Thanks @jsd!

@Loppukilpailija Thanks!

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.

I like the varied and different tools. I'm a bit worried about the minimum funding bar not being hit.

Congrats on getting to alpha

What progress have you made since your last update?

• A foresight team continuously looking for things that could become large-scale or existential catastrophes

• An emergency response composed of capable yet mostly unattached people who could convene in the event of a catastrophe

• A website http://sentinel-team.org/

  • It also has a short writeup of the project's history https://sentinel-team.org/sentinel-history/

• Weekly public minutes from the foresight team https://sentinel-team.org/blog/

• A fiscal sponsor

• Further funding

• A collaboration with Nathaniel Cooke on foresight methods beyond forecasting <https://forecasting.substack.com/p/a-gentle-introduction-to-risk-frameworks>. We later parted ways, but this was a good output.

• I'm probably forgetting something

In short, the project has overall been going well. The idea was to have two components, the first of which was a foresight team that could raise an alarm if something happens. This foresight team is going great; I have three very obsessive, very competent forecasters, in addition to myself, and some tooling to aid them.

The emergency response team has been going well, but less so. It exists, it has some competent people, and we had a trial run with the Iran attacks on Israel.

But in general I just feel much better about our ability to, say, detect a Chinese invasion of Taiwan two weeks, or a few days before it happens, than I feel about our ability to do anything about it.

What are your next steps?

Some steps on the horizon:

1. Improve emergency response team.

2. Integrate more info sources.

3. Put out analytical pieces sharing lessons learnt

4. Reach out to potential collaborators and similar projects

5. Consider finding more funding

Is there anything others could help you with?

1. Introduction to potential emergency response team members. For details see https://sentinel-team.org/emergency_response_team/

2. Mentorship seems like it would be super useful to me. Are you one or two levels above me in life; have you set up something cool and want to share pointers? I'd be grateful.

3. I'm currently conflicted about funding. I'd appreciate help either with acquiring more, or with deciding that it's a distraction.

   • Funding is not the bottleneck on the, say $5k to $10k range, but funding on the $100k to $5M range would allow me to make this project more awesome.

   • I'm thinking that I prefer a smaller project that is sustainable ~forever, over a larger project that lives or dies by [large funder]'s word. But is this a good way to think about it? And even if it is, should I instead attempt to build something that shines twice as bright but lasts twice as long?

   • I'm procrastinating on applying to the SFF grant round. Partly this is because I find the application baroque. Help, or just coworking on it, would be appreciated

   • On the other hand, this project is sustainable at the current spend, so looking for more funding feels like a distraction.

   • I'm currently ~not really paying myself. I'm probably fine with this until the end of this year, though. Is this a good move?

Thoughts on Manifund

I am very grateful to Manifund.

• Writing the project proposal and getting early funding was important for coordinating between people interested in supporting the project.

• Getting early funding from peers, from people whose respect I cherished, was important for me psychologically. It made me more excited. It was a hard to fake signal of promisingness

• Early funding has been useful to not have money be a bottleneck.

I continue to be excited about RCGs and its role in the EA Spain/LatAm communities.

I was waiting until end of year to see if I found more promising options. I was considering APART (https://manifund.org/projects/help-apart-expand-global-ai-safety-research), but I don't think I'll have time to evaluate it in more depth; still, I've reserved some of my funds potentially for it.

I guess that another way of expressing the above might be that this seems potentially good, but given the large amount of funding it is asking for, it feels like someone should evaluate this in-depth, rather than casually?

This looks shiny to me. I am considering funding it for a small amount.

Pros:

• Successes and accomplishments seem valuable

• Proxies look good

• Writeup seems thoughtful

Cons:

• I don't understand why other people haven't funded this yet

• Maybe this application is exaggerating stuff?

• Maybe the organization adds another step in the chain to impact, and it would be more efficient to fund individual people instead?

• Maybe the biggest one: how do I know the success is counterfactual? Say that someone participated in a hackathon/fellowship/etc, and then later got a research position in some Oxford lab. How do I know that the person wouldn't have gotten something similarly impressive in the absence of your organization?

I thought bundling was a neat idea. Contra other comments I don't think this would only be valuable if you also solved discounting. And discounting could maybe be achieved by the platform offering to match your returns (on resolved or exited markets).

Main points in favor of this grant

• Project has some value, may have influenced organizations like Charity Entrepreneurship

• Project has some learning value as well

Donor's main reservations

• None.

Process for deciding amount

• Negotiation with project lead based on expected number of hours.

Conflicts of interest

• None

I think this project is my bar for funding. If I don't find other projects I'm as excited by, I'm planning to donate my remaining balance to it.

I feel that the project could be potentially valuable, and I hope Marcel will be a bit more ambitious/have a bit more runway and leeway. I feel that there could be room for more funding, but I'd want some specific commitments in exchange.

@vandemonian Are you currently constrained by more funding? Do you have the capacity to put in more effort if you get more funding?

Funding this. I like the lumenator part, but I particularly like the more ambitious life trajectory point.

On your application, you mention:

returning the money left if I decided that this was not a good idea anymore

Please consider not doing this; rather, please either pivot to a better opportunity or keep it until a good opportunity arises.

Overall I don't really understand the biosecurity ecosystem or how this would fit in, so I'm thinking I'm probably a bad funder here. Still, some questions:

• Do you already have some decision-makers who could use these estimates to make different decisions?

• How valuable do you think that this project is without the long covid estimate?

• Who is actually doing this work? Vivian and Richard, or Joel and Aron?

• Why are you doing stuff $3.6k a time, rather than having set up some larger project with existing biosecurity grantmakers?

Could you say a bit more about why this beats your counterfactual?

I have too many conflicts of interest to fund this myself, but here are some thoughts:

I like thinking of Nathan's work in terms of the running theme of helping communities arrive at better beliefs, collectively. And figuring out how to make that happen.

On the value of that line of work:

- I have a pretty strong aversion to doing that work myself. I think that it's difficult to do and requires a bunch of finesse and patience that I lack.

- I buy that it's potentially very valuable. Otherwise, you end with a Cassandra situation, where those who have the best models can't communicate them to others. Or you get top-down decisions, where a small group arrives an opinion and transmits it from on high. Or you get various more complex problems, where different people in a community have different perspectives on a topic, and they don't get integrated well.

- I think a bottleneck on my previous job, at the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute, was to not take into account this social dimension and put too much emphasis on technical aspects.

One thing Nathan didn't mention is that estimaker, viewpoints and his podcast can feed on each other: e.g., he has interviewed a bunch of people and got them to make quantified models about AI using estimaker: (Katja Grace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zum2QTaByeo&list=PLAA8NhPG-VO_PnBm3EkxGYObLIMs4r2wZ&index=8, Rohit Krishnan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqCYMgEnP7E&list=PLAA8NhPG-VO_PnBm3EkxGYObLIMs4r2wZ&index=10, Garett Jones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSM94rmJUAU&list=PLAA8NhPG-VO_PnBm3EkxGYObLIMs4r2wZ&index=4, Aditya Prasad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwTb7VgSZKU&list=PLAA8NhPG-VO_PnBm3EkxGYObLIMs4r2wZ&index=6). This plausibly seems like a better way forward than the MIRI conversations https://www.lesswrong.com/s/n945eovrA3oDueqtq.

Generally, you could imagine an interesting loop: viewpoint elicitation surfaces disagreements => representatives of each faction make quantified models => some process explains the quantified models to a public => you do an adversarial collaboration on the quantified models, parametrizing unresolvable disagreements so that members of the public can input their values but otherwise reuse the model.

I see reason to be excited about epistemic social technology like that, and about having someone like Nathan figure things out in this space.

I think that RCG's object-level work is somewhat valuable, and also that they could greatly contribute to making the Spanish and Latin-American EA community become stronger. I think one could make an argument that this doesn't exceed some funding bar, but ultimately it doesn't go through.