Matt Wage

Conducting independent research on forecasting and optimal paths to improve the long-term future.

This grant is for Nuño to do a year of independent research. Nuño will be working with Phil Trammell (of the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford) on philanthropic timing research and Ozzie Gooen (of the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute) on forecasting research.

We are most optimistic about Nuño's work on philanthropic timing, which is a continuation of the work he already started as a summer research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute. This work models the optimal allocation of capital for a social movement between direct spending, investment, and movement building, as well as the optimal allocation of labor between direct workers, money earners, and movement builders. Nuño received positive references, particularly from Phil Trammell (who thought this work could be a valuable extension of his own past work on patient philanthropy).

Investigating the historical longevity of institutions in order to better understand the feasibility of setting up charitable foundations that last hundreds of years.

This small grant is for Maximilian to work on a research project with Phil Trammell, who works at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford. The project is to research the historical "longevity and decay of universities, philanthropic foundations, and catholic orders" in order to inform the feasibility of setting up charitable foundations that last for centuries.

I am optimistic about Phil Trammell's research work on patient philanthropy and think this is a relevant topic to research as part of that. Existing work relies on assumptions about being able to transfer wealth and resources into the future; understanding how likely an institution is to be able to do this will be informative for understanding whether to spend longtermist resources now or later.

Supporting the use of better voting methods in U.S. elections.

This is an unrestricted grant to the Center for Election Science (CES). CES works to improve US elections by promoting approval voting, a voting method where voters can select as many candidates as they like (as opposed to the traditional voting method where you can only select one candidate).

Academic experts on voting theory widely consider approval voting to be a significant improvement over our current voting method (plurality voting), and our understanding is that approval voting on average produces outcomes that better reflect what voters actually want by preventing issues like vote splitting. I think that promoting approval voting is a potentially promising form of improving institutional decision making within government.

CES is a relatively young organization, but so far they have a reasonable track record. Previously, they passed a ballot initiative to adopt approval voting in the 120,000-person city of Fargo, ND, and are now repeating this effort in St. Louis. Their next goal is to get approval voting adopted in bigger cities and then eventually states.

General support

80,000 Hours is an organization that “provides research and support to help people switch into careers that effectively tackle [the world’s most pressing problems]”. They primarily focus on longtermist cause areas. You can see their most recent self-review here.

80,000 Hours is one of the organizations in the EA community that I am most optimistic about. This is partly because they seem to be addressing an important bottleneck with a high-caliber team, and partly because of a promising track record (e.g. “From 2016, the numbers of EAs reporting first hearing about EA from 80,000 Hours explode from 9% to 13% to 25%, making them the largest single source of EA recruitment in 2018.”)

80,000 Hours had not managed to hit their fundraising target and seemed to be running out of plausible funders, so it seemed like a good time for us to make a grant and help fill their remaining gap.

Supporting research on nuclear weapons and AI arms control.

This is a restricted grant to Rethink Priorities to support their research on nuclear weapons and AI arms control. You can see Rethink Priorities’ past work and most recent self-review here.

The main case for funding them (as I see it) is:

I think their approach of working on tractable research questions and frequently, publicly writing up their results is a promising model which I’d like to see more of in EA.

External references I trust have been positive on the quality of their past work.

Due to the public nature of their output, I think it will be pretty clear whether they're doing good research. (This allows them to learn faster what research is useful and also allows the EA community to learn faster whether we should stop investing in the project.)

Their longtermist work seems to be less well-funded than that of most other organizations in the space, and it’s unlikely they would be able to grow that work without this grant from us.

Organizing a workshop aimed at highlighting recent successes in the development of verified software.

Grant date: January 2020.

Gopal applied for a grant to run a workshop called "Formal Methods for the Informal Engineer" (FMIE) at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, on the topic of formal methods in software engineering. More information on the workshop is here.

We made this grant because we know a small set of AI safety researchers are optimistic about formal verification techniques being useful for AI safety, and we thought this grant was a relatively inexpensive way to support progress in that area.

Unfortunately, the workshop has now been postponed because of COVID-19.

Supporting research and job applications related to AI alignment.

Charlie applied for funding to spend a year doing research with Jan Brauner, Sören Mindermann, and their supervisor Yarin Gal (all at Oxford University), while applying to PhD programs to eventually work on AI alignment. Charlie is currently finishing a master’s in statistics at Oxford and is also participating in the Future of Humanity Institute’s Summer Research Fellowship.

We think Professor Gal is in a better position to evaluate this proposal (and our understanding is that his group is capable of providing funding for this themselves), but it will take some time for this to happen. Therefore, we decided to award Charlie a small “bridge funding” grant to give him time to try to finalize the proposal with Professor Gal or find an alternative position.

We funded Ought in our last round of grants, and our reasoning for funding them in this round is largely the same. Additionally, we wanted to help Ought diversify its funding base because it currently receives almost all its funding from only two sources and is trying to change that.

Our comments from last round:

[Ought](https://ought.org/) is a nonprofit aiming to implement AI alignment concepts in real-world applications. We believe that Ought’s approach is interesting and worth trying, and that they have a strong team. Our understanding is that hiring is currently more of a bottleneck for them than funding, so we are only making a small grant. Part of the aim of the grant is to show Ought as an example of the type of organization we are likely to fund in the future.

Scaling up scenario role-play for AI strategy research and training; improving the pipeline for new researchers

We are funding Shahar Avin to help him hire an academic research assistant and for other miscellaneous research expenses. We think positively of Shahar’s past work (for example this report), and multiple people we trust recommended that we fund him.

A biorisk summit for the Bay Area biotech industry, DIY biologists, and biosecurity researchers

We are funding Tessa Alexanian to run a one day biosecurity summit, immediately following the SynBioBeta industry conference. We have also put Tessa in touch with some experienced people in the biosecurity space who we think can help make sure the event goes well.

Conducting postdoctoral research at Harvard on the psychology of EA/long-termism

We are funding Lucius Caviola for a 2-year postdoc at Harvard working with Professor Joshua Greene. Lucius plans to study the psychology of effective altruism and long-termism, and an EA academic we trust had a positive impression of him. We are splitting the cost of this project with the EA Meta Fund because some of Caviola’s research (on effective altruism) is a better fit for the Meta Fund while some of his research (on long-termism) is a better fit for our fund.