Tolga Bilge

Main points in favor of this grant

Forecasting conditional policy effects and forecasting important questions are among the best use of forecasters in my opinion.

It's good to see forecasters work be used for something actionable.

I want to encourage forecasters to do more of this kind of work.

I'm not aware of anyone else trying to quantify impacts of different AI policies which seems important.

Tolga seems quite bright and is a top superforecaster.

The grant is just very cheap compared to what it could accomplish.

I am hopeful that if successful, when Tolga graduates, he will be doing a lot more of this kind of work. Making forecasts useful for AI Policy.

Donor's main reservations

I think there is an order of magnitude too much funding going towards forecasting. I am worried about contributing to this. However, this isn't the type of forecasting grants I am against (this is mainly just blind funding forecasting platforms).

I'm skeptical how much forecasting work can really be done in areas like this vs. just guessing and putting numbers on things to make them seem more credible when that number can just be fairly meaningless.

Process for deciding amount

The amount Tolga wanted for this was very reasonable. Everyone is working on below market rate salaries or for free. I didn't want there to be a tradeoff between compensating previous forecasting work vs. ensuring there was some funding for the next forecasting steps.

Conflicts of interest

None.