regulations or use various interventions to actually
get it up to standard. FinTech in the US isn't as bad as some places but there are
places that totally eat our lunch. The Chinese have managed to do better without
using crypto. Or the Koreans if you want a democratic version.
In the US can't you just mail a cheque? You gotta pay for a stamp and it takes a
couple of days, but that's better than paying 2% to Paypal.
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Eric Rall 17 hr ago
 That was my thought, too. There are some limitation I know of: depositing
checks can be inconvenient, especially checks large enough to trigger
procedures for detecting fraud and tax evasion, and they can take several days
before the funds are available (due to the US still using a check-clearing
automation system that was first set up in 1972). But unless I'm missing
something big, it seems like a better option than PayPal or wire transfers.
Reply
Erusian 16 hr ago
Sending by mail is much slower and less secure. People can and do steal such
mail. Besides, in some places you can have a completely secure transaction
that takes a matter of hours for big transactions. Often less for smaller ones.
That's just clearly superior to mail.
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Richard Gadsden 4 hr ago
It's worth pointing out that, like job applications, grant applications get a lot of bad
applicants because the people that get rejected then go on to apply everywhere
else, while the people that get accepted get on with doing the job and aren't just
sending out constant applications.
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Max Morawski 18 hr ago
"There wasn't as ready-made an EA infrastructure for biology, so I jury-rigged a Biology
Grants Committee out of an ex-girlfriend who works in biotech, two of her friends, a guy
who has good bio takes in the ACX comments section, and a cool girl I met at a party
once who talked my ear off about bio research. Despite my desperation, I lucked out
here. One of my ex’s friends turned out to be a semiprofessional bio grantmaker. The guy
from the comments section was a bio grad student at Harvard. And the girl from the
party got back to me with a bunch of detailed comments like “here’s the obscure immune
cell which will cause a side effect these people aren’t expecting” or “a little-known
laboratory in Kazakhstan has already investigated this problem”.
Was thinking about this, does anyone know if there's some sort of expertise swap out
there? I often need to know weird things about other disciplines; I have access to a
leading experts on bees, woodpeckers, javascript, and chrome book touchpad drivers.
This is very useful on the occasion I need to know about one of those things. I don't know
any chemists, which is very irritating when I have big chemistry questions. I assume
someone out there sometimes has questions about CS pedagogy or AI that are similarly
going unanswered.
Reply
Laurence 17 hr ago
Courtesy of another ACX commenter: https://crowdfight.org/
Reply
 Nick 17 hr ago
You could try using the relevant StackExchange or Quora for a cheap on demand
version. For learning existing content you might try Twitter or YouTube. Working at
large consultancy or similar professional employer with lots of different disciplines
represented will also let you play telephone very effectively.
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name99 18 hr ago
There's a lot that's very interesting here, but one confusion I see throughout is
- are you funding a CAUSE or are you funding a PERSON?
Because (the way I see it, anyway) at this small money level, you are very much funding a
person, not a cause. (You can only claim to be funding a cause independent of people
when there's a whole infrastructure of multiple people involved...)
And that simplifies the problem tremendously. It doesn't matter how great the cause
appears to be if the person charged with implementing it is incompetent, deluded,
fraudulent, naive, or all the other various relevant pathologies. So you can immediately
weed out everyone who gives you a bad vibe in their application, even if you can't quite
put a finger on it.
Depending on exactly how many grants are left after you weed out
- person I simply do not believe can do the job with the money AND
- cause I do not care about enough to fund
my next filter would be, is there anyone, anyone at all, in the list who shows any proof of
work ability of anything, anything at all?
This sounds harsh, so the question is what is the goal here? If the goal is "give out money
and help a few people", well, credit card debt in the US and medicine for Africa. If the
goal is "actually *achieve* something with high leverage", how about starting with
someone who has achieved something in the past?
Now we get to the contentious area of "how many people are actually capable of doing
anything
Expand full
whatsoever"
comment
where, uh, let's say, opinions differ widely. But I would say, based
on
Replymy limited experience of either seeking a job helping others find jobs or helping
Immortal Lurker 18 hr ago
There are now several people in or known to the rat-sphere who have done a microgrants
program. Can they create a document with lessons learned so that the next person who
tries it can have something to go off of?
Reply
Muncle 18 hr ago
Regarding the future version of this, I hate to be the crypto guy but I think it would be a
great fit, though I would make the tokens fungible.
The way I would do this is - you make a platform for submitting proposals. Then, for the
ones you’ve approved and committed to(or anyone else who wants to for that matter), we
run a token sale, where people buy the proposal’s token for dollar-backed stablecoins,
with a threshold so that if the project doesn’t get enough funds to execute everyone gets
their money back.
To keep the math simple let’s say we’ll issue the same number of ProposalTokens as the
number of dollars committed. Then at the end of a successful project, everyone with
ProposalTokens can exchange them for the corresponding amount of dollars.
This way, you don’t need a single investor to cover the whole amount, it can be
crowdfunded. Furthermore, there will be a market for each project’s tokens, and the price
of the ProposalToken would function exactly like a prediction market for the success of
the project.(And implicitly the trustworthiness of the commitment, unless you want to
lock up the rewards ahead of time)
You could even make it so that the team that’s working on the proposal cannot sell all of
their ProjectTokens at once, but instead have to do it in batches over time. This way, they
are incentivised to keep everyone updated about their progress, so that they can raise
more funds at better valuations.
The only thing is though, there would have to be some upside for the investors to lock up
money for a year, some gap between what’s required to execute the project - I guess
that’s the price of doing this retroactively. Or maybe just the fact that you’re able to help
a charity for $0 is enough?
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Austin Chen Writes Austinsibly · 17 hr ago · edited 17 hr ago
Austin from Manifold Markets here; I've been thinking about this problem from the
opposite perspective, in terms of the opportunity cost that grantseekers pay to navigate
the EA funding landscape (my back-of-envelope estimate for Manifold was $3k in time
spent). My own proposal was to consolidate the different kinds of funding applications
into a single "Common App": https://blog.austn.io/posts/proposal-a-common-app-for-
ea-funding
Ideally, this platform would also allow grantmakers to better coordinate on which projects
they want to fund, and allow new microgrant creators to easily get started (I saw that
Scott Aaronson and Nuno Sempere both started microgrant programs patterned off of
ACX).
An impact certificate model also sounds like a great idea! If Manifold's infrastructure or
technical expertise would be useful, let me know (akrolsmir@gmail.com) and I'd be happy
to help.
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Kris Writes Almost Daily Candy - A Microblog · 17 hr ago
I heard this at a much higher level a few years ago at a conference. He was a CEO that
sold his company for some crazy amount of money and turned to philanthropy and was
shocked at how difficult it was. Turns out that if you are giving away money and want to
do it well (especially at scale) it calls for an organization and operational expertise. He
since started spending his time working with similar folks who wanted to set up
something like this but didn't know how to get it started. I never had thought about it
before but when you think about it it make sense. The incredible weight of donating
$100M but doing it "right" seems high.
Reply
Deiseach 6 hr ago
Yeah, it's hard to give away money if you're not standing on the street corner
handing out bundles of tenners to random passers-by.
First, if you naively just give out money, every begging letter writer, con artist, and
scammer is going to target you.
Second, even if you give it to a particular charity or good cause, if it's a one-man
band operation it may eventually implode due to clashes of personality, the guy in
charge burning out, or he decides stubbornly to do things his way which is not the
best way. There are also potentials for scandals within the organisation, as here in
an Irish case:
https://www.devex.com/news/we-were-wrong-says-head-of-irish-charity-goal-
90781
So you need some way of winnowing out the fraudsters and the inefficient, and
that's a big job if you have no experience and are only in this as a source of cash.
Reply
Benjamin Yeoh Writes Ben Yeoh, Then Do Better · 17 hr ago
Well I think you did a great thing. And there is enough tail uncertainty that it’s possible
that you funded something albeit with a low chance of very high impact like VC. There is
a lot of chance. And while eg a malaria charity has a pretty certain outcome, these grants
might plausibly have higher or at least very different type of expected outcome. I think at
the margin more grants probably enriches the giving ecosystem which is a positive.
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Nuño Sempere Writes Forecasting · 17 hr ago
> Because you have a comparative advantage in evaluating grants
Cackles maniacally: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/AbrRsXM2PrCrPShuZ
Reply
Melvin 17 hr ago
Thanks for writing this. It gives me an appreciation for why so many philanthropists
choose to spend their donations in ways that are perhaps less effective but a lot more
predictable. If you buy a new building for the local university then it's almost certainly not
the most effective way of spending that money, but at least you know what you're
getting.
I guess I have the same problem with Effective Altruism that I do with utilitarianism; it's
easy to say in theory "just do whatever creates the largest number of utils, duh" but this
is a heuristic you can't possibly apply in practice, so you're back to square one.
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Mo Nastri Writes Mo’s Reads · 10 hr ago
> I guess I have the same problem with Effective Altruism that I do with
utilitarianism; it's easy to say in theory "just do whatever creates the largest number
of utils, duh" but this is a heuristic you can't possibly apply in practice
I used to think like this too, and then I decided to look at GiveWell's cost-
effectiveness analysis:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B1fODKVbnGP4fejsZCVNvBm5zvI1jC7Dhk
aJpFk6zfo/edit#gid=1377543212
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Moon Moth 17 hr ago · edited 9 hr ago
[self-deleted due to being in poor taste]
Reply
Sebastian 12 hr ago
On the other hand, she (apparently) got ghosted/forgotten, then got over it and still
applied for the program, just to be rejected again - for being ghosted. I don't think
you need to any ulterior motives to explain why she might have been a tad pissed.
Reply
Moon Moth 9 hr ago
Yeah, that could also be the case. It depends on details which we aren't, and
shouldn't be, privy to.
In retrospect, that comment of mine was in bad taste, given that both parties
involved probably read this. I think I was in too dark of a place to be
commenting, as evidenced by my other comment on this post. I think I'll edit it
into nothingness, but leave this up as a warning sign to myself (and others)
about where my brain can take me.
Reply
TANSTAAFL 17 hr ago
Let the big boys fund that stuff, no individual has enough bandwidth. If you want to beat
the market, such as malaria etc, then you have to get directly involved. Pick someone
that you connect with and aligns with your values, dig in deep with them, and make sure
they don't get hung up on something you can prevent. Sometimes that will be money for
the right thing, but the biggest value will come from holding back when you see that
something would be counter productive or wasteful.
What you're doing seems like a good idea at first but can't really be better than randomly
handing money out to winos on the corner.
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beleester 16 hr ago
I know it was probably heartbreaking in the moment, but I burst out laughing at "This
remains the most stone-cold rejection I have ever gotten." Of all the consequences of a
grants program I wouldn't have expected that one.
Reply
John Slow 16 hr ago
I’m really excited about the prediction markets-themed grant-making proposal! Wouldn’t
it be more fun to open the initial round of investment (the owning of the impact
certificates) to other ACX plebs like me who don’t have $250,000?
Reply
atgabara 16 hr ago
So you're saying Molly Mielke's Moth Minds may make microgrants more manageable?
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Gunflint 14 hr ago
maybe
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LGS 11 hr ago
Moreover, Moth Minds may mitigate migraines many morose microgrant managers
must manage.
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Some Guy Writes Extelligence · 16 hr ago
Really liked your idea for funding grant proposals. Been reading up on prediction markets
since discovering them here. Seems like there’s a need to do a dance for regulators to
say “See?!?! We’re not gambling! We are just having different opinions about future
events, recording those opinions, with different rewards for success!” Wondered if there
was a way to do multi-year trading on those and maybe something to turn on a trickle of
funding and build up as trust increases (based on -and this will do a lot of work- “some
kind” of review).
I’ve often wondered if something similar to this could be done on a smaller funding scale,
ie the city of Los Angeles does this for odd jobs and over time we fund and trust people
to deliver sandwiches to the homeless or fill in pot-holes or even have the job of finding
new odd jobs. That seems like a cheaper way to administer a city and a happier way for
people to find something to do when they don’t want to be chained to a company.
Reply Give gift
hnau 15 hr ago
- This was awesome for you to do and publicize, sorry you didn't enjoy it
- It's your money, you can do what you want with it
- You really do have the advantages you describe in section VI
- Doing your own grants as opposed to just donating everything to established EA orgs
provides valuable hedging / information to the ecosystem
... but can we talk about Grant B?
ACX Grants gave an established academic $60k to jet around the world writing a book on
a super trendy, politicized, non-quantitative subject.
One, that's not a long-shot project; it's a project that's not even trying. Even if there was
One Weird Trick to Smash Patriarchy (which there isn't; that's "murderism" talking) this
isn't the kind of work that would find it.
Two, this is a clear case where ACX Grants have zero comparative advantage. "Harvard
degree" has nothing on how legible this recipient is to mainstream grant-making
institutions, _and_ Tyler Cowen already wrote her a check.
Look, admittedly I also dislike that the recipient considers my presence as male in tech to
be ipso facto problematic (https://www.draliceevans.com/post/smash-the-fraternity) but
that isn't where my objections are coming from. I'm just disappointed that the ACX
Grants program gave such a large chunk of funding to such a lackluster cause. And given
the thought process described in this article I'm confused about how it happened, unless
the decision was just outsourced to Tyler Cowen.
Reply
Scott Alexander 8 hr ago
AUTHOR
See my discussion at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-
results/comment/4208051
Reply
Deiseach 6 hr ago
Yeah, that's the one that makes me raise my eyebrows. Scott says that this person is
working on the problem of gender equality in developing countries, but if I go by
something they've already worked on, they've cracked it.
The short answer is "industrialisation".
Slightly more developed answer: if it's a village of poor goat herders in the
mountains in the back of Nowherestan, then they will have rigid gender roles and
traditional ways of life that mean women stay in the house, are obedient to the men
of the family, and the men do all the public life.
 If Amir from the goat herd village goes to the nearest Big City to get a job and earn
money (because even traditional rural communities are not immune from the
stresses of modernity), it's very damn likely Amir is going to run into women who are
working outside the home for the first time in his life. This is going to have a *big*
effect on his world-view (see rigid gender roles and traditional ways of life).
Also, if Amir meets a girl from his home village or neighbouring village, because
they've both moved to the Big City to work and make money, that he wants to marry
then due to factors such as the high cost of living (relative to poor goat herder
village), the girl *has* to work outside the home, else they'll both end up living in a
cardboard box in an alley because they can't afford anything better on Amir's wages
(he's a poor goat herder, he's not going to be working high-paying, high-value
creating, jobs).
This has knock-on effects such as "we can't afford to have kids/ten kids like we
would
Expand do back home", so things like birth control and abortion are now part of
full comment
Replyd i i li i lif d i h b jb
teucer 15 hr ago
You recently wrote a post about why your posts aren't as good anymore. One of your
reasons is that you're focusing too much on the community stuff.
This is a community stuff post.
I think if I assign some very arbitrary rating to how interesting one of your posts is, and
some very arbitrary rating to how important it is, and multiply, that this will come out as
the very best post you've ever written. You've lately done big work that isn't this cool,
you've written cool stuff that isn't this big, but in terms of how good a thing you have
going for? This is something great.
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Scott Alexander 8 hr ago
AUTHOR
Thank you!
Reply
Seta Sojiro 2 hr ago
Definitely. This goes straight into the ACX hall of fame.
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Lucas 15 hr ago
About second order consequences: saying that you gave X$ against malaria is nice but
is, at least for me, easily forgotten, and probably doesn't lead to blog posts like this. This
grant program, however, is itself a form of publicity. It shows that you and the people
around you are ready to invest a lot of time in those kind of things, which, in my opinion,
makes you appear way more serious about everything "effective altruism". Of course,
evaluation that will be very hard (or will it? Maybe a poll could be a start), but I think
there's something there.
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Desertopa 15 hr ago
While reading over this, I had the thought, maybe one that you already had in the process
of running the grants program, that if I were running one, I think I would aim to prioritize
funding charities and programs which will continue to exist and have some plausible
means of making realistic assessments of how much good they're accomplishing over
time. If you fund 50 charities, and only three of them turn out to be much good, that
might still end up leading to better outcomes than just donating all that money to the
Against Malaria Foundation, *if* the process allows you to discover that those charities
are particularly worthwhile, so that you and other people can direct more funding to them
later.
I think this encapsulates the same idea you expressed in your essay on Diversity
Libertarianism. Trying more things, rather than a few known-to-be-good things, can be
preferable if you have a process to iterate on the things you try which turn out to be
particularly good. But, it's a lot less likely to be if you don't.
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Scott Alexander 8 hr ago
AUTHOR
Hmmm...I was thinking kind of the opposite. Part of my advantage over big
foundations is that I'm faster and nimbler, which suggests being more willing to fund
one-time opportunities.
I do intend to email everyone in a year and ask them what happened, and write
about anything I learn from this process.
Reply
Desertopa 1 hr ago
If you think that the one-off opportunities wouldn't be funded by other
foundations, but the iteratable (iterable?) ones would, then that's one way to
take advantage of your position, but I'd need a much higher level of confidence
to donate to causes that can't be iterated on.
Is giving tens of thousands of dollars to an academic to take a sabbatical going
to produce several lives saved from malaria worth of value, or several people
relieved of debt? It might, but my feeling is, it's *probably* not going to have
more impact than the highest value charities. But the big problem is that if it
does, I can't generalize from that that it'd be valuable to fund sabbaticals to
other academics; the situation is too idiosyncratic.
If there's a probability distribution where there's a 90% chance that money
given to a cause does less good than money given to the highest-rated
charities, then a significant part of the remaining 10% is probably taken up by
 the possibility of it doing a little bit better than the best-rated charities, but not
a lot. So, it's probably not going to exceed the expected value of the best-rated
charities with a one-time donation.
But, if it's an opportunity you can iterate on, a 10% chance of finding something
that could be even higher-impact than the best-rated charities, which people
could then direct more money to, could give that one-time donation *very* high
expected value. It doesn't have to turn out to be much better than the current
best charities for the numbers to turn out favorably.
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Thecommexokid 15 hr ago
I continue to be amused that the difficulty of operations keeps surprising you. You were
surprised that the Meetups Everywhere project turned into such a recordkeeping
headache. You were surprised at the logistical complications of running the Adversarial
Essay and Book Review contests. And now I hear you were surprised by the challenges of
paying thousands of dollars to dozens of parties. I’m glad in all these cases that you find
someone after-the-fact to help rescue you from the administrative quicksand, but I’d
think by now you’d be better able to foresee the need before you start these projects!
Reply
Mo Nastri Writes Mo’s Reads · 10 hr ago
Ever since I read John Salvatier's http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-
surprising-amount-of-detail my default expectation for stuff I don't have prior
experience in has been "this will be a lot more involved than I think in all sorts of
unforeseen ways", and this both puts me into the right frame of mind (long slog, not
'quick and easy') and I'm occasionally pleasantly surprised when it turns out wrong
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Pierre 10 hr ago
I nearly laughed out loud here. Good one.
If he needed any defense: that things are going to be more complicated than one
thinks in the first place (especially the first time you do it) is always true.
And I think he laid out quite a few arguments in his post why one should do it (start)
anyway.
(Don't want to spam but just in case this gets missed in another comment:
connecting Scott's retroactive grant with the following seems very beneficial: the
xprize foundation)
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Scott Alexander 8 hr ago
AUTHOR
I think my main mistake here was underestimating the number of applicants. I made
a bet with Oliver Habryka that I'd get fewer than (I think the number was) 60. I ended
 up getting 656. I don't know why I was so wrong. I implicitly figured this seemed
harder than book reviews and I got about 100 book review entries. But maybe the
lure of "easy" money attracted people who otherwise wouldn't participate in ACX
stuff. Certainly some applicants didn't seem to understand what ACX was.
Reply
Desertopa 1 hr ago · edited 58 min ago
I will note that although I obviously had less investment in the subject, I was
also surprised when I heard you got that many applicants. I thought that
seemed like a lot more people than I'd expect to think they could make a
reasonable case for you to give them money for stuff.
ETA: I think I would have bet against you for <60 though. I didn't give a lot of
thought in advance to how many applicants I expected you to get, but when I
try to think of what number of applicants would have been least surprising to
me, I think that would have been somewhere in the range of 100-150.
Reply
pozorvlak 6 hr ago
AFAICT "constantly underestimates how difficult things will be" is a common
attribute of people who actually get things done (often by delegating the hard work
to someone who can't say no, admittedly). Those of us who predict in advance that
things will be difficult often give up before we start.
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Nancy Lebovitz Writes Input Junkie · 5 hr ago
See also IRB.
I think most non-trivial new projects turn out to be more complicated than expected
for most people.
Reply
Jay 15 hr ago
I'm a CPA, and you should probably talk to a tax lawyer if you haven't already. The US has
a Federal estate, gift, and trust tax that may kick in if you give more than a couple million
over your lifetime. It may be yet another continent of angry cannibals.
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Alex Power Writes the Yevaud Newslettr · 15 hr ago
It seems like my "let Scott Alexander handle the busywork" approach to micro-grants is
not sustainable, then?
Reply
Kevin 14 hr ago · edited 14 hr ago
As an academic scientist with a lot of (mostly negative, with the remainder mostly
puzzling) experiences applying for federal grants, there's a lot of interest here. Federal
agencies tend not to describe their grant-reviewing experiences with such honesty.
I have a few remarks on lesson 4:
> and then my grants program would get really famous for funding such a great thing
I know some programs that veered very hard in this direction in an ostensible attempt to
become more established and build their reputations. I caution against this, because
people can tell when you're just going for name association rather than actually doing
anything worthwhile.
> Or suppose some promising young college kid asks you for a grant to pursue their cool
project.
I think Tyler would also recommend considering the marginal impact of your grant
dollars. Giving somebody their first chance has a much larger potential upside than
funding an existing effort.
Finally, one point that isn't emphasized here: especially when it comes to basic research,
being afraid of "failure" (in the sense of a project not being successful) is
counterproductive. If anything, basic research grants should be targeting a certain failure
percentage, or else they won't fund enough novel ideas with potentially huge long-term
payoffs. (This Works in Progress essay discusses a related idea, "Demanding null
results": https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/escaping-sciences-paradox/.) Of course,
for some of the AI or x-risk proposals here, "failure" could have significant negative
externalities, which is different than not finding a new drug and has to be handled more
Reply
pozorvlak 6 hr ago
Peter Norvig has said that (at least in engineering) you should aim to be wrong half
the time, to maximise your learning rate: https://slate.com/news-and-
politics/2010/08/error-message-google-research-director-peter-norvig-on-being-
wrong.html
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Presto 14 hr ago
Fantastic post, thanks for writing it all out !
Reply
Metacelsus Writes De Novo · 14 hr ago · edited 14 hr ago
>Church has seven zillion grad students, and is extremely nice, and is bad at saying no to
people, and so half the biology startups in the world are advised by him
In fact, the conflict of interest section on papers he's on would be too long, so he made a
webpage to list them and just links to that.
https://arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc/tech.html
(See also: https://twitter.com/ggronvall/status/991300734774923264)
Reply
david roberts 13 hr ago
Here's a third option between starting a micro grants program and donating to an EA
powerhouse 501c3. Go to a public school with an impoverished population. Ask them
what they need. Find a local 501c3 that can fulfill that need. Put them together and ask
for a plan. if you have confidence in the plan, the people, and the partnership, fund a
pilot. If the pilot works, go from there. You will have created something that BUT FOR you
would not have happened. Of course, I'm making it sound easier than it really is. And you
need to be choosy and lucky. But inspired principals and inspired executive directors of
smaller, local charities are out there. Waiting to be connected and a need funded.
Reply
Peter Gerdes 13 hr ago
One thing that stands out to me is how much you benefited from connections and
knowing people.
Makes me wonder if one of the most effective things one can do is simply to promote
schmoozing amoung EA types. I know that since Oxford stopped their EA lectures I don't
know where to go in academia to do that and I wonder if it's a broader problem.
If I had the time/management skills I'd submit a grant request somewhere just to do a
continuing EA lectures series in some fancy philosophy/CS/math department.
Reply
Drethelin Writes The Coffee Shop · 10 hr ago · edited 10 hr ago
This has long been seen as a really important factor in all sorts of non-linear gains
from cooperation, eg in the Silicon Valley VC network, but it's not obvious how to
encourage it artificially because you immediately run into bad actors and bad
incentives.
I think you might be able to do this kind of thing "manually" as an individual but that
just sort of brings you back to the original problem.
Reply
Scott Alexander 8 hr ago
AUTHOR
Does Oxford not have any kind of EA group now?
Reply
Steve Writes Climateer · 12 hr ago
Having recently started making donations – not microgrants, just donating to established
organizations, but attempting to identify underfunded groups where incremental dollars
will make the most difference – this is so spot on.
The question I've especially been wrestling with is how to understand whether a
particular organization actually needs your dollars, and how many of them, considering
that they will also be raising from many other donors. It seems like a fundamentally
intractable problem when a large number of donors / funding sources are attempting to
make independent decisions (which is mostly the only option available under the current
system). I wrote up some thoughts about the problem here, would love feedback:
https://climateer.substack.com/p/philanthropy.
Reply
Bugmaster 10 hr ago
> The problem is: this grants program could be the most important thing I’ll ever do.
No, it's not. The chances that your $60K are going to be the difference between utopia
and a thousand years of darkness are negligible. In terms of strict value for the money,
you'd be better of finding six random hobos and giving them $10K each. However, this is
the classic tragedy of the commons: giving $60K to hobos is the rational choice, but if
everyone took the rational choice, we'd still be stuck trading slaves for coconuts, instead
of flying drones on Mars. So, yes, what you do is important... just not so important that
you should dedicate your entire life or reputation or fortune to it; nor is it important
enough to endlessly obsess over. Half-assing the job is probably the right move.
Reply
Pierre 10 hr ago
Scott's mentioned retroactive grants mechanisms are very similar to what xprize are
doing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Prize_Foundation
I mentioned it in a comment yesterday on the polymarket post. Seems even more
relevant now. I think connecting the two concepts and persons would be very beneficial
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Dweomite 10 hr ago
Re: Corporate Babble. Once I was reading a forum, and someone posted a thread asking
for feedback on their pitch document for something related to the forum's topic. I took a
brief look and told them that it looked like buzzword soup instead of actual information.
I expected them to be upset with me. I figured that someone does corporate babble
because either:
(A) they believe it works better than actually explaining stuff, in which case their first
thought will be something like "that's on purpose, dumbass", or
(B) they don't actually KNOW the information that they are pretending to explain, in
which case they will be embarrassed to have been caught in what is effectively an act of
fraud, and will likely try to bluster their way out
So I was rather gobsmacked when they replied with something like "yeah, that's a fair
criticism; how can I improve on that front?"
(And I had no freaking clue what to tell them! I don't have any models for how corporate
babble happens as a locally-correctable error! To this day, I'm honestly not sure whether
what they really meant was "how can I *disguise* that better?" I guess I probably should
have asked follow-up questions at the time...)
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Nancy Lebovitz Writes Input Junkie · 5 hr ago
That's an interesting question. If someone doesn't know what "explain concretely"
means, how can they find out?
Reply
Baizuo 9 hr ago
Having received a grant, reading this made me really anxious. Internally comparing the
outcome of your project (even in the best case scenario) with X lives saved surely
creates pressure. Idk whether it is right to feel this way and actually all of one`s expenses
should be weighed in this way (eg, buying a new car or saving 4 lives?) as to put things
into perspective or whether this in the end creates a dysfunctional amount of anxiety,
actually lowering your chances of success. Same reasoning should apply for the grant
selection process I suppose.
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polscistoic 8 hr ago · edited 8 hr ago
Scott writes: “How can big foundations be short of good opportunities when the world is
so full of problems? This remains kind of mysterious to me”
I believe I can solve that one for you/add some reasons besides the one you give.
My reference is to government development cooperation, not charity-based altruism, but
the problems are bound to be similar. (Actually, I think Scott knowns the reasons very
well, but acts ignorant to come across as modest and not an arrogant know-it-all. Which
is a very sympathetic character trait.)
If you want to solve the problems in the world, you run into two practical problems:
1) The people with the largest problems in the world do not have any organisations, or
anything else, you can “attach your money” to. That is one of their problems. So you have
to rely on middlemen.
2) Money aimed at solving other people’s problems where you do not want anything
tangible in return, attracts a lot of fake middlemen that mimic the behaviour of real
middlemen. You try to screen the middlemen to find the real ones, but this is a signals
arms race, where fake middlemen are incentivized to improve their mimicking behaviour
as you develop better screening abilities. It’s a principal-agent problem. Everything is.
(As your blog post illustrates.)
To illustrate. You want to solve the problems of the people with the most problems in the
world? They are actually easy to identify. 1) go to a low-income country. 2) Go to a rural &
remote area in the country. 3) Locate a minority ethnic group in that area. 4) Locate the
single mothers/abandoned wives/widows in that ethnic group. 5) Locate the ones with
E d f ll t
Expand full comment
daughters 6) Narrow in on the daughters with disabilities Those daughters are the
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labrav 7 hr ago
Great write-up, thank you. There is something out there that resembles somewhat your
last idea, albeit for government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_impact_bond
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hwold 7 hr ago · edited 7 hr ago
> That is, funders give them lots of money, they’ve already funded most of the charities
they think are good up to the level those charities can easily absorb, and now they’re
waiting for new people to start new good charities so they can fund those too
Meanwhile, funding open source projects used by almost the whole industry is
apparently still unattainable rocket science.
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Nancy Lebovitz Writes Input Junkie · 5 hr ago
That's a good point. I don't know whether anyone even had it together to write a
grant application on the subject.
Reply
mk 4 hr ago
I applied and was not successful.
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Xpym 6 hr ago
Is there a simple explanation for how there's apparently a glut of money in charity, and
Against Malaria Foundation can still save a life for $5000, a claim which I've been seeing
for many years now? Surely there's no shortage of billionaires willing to do that, so why
doesn't the price to save a life go up?
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1 new reply

a real dog 5 hr ago · edited 5 hr ago

> five paragraphs explaining why depression was a very serious disease, then a sentence
or two saying they were thinking of fighting it with some kind of web app or something.
Sounds like most grant proposals I've seen people write, and get approved.
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Lackadaisical Enkrateia 5 hr ago
I think second-order effects of this process are worth mentioning. A lot of VCs and rich
people read this blog, so if you inspire some of them to do their own microgrants, you
can surely move orders of magnitude more money.
It also serves to start a discussion in these circles, helping others who need it to become
better at this kind of thing and helping you become better at this too, so that next time
you can do an even better job. I think a lot of people agreed with your choice of charities,
as most are awesome and inspiring. Hope we get updates later too on how it's going.
People have different values and I imagine it's way more exciting to fund moonshots than
the "boring" choice of giving it all to AMF.
Also, if doing it once was worth it despite all the headaches involved, doing it a second
time should be way easier, especially if you get help and prepare.
I also expect a second microgrants program to get fewer applicants, considering most
were already evaluated in the first round, so it shouldn't be that hard second time.
Still, thanks for doing this. Hope some of them work out.
Reply
Richard Gadsden 4 hr ago
V here seems to be a much bigger condemnation of the American banking system than
you might have realised.
Here in the UK, I can transfer to any other UK bank account, given the sort code (a six-
digit numeric code that represents the bank that the account is located in) and the
account number (which are always eight-digit numbers).
There are three different systems:
BACS, which is almost free (a standard per-transaction fee of 35p), has no upper limit on
the amount transferred, and takes three days.
CHAPS, which is same-day guaranteed, has no upper limit on the amount transferred,
but is much more expensive (£25-35 per transaction).
FPS, which is same-day but not guaranteed (it falls back to BACS in some rare
situations), has an upper limit which was £150,000 until recently but is now £1,000,000
(pandemic change, though now made permanent), and has similarly small fees to BACS
(45p per transaction).
Personal bank accounts normally have free BACS/FPS transfers (ie the bank eats the
fees, though they get bulk rates, so they are paying a lot less), business accounts
normally pay modest fees. I use BACS and FPS all the time, e.g. to transfer money to
friends much like Americans use Venmo. I have used CHAPS exactly once, which was to
transfer the money from my mortgage to the vendor when I bought my house. It tends to
only be used for very large transactions where timing is very important (like buying a
house).
Doing
Expand afullseries of large transactions like paying out grants would require a business
comment
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Richard Gadsden 3 hr ago
 Just to flag up why this system was successful: it was originally founded by 16 large
banks in the 1980s. That covered over 90% of UK bank accounts from foundation.
Other banks either join the system as full members or they contract with a big bank
to run transactions through that big bank.
In 1996, the "Truck Acts" (the laws that banned companies paying in scrip that could
only be spent at the company store) were amended so that employers could refuse
to pay in cash provided they would offer to pay via BACS. The result was that the
few small banks that didn't support BACS immediately moved to do so, because
their customers wouldn't be able to get paid.
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Robi Rahman 2 hr ago
Since there's so much funding available for AI-related ventures, this got me thinking that
some of the ACX grant applications will probably be more in need of staffing than grants
at this point. If you're looking for an employee for your AI research organization, I want to
work for you! I'm finishing grad school this year and am currently looking for a job doing
data science, ML engineering, AI safety research, or anything related. I'm also potentially
interested in helping with any projects of the sort that would be pitched as an ACX grant
application. I think I get notified of replies here but I can also be reached by email at
robirahman@g.harvard.edu. (Sorry in advance if this kind of comment is only allowed on
classified threads; no offense taken if it gets removed.)
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