@Austin Thanks for clarifying. I still view it as pretty antisocial/indicative of poor epistemics, even if it's allowed by the rules fwiw - everything I said above still applies.

What proportion of the other proposals did you even read?

@ms No real life situations are clean examples of economics games, but this has key PD-related choices in which you reduced overall good by choosing the selfish option:

• you could have increased the total funding pool by splitting but decided to concentrate the donation on yourself;

• you could have given meaningful information on multiple other projects, but instead just confirmed a disposition toward your own projects that we could have already guessed (because you run them).

@ampdot Update: I've had a text conversation with Dawn. We're planning to have a call in person, but Dawn's not available until the end of next week. The upshot so far:

• Our ideas do have a lot of overlap, though I think I was largely right in my sense of the differences, and it does seem like in GiveWiki's current form they'd be complementary.

  • Their current structure as I understand it has donations as implicit 'recommendations', but where evaluators 'reward' donors who pick causes they've retrospectively evaluated highly by increasing the recommendation weight of their donations.

• They are not currently putting a lot of development into their project, since they were finding not enough money was going via the Wiki to merit it . So this downgrades my expectation for how much interest I would expect to find in my project. I do think my project is more resilient to this problem, though, partly by what I suggested previously about the value of existing sources of information reducing the two-sided market, partly because their algorithm seems to downweight older donations (I'm not sure about this, but it seems like their max support scores used to be much higher).

• I was wrong about it being closed source. Their code is here.

• They're potentially open to using some of their residual funding for me building the features into their app, which I'm potentially open to doing. We'll talk about this in the call. At the moment, my updated instinct is if it reaches the coding phase, to build my idea into an independent API which might be primarily but not exclusively used by GiveWiki. I'll update the proposal to represent this.

@Marine-Lercier Thanks for the confidence vote :)

*resisted the temptation to self-donate

@ms Self-donating seems like a prisoner's dilemma defection to me. Many people in this initiative both received money and contributed a project to the selection, and most of us resisted the temptation to self-donate at all, let alone the full amount. Were I a funder considering a similar initiative like this I would find it highly offputting to see this behaviour (since it amounts to a first-come-first-served distribution of the funds, losing almost all the informational value it was supposed to generate).

@erin_f Self-donating like a prisoner's dilemma defection to me. Many people in this initiative both received money and contributed a project to the selection, and most of us resisted the temptation to donate at all, let alone the full amount. Were I a funder considering a similar initiative like this I would find it highly offputting to see this behaviour (since it amounts to a first-come-first-served distribution of the funds, losing almost all the informational value it was supposed to generate).

(Since Manifund to doesn't seem allow editing) After writing all that out, I retract my initial comment that 'it's mainly the title'!

@JBraunstein It's mainly the title. It's hard to put my finger on exactly - a) something about the phrase 'an online platform' make it sound like it's a fairly abstract idea rather than something you've already built an MVP for, and b) something about the phrase 'to-solve-collective-action-and-coordination-problems' reinforces that feeling of abstraction - giving the impression that you're trying to fix an incredibly broad class of concern all in one go ('solve' I guess is a key part of that impression), rather than contributing a more realistic partial solution.

I guess both title or the first paragraph of the post would benefit from a more concrete and intuitive statement of what your app actually does, which it doesn't really start discussing until the first paragraph of 'What are this project's goals?' - (and even then it's only after offering a summary which you then quasi-retract), and on quite a technical level - I had to Google 'assurance contract', and reparse 'temporary anonymity to break the inertia of bad equilibria and incentive structures that deter people from acting on their actual preferences or suppress crucial information required for rational decision making' a few times.

It's not a trivial problem to solve, but ideally you'd have a one-or-two-sentence summary of what actually happens when I use the app. In general I think your marketing feels slightly off. "Kickstarter" for Collective Action' doesn't really evoke anything for me; 'spartacus.app' is a name I can only barely follow the conceptual link to (and would really struggle if I hadn't seen the film!); the three-image diagram on your page is the most helpful, but feels both too much (I feel like there's a way to get the same amount of info across much more succinctly) and not enough (I still don't have a good sense of what the parameters are, or example or actual use cases, or how much effort it's going to be to find a 'movement' I want to get involved with if I download the app, etc).

There's another project on here that's offering free marketing support, so you could maybe reach out to them (though for some reason they got no funding, which I don't get - they were one of the best couple of projects we decided not to fund, and our reasoning didn't seem very generalisable). There's also a post by Annabel Luketic offering free marketing strategy calls.

@ampdot I must admit I wasn't! Looking through the project, it does feel closer to what I'm imagining than any of the other alternatives I mentioned in the OP - and it looks like a great initiative - but there are some important ways in which it's not doing what I have in mind, or at least not yet:

• It crowdsources information about donors rather than about evaluations. So you get a score, but there isn't by default any explanatory text behind it (it has 'reasons' and 'endorsements' at the bottom of the evaluatee's page, but they're not required, and none of the top three organisations have any info there).

• There's no API that I can see (meaning the site can't easily be used algorithmically, or for third party data analysis). Relatedly there's not much publicly given metadata - I don't think you can see who are the people behind the support score, or with what weight they've contributed to it, for eg. An API allows an effectively unlimited amount of metadata presentation, whereas a humans-only UI needs to restrict itself to whatever seem to be the most important few fields of data, both to reduce clutter and because of the need to anticipate and program them in in advance.

• There doesn't seem to be any mechanism or pathway towards rewarding people for their evaluations (though they say on their blog they've 'suspended evaluations', so maybe some functionality like this is waiting to be reintroduced).

• What I have in mind is an aggregation of data which is already being generated. For example, with the authors' permission, I (or another user) could take Joel's evaluation of Giving What We Can or Evan's evaluation of the Long Term Future Fund and copy the salient details across, ensuring some minimal amount of content, and so avoiding the chicken and egg problem of two-sided markets. (I'm unclear to what extent this is a problem for GiveWiki, since I'm unclear what the input to their support score is)

• As far as I can see, their data only updates if someone makes their donation via the platform. If so this means that if e.g. a big donor makes a single considered donation elsewhere and later remembers GiveWiki, they've missed the chance to contribute to the site's ranking.

• I can't find the GiveWiki codebase, so I'm guessing it's either closed-source or using prebuilt Wiki software. They presumably had good reason for this, but I would prefer to make anything like this fully open source, so that people can easily see how the values given on each project are generated.

So as GiveWiki is at the moment I think the projects would be complementary, and I would still like to go ahead with mine. But as with Manifund (see my reply to Tony Gao below), I could imagine it being easier to extend the existing GiveWiki functionality to include the features I have in mind than coding something from scratch .

I've reached out to Dawn Drescher (the main person behind GiveWiki) for her thoughts, both on the comparison between {my project and where GiveWiki is now} and between {my project and where she wants to take GiveWiki}. If she replies privately I'll share whatever I'm able to along with my own updates here.

@TonyGao I'm not super familiar with the full functionality of Patreon, Manifund and Forum Magnum, so it's more 'these do something relevant, so I can't rule them out' than that I expect any of them to be sufficient. Each has an element of what I'm describing:

• Google Worksheets offers an easily shareable and/or copyable database with easy access for any user to use relatively simple functions to process the data. I suspect I would use it by default in the process of gathering existing evaluations, and share the worksheet I used with the community.

• Patreon makes it relatively easy for individuals to receive payments from supporters, and I can imagine the most practical way of getting money to them being 'have your Patreon link be a field in your evaluation or user profile'. An alternative would be integrated payments with something like Stripe, but I don't know if it would be possible to have a generic payment service have a low-friction way to send money to your choice of multiple individuals. Assuming it did, I can still imagine a Patreon link being the primary option in an MVP.

• Manifund regranting seems like it could be set up with the emphasis shifted to match what I'm describing. E.g. a regranter could set up their profile to just be a lot of evaluations, or a series of links to evaluations, and people could donate money to them earmarked for a specific cause. I don't think there's much of a way to pool data on this site, but it's possible if the Manifund team got behind this idea they could add much of what I'm describing as features to their site, which could be a lot less hassle than building everything from scratch.

• Forum Magnum is, for better or worse, among the most feature-heavy forum software I know, with a lot of functionality that could be adapted. E.g. its 'feed' could be restricted to posts tagged 'evaluation', its pinned posts could be for a single post linking to (or, if possible implementing) and its tagging system in general could be a good human-friendly way of sorting into categories we care about. Plus its karma system could be a secondary signal of the value of someone's work that might be easier to keep track of than how much money they'd been offered. And the ability to discuss published evaluations also seems very valuable welcome. Though fwiw I feel like Forum Magnum contributes fewer of the core ideas than any of the other services above, so I would guess would be least likely to find its way into or on the path to an MVP.

Conceivably the final product could be a wrapper around some subset of these services with out needing to add extra functions. An API seems like the obvious exception, unless a) Manifund would be willing to implement that, or b) some market research shows that that's not a function a significant proportion of users are interested in.

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and thought this was one a good one some really strong competition. It wasn't top tier for either of us (mainly because GWWC is so big our leverage is tiny relative to other projects on here), but we wanted to give a token of support - there were so many projects we would have liked to support on here that I hope you take this as a strong emotional positive support, even if it might not help much materially. I gave more specific thoughts in a comment below :)

<3

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and thought this was one a good one some really strong competition. It wasn't top tier for either of us, but we wanted to give a token of support - there were so many projects we would have liked to support on here that I hope you take this as a strong emotional positive support, even if it might not help much materially. Our quick and dirty notes:

They: Seems like a long shot but haven't seen tried seriously, so good value of information

He: Idea seems unique, worth trying, skin in the game/track record of builders (title of Manifund post kinda offputting - makes it sound much less concrete than it is)

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and thought this was one a good one some really strong competition. It wasn't top tier for either of us, but we wanted to give a token of support - there were so many projects we would have liked to support on here that I hope you take this as a strong emotional positive support, even if it might not help much materially. Our quick and dirty notes:

Heavily discounted = high value signal at least on an abstract market evaluation, and I generally find it convincing that active Slack communities are valuable

<3

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and thought this was one a good one some really strong competition. It wasn't top tier for either of us, but we wanted to give a token of support - there were so many projects we would have liked to support on here that I hope you take this as a strong emotional positive support, even if it might not help much materially. Our quick and dirty notes:

They: Seems well thought as a proposal an I'm a fan of this sort of research

He: Field of technical AI safety I'm most positive about. SEA = good value for money. Would like more real-world experience from the team, but the project track record looks good. Proposal v well presented, too (I appreciate the credences!)

<3

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and thought this was one a good one some really strong competition. It wasn't top tier for either of us, but we wanted to give a token of support - there were so many projects we would have liked to support on here that I hope you take this as a strong emotional positive support, even if it might not help much materially. Our quick and dirty notes:

He: Very high variance, unclear track record of participants with no examples of success :( I understand the goal, though. Maybe at least this will highlight the bizarre 'entertainment' subcategory of exceptions

They: Concrete policy proposal, well-thought out, volunteer supported. Wish there was more detail about funding use

<3

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and thought this was one a good one some really strong competition. It wasn't top tier for either of us, but we wanted to give a token of support - there were so many projects we would have liked to support on here that I hope you take this as a strong emotional positive support, even if it might not help much materially. Our quick and dirty notes:

He: Prototype in place, looking reasonable; concept is interesting, though unsure what they've learned from failure of previous impact certificate systems

They: I'm confused by the demo but they built the demo, which is cool. Definitely an experiment worth trying and it strikes me as a well-thought out experiment. I can definitely think of people (non-EAs) I would point to this website if they asked where to donate

<3

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and thought this was one a good one some really strong competition. It wasn't top tier for either of us, but we wanted to give a token of support - there were so many projects we would have liked to support on here that I hope you take this as a strong emotional positive support, even if it might not help much materially. Our quick and dirty notes:

Would have liked to have a little more estimatation of counterfactual (justification for claim that 'Potential to double or triple our annual output'), but space is cheap, and most of the participants have a decent track record

Wish they would tell me more about initiatives other than coworking (e.g. hosting events)

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and thought this was one a good one some really strong competition. It wasn't top tier for either of us, but we wanted to give a token of support - there were so many projects we would have liked to support on here that I hope you take this as a strong emotional positive support, even if it might not help much materially. Our quick and dirty notes:

I would like a more concrete proposal, but (as a non Christians) my impression of EA for Christians is extremely positive. They seem to donate more on average than the rest of us, have a better community, and IMO are generally much closer to the spirit of EA than most core EA orgs.

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and thought this was one a good one some really strong competition. It wasn't top tier for either of us, but we wanted to give a token of support - there were so many projects we would have liked to support on here that I hope you take this as a strong emotional positive support, even if it might not help much materially. Our quick and dirty notes:

We really think the value of gathering data in general is high, though would have liked to understand more concrete examples of what and how much data you would gather, how you would do it, and some kind of credences of concrete value.

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and thought this was one of the more convincing among some really strong competition.

Our quick and dirty notes:

Community building in China is incredibly important, and seems to have been stymied by a single speculative, outdated and honestly mildly insulting post by Ben Todd, which implied that China's EAness is a key that can be unlocked with the right language, rather than a conversation to have. We are much more positive about the prospects of involving China to engage with and even positively evolve EA ideas.

<3

@Jason 'The low barriers to entry make the model easy to copy if successful, so high-impact charities would likely be competing with US children's hospitals, animal shelters, and other very popular charities.'

Fwiw the most directly comparable project I can think of to this failed because the barriers to entry were much higher than it superficially seemed. I also haven't seen much evidence of the rest of the charity world trying to ape in on somewhat comparable initiatives that have worked (e.g. High Impact Athletes) - my sense is the rest of the charity world generally doesn't have the collective coordination to copy something like this.

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and thought this was one of the more convincing among some really strong competition.

Our quick and dirty notes:

They: I wish EA would do more in the way of financial incentives/efficiencies etc; insurance people make a lot of money, and if this can successfully incentivise them with more customers that seems amazing

He: I liked this more the more I thought about the success of similar targeted-fundraising projects (High Impact Athletes, Founders Pledge). Would have liked a more concrete proposal ('develop marketing materials' feels like the organisational CV equivalent of 'proficient in MS Word') and more on what success/failure would look like, but the idea seems well worth testing, and the founders sound really solid

<3

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and thought this was one of the more convincing among some really strong competition.

Our quick and dirty notes:

They: Something distinct in the prediction market field

He: Product ready = big plus, and doing something distinct (much more a fan of this than making new forecasting alternative tools)

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and thought this was one of the more convincing among some really strong competition.

Our quick and dirty notes:

He: 'Frugal' in middle income country = high value! Have interacted professionally with Dusan a handful of times, and he was very impressive

They: In favour of AI safety in lower income countries both for low cost and for increased diversity of ideas; in favour of funding physical space

<3

I'm obviously biased (former Trustee), but I think CEEALAR is unique in the EA community in many respects:

• Tight feedback loops (rather than a lump sum grant, you can offer conditional support and see firsthand how the work is progressing, and offer support rather than a hard cutoff when there are problems) - which also means we can afford to cast the net wider

• Develops meaningful EA relationships (rather than superficial 'connections')

• Keeps costs about as low as is possible in the developed world

• Highly scalable

I wish we could have offered more, but there were so many good projects on this list our EACC windfall got stretched rather thinly!

<3

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and both agreed this was a standout :) Our quick and dirty notes:

He: good advocacy? Would have liked more info on methods. But love the track record of high risk but bitesize, measurable-value projects

They: Working in education + history as teacher is a good combination
More positive about this than most advocacy because of history of repeatable, small projects

<3

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and both agreed this was a standout :) Our quick and dirty notes:

Seed funding novel ideas seems v counterfactually valuable, and giving it to the best-evaled by an experienced team = win

<3

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and both agreed this was a standout :) Our quick and dirty notes:

They: Generally a fan of EvN's work. Her epistemics are refreshingly good - has made my life better with other research, so I'm happy to assume her Covid work was good or compensate her in principle for the other work

He I think retroactive funding is a really important idea, and what I've seen of Elizabeth's work is extremely good

<3

I'm still going through the list, so can't allocate yet, though I hope to give some - and I wanted to observe that

a) I suspect you're being penalised slightly for requesting general funding (about which it's hard not to be scope sensitive) rather than project-specific funding, and

b) that I think if so this is basically unreasonable. Rethink's requesting funding specific projects says to me 'we basically think these are the least important things we'd spend money on, otherwise we'd spend it on them out of our primary budget (not relevant to the Rethink subsidiary project, which I assume doesn't get financial support from above). GWWC's request says to me 'whatever we think the optimal marginal value of your dollar is, we'll spend it on that'.

(if anyone from Rethink reads this, I'd be interested to hear if you think that's unfair)