Stanford Existential Risks Initiative

Stanford students certainly are one place to find people worth educating about existential risk. It’s also an expensive place to be doing it, and a place that shouldn’t need extra funding. And that hates fun. And it’s not great that AI is listed third on their existential risk definition. So I’m not high on them, but it sure beats giving unrestricted funds to your Alma Mater.

Interested donors should contact Steve Luby directly at sluby@stanford.edu.

Providing general purpose support via the Berkeley Existential Risks Initiative.

The Stanford Existential Risks Initiative (SERI) is a new existential risk mitigation program at Stanford. They have 12 undergraduate student affiliates and what seems like a strong team of affiliates and mentors.

They seem to do a lot of things. From their website: “Our current programs include a research fellowship for Stanford undergraduates, an annual conference, speaker events, discussion groups, and a Thinking Matters class (Preventing Human Extinction) taught annually by two of the initiative's faculty advisors.”

This grant is to support them via BERI. I’ve personally had very good experiences with BERI and have heard positive reviews from others. BERI doesn’t just provide useful operations help; more importantly, they provide an alternative funding structure for a large class of things that universities tend not to fund. (It seems like the most prestigious universities sometimes have the most intensely restrictive funding policies, so this alternative could be a big deal.) I used BERI for help funding contractors for Foretold.io, and am confident I wouldn’t have been able to do this otherwise. (Note to those reading this: if you have an organization and would like help from BERI, I suggest reading this page and emailing them.)

My guess is that dollars given to requested BERI organizational grants would be somewhat more valuable than marginal ones going to the corresponding organizations (if this were not the case, then we would just donate directly to the organizations). For one, BERI organizational grants typically represent efforts to hire part-time help and perform small but valuable operations tasks horizontally through many projects of an organization. I think “making sure that existing projects go more smoothly” is rather safe.

This specific grant would be spent on a combination of:

• Stipends and researcher support for approximately one year
• Existential risk seed grants to graduate students
• Support for a spring conference
• Support for future courses on existential risks at Stanford
• Miscellaneous funds and BERI core operations expenses

This was a fairly easy bet to make. The Stanford EA community has historically been successful, and the current community seems promising. I reached out to a few people close to the community and got glowing reviews. The program seems to have a lot of activity and senior longtermist mentors.

The main downsides for this decision are more about the structure of the LTFF and the longtermist funding landscape than about SERI. This grant was somewhat unusual in that SERI was already funded by Open Philanthropy, but multiple parties (OP, BERI) wanted them to have a more diverse set of funding sources. One key question for me was whether the LTFF would really provide the intended benefits of a diverse funding ecosystem. It would be easy for the LTFF to simply defer to Open Phil on which groups are worth funding, for example. But if we did, that would defeat the main benefits of funding diversification.

This donation seemed like a good enough bet, and the organization still relatively small enough, for the grant to be a solid use of LTFF funding.