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:
Improve emergency response team.
Integrate more info sources.
Put out analytical pieces sharing lessons learnt
Reach out to potential collaborators and similar projects
Consider finding more funding
Is there anything others could help you with?
Introduction to potential emergency response team members. For details see https://sentinel-team.org/emergency_response_team/
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.
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.