Miti Saksena

I had a great conversation with Miti and Convergent’s Aleš Flidr about this grant, and will be fully funding it.

General:

• I am explicitly looking for projects aimed at biosecurity/pandemic prevention, since I feel better equipped to understand what is valuable in that field than in AI. I also worry that biosecurity is underserved by the current quick-grants structure, relative to AI.
• This is exactly the type of project Manifund is best poised to serve: the turnaround needs to be really fast, since Miti is targeting an October deadline, and it’s for a small enough amount that at my $50k regranting budget I can fully fund it.

Specific:

• From my conversation with Miti and Aleš, it sounded as though there was a pretty good chance to unlock UK government buy-in for an important biosecurity apparatus, through the relatively inexpensive/short-term investment of a proposal submitted to the government. Biosecurity doesn’t have a lot of opportunities for cheap wins as far as I normally see, so this is really exciting.
• Even if this project doesn’t unlock that buy-in, the project deliverables look really useful, and I would like for them to exist and be accessible to others.

• Miti has worked at several different points in the chain of biosecurity-relevant roles, so seems especially well-positioned to come up with the listed deliverables and write a proposal to the UK government.

Reason for amount: The project is on a very tight timeline and Miti is assuming a very reasonable 3-month salary for herself in her budget. I don’t want to cut into it and cause financial pressure to take attention away from the project or for her to need to seek additional contract work.

Key uncertainties: The list of deliverables is a lot for one person for three months. It would be amazing if Miti actually got through the whole thing, but she and Aleš were forthright about the possibility that not all of the deliverables would come through, and that they were uncertain about how the project would be able to move forward after the October deadline. They did agree that there was value in the project beyond the deadline, and it would be ideal to continue it if circumstances allowed, so we were on the same page about that. I still consider the project to be well worth pursuing, as whatever information is gained will still be useful and accessible after the deadline.

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Optimizing clinical Metagenomics and Far-UVC implementation., Aug 2023

@joel_bkr Makes sense, thanks for the feedback!

1) ~nothing negative to say: I think I instinctively made this sound a little too "nice" and also once I made up my mind, had a bias toward sounding confident, both of which probably disguise how negatively I weighed that key uncertainty referenced at the end of my writeup. Reading it back, it doesn't convey my real level of concern--it gave me serious pause that there's basically one person tackling this whole list, for an October deadline, who's also trying to handle immigration, and no clear person to pick up the ball. I think of this project as falling very much into the philosophy of hits-based giving, which makes that particular timeline problem more acceptable to me as a risk...but probably if I didn't already have some level of trust toward the people involved, I would have been harsher toward that aspect of the project. Even then, I think it would have been a stronger application if CR were able to say they had another person who could help Miti, or had a handoff process as backup, or some other method to ensure the ball isn't dropped.

2) other bio opportunities: For starters, there's very little else I've seen so far in the category of biosecurity specifically; almost all biosecurity/pandemic preparedness projects I know of are beyond my funding capacity, including the one other explicitly biosecurity-focused project posted on Manifund. Although I am not absolutely locked into funding biosecurity projects, I did want to start there, and I wanted to make sure I could fully fund at least one thing in case nobody else was interested in biosecurity. This project is also much more urgent than others, with a faster feedback loop--we'll know how it went within a few months. (Another project I was interested in isn't even ready to go yet, although I'd love to help that person find funding in the future). Beyond biosec, without getting too into the weeds of each individual project I looked at, most projects posted to Manifund just strike me as a) much more speculative or b) less valuable or c) not within my capacity to both evaluate and fund.

@GavrielK (Note to others: I have a major COI with Miti.)

I think your write-up is very clear. But I am somewhat surprised that you have ~nothing negative to say, which makes me think that it could be more useful if you said more (true, salient, and) negative things.

Even if you are totally positive about the project, could you say something about how other bio opportunities you've looked at feel below this bar? I am imagining things like "cost too much relative to Manifund pool," "seem better-suited to larger funders with more context on their project," and other stuff that I think you imply in the write-up but don't say outright.