ALERT

This continues to run, you can keep track at https://blog.sentinel-team.org. We also have a weekly private project update mailing list to which I'm happy to add people with whom I have some rapport.

One important development has been getting a cofounder, Rai Sur (rai.dev) to complement my skillset; he's been working out great.

Matching Joel in reasoning and donation. Great idea; only possible through charity ecosystems; I was sad to see the previous one fade.

The predecessor was my most important project last year. I've personally verified that there's a great deal of demand for some version of this ("customer" orgs and institutions and "supplier" volunteers). Nuno has some rare and essential qualities (honesty, clarity, infovorism) while lacking some others. But the shoestring version still excites me and I vote with my feet.

I've made a $5k offer to this project. I might end up offering more later. Below written hastily.

**Main points in favor of this grant**

• I agree that emergency response teams are promising in the abstract, broadly for reasons given in the linked post.
• Nuno's plan seems reasonable. I think it has Gavin's backing.
• As Nuno has written elsewhere, AI feels like "a domain in which we are likely to not have the correct hypothesis in our prior set of hypotheses." I feel more excited about "a bet on variance" in this setting.
• ALERT needs someone to take responsibility for it, and Nuno is standing in front of us willing to take responsibility.

**Donor's main reservations**

• I have thought ~0 about who might be the right person to lead this project and don't feel pulled towards taking this more seriously. Meanwhile, my rough and probably-somewhat-misremembered understanding is that Open Philanthropy have been hesitant to throw their weight behind ALERT-style projects because they want the person running it to clear a very high bar. Something about this pattern-matches nicely to my take that the OP cluster is too distrusting of people outside the cluster, which makes me feel more comfortable ignoring the importance of careful selection of the person leading ALERT. But neither my understanding nor my take is well thought-through. So the chance I'm mistaken in thinking that I shouldn't take this concern seriously seems decently high. (And perhaps if I did put thought to the concern, I'd discover that I think Nuno is not the right person to lead this effort. Right now my position is that I haven't even thought about what that would mean, let alone evaluated Nuno in particular.)
• "Improve alarm raising so that it catches more emergencies in time, and throws up fewer false positives." This step feels potentially hard to me. At the very least I think it should read "and/or throws up fewer false positives."
• Something I really, really like about Dendritic is that it plans to put monitoring, alarm-raising, and emergency response under one roof (but for bio only). I like this because it follows a model that I gather has already been successful elsewhere (Security Operations Centers). It makes sense to me that this model would be less likely to come up against problems like "we've raised the alarm but no-one is responding." I am seriously concerned that ALERT might run into problems like this.

**Process for deciding amount**

I would prefer to offer a larger amount, but my Manifund budget is pretty constrained. Any amount I offer to this project will be based on some vague notion of 'fair share' between the remaining projects I want to fund before Dec 31.

**Conflicts of interest**

First, Nuno is my friend. Second, one of my projects (Dendritic) is taking up a part of the ALERT mantle in a different way (monitoring + emergency response for bio in particular). There's no immediate conflict with Dendritic, but it doesn't seem implausible to me that there could be some Nuno-Dendritic collaboration in future given the overlap.