ACX Grants is a program run by Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten that awards grants in the range of $5k-$100k to charitable and scientific projects. You can see the grant recipients from the previous round here and Scott’s 2022 retrospective here.

Scott plans to give $250,000 of his own money in the 2024 round, in addition to any money contributed by donors through Manifund or other channels. If you’d like to add to his budget but don’t want to do so through Manifund, you can email him at scott@slatestarcodex.com.

He plans to award the grants by February 1st, 2024, so if you’re considering donating, we recommend doing so well in advance of that date so he can make grant decisions with his full budget available.

Note that instead of or in addition to donating to Scott’s grant making budget, you may also participate in the impact certificate portion of the round either as an investor or as a retroactive funder.

Below are some sections from Scott’s announcement post that may be particularly relevant for donors. You can see the full post here.

What kind of projects will be funded?

There are already lots of good charities that help people directly at scale, for example Against Malaria Foundation (which distributes malaria-preventing bed nets) and GiveDirectly (which gives money directly to very poor people in Africa). I think these are hard to beat.

I’m most interested in charities that pursue novel ways to change complex systems, either through technological breakthroughs, new social institutions, or targeted political change. Among the projects I funded last year were:

• Development of oxfendazole, a drug for treating parasitic worms in developing countries.

• A platform that lets people create prediction markets on topics of their choice

• A group of lawyers who sue factory farms under animal cruelty laws.

• A biosecurity think tank at Stanford.

• An open-source intranasal COVID vaccine.

• Development of software that helps the FDA run better drug trials.

• An assessment company that addresses implementation issues around Georgist land value taxes.

• An effort to perform rapid replication of results in psychology journals.

You can read the full list here.

Is there anything good about winning an ACX Grant other than getting money?

You will get my support, which is mostly useful in getting me to blog about your project. For example, I can put out updates or requests for help on Open Threads. I can also try to help network you with people I know. Some people who won ACX Grants last year were able to leverage the attention to attract larger grantmakers or VCs.

You can try to pitch me guest posts about your project. This could be a description of what you’re doing and why, or just a narrative about your experience and what you learned from it. Warning that I’m terrible to pitch guest posts to, have never gone through with this, and would be incredibly nitpicky if I did. Still, you can try.

You’ll be invited to an ACX Grantee Discord server, where you can talk to other grantees. I don’t really understand why people want this so much, but some of last year’s grantees seemed to appreciate it. One of them is considering sponsoring a physical ACX Grantee meetup in the Bay Area, which you would be welcome to attend if it happened. I wouldn’t be able to give you extra money to travel to this, sorry.

What’s the story behind why you have $250,000 to spend on grants, but are also looking for more funding?

Back during the crypto boom, some extremely generous readers told me to buy crypto, or asked to buy NFTs of my posts for crypto, or just sent me crypto and said “hold on to this, wait for it to go up, and thank me later”. Lots of it did go up, and I did pretty well. I’m eliding some details for security reasons, but I don’t think the full details would be scandalous or change anyone’s overall assessment of the situation.

I think of this as unearned money and want to give some of it back to the community, hence this grants program. I have a lot of it but not an unlimited amount. At the current rate, I can probably afford another ~4 ACX Grants rounds. When it runs out, I‘ll just be a normal person with normal amounts of money (Substack is great, but not great enough for me to afford this level of donation consistently).

My hope is that this will act as a seed, and other people will add more to the pot. Last year I committed $250,000 and other people added an extra ~$1 million. If this happens again, I might slightly decrease my $250,000 donation in order to save money to seed future rounds. If you’re thinking of helping fund these grants, and it bothers you to think of me scaling back my own money by some percent of your contribution, let me know and I won’t do that.

If you’re interested in helping fund these grants, you can talk to me at scott@slatestarcodex.com