i think arcadia is a pretty fantastic place — i've gained quite a lot of value from the house & community, and i'd like to ensure some of that value circulates back to arcadia :)

@Alene thanks for the responses! i really appreciate your taking the time to write back :)

1. gotcha. this still doesn't totally make sense to me — i feel confused why "work to help support chickens" is more cost-effective than "work to help {shrimp, catfish, salmon, etc}." to highlight:

   Once you assume all sentient animals are equally sentient, then focusing on chickens makes sense because (1) a huge number of them are killed for food (about 9 billion in the US each year—far more than the number of lambs), (2) they're kept in terrible conditions, and (3) our society and our courts may be at a place where they're ready to recognize the needs of chickens (sadly, I don't believe our courts are as ready to recognize the needs of fish nor shrimp, but I hope that our work for chickens helps speed the day when are courts are ready).

   i don't think this follows.

   1. agreed that more chickens are killed for food per year than lambs... but many more orders of magnitude of shrimp are killed per year than chicken.

   2. agreed.

   3. agreed, and i see this as the strongest case for the work that you're doing — in my view, the majority of the impact that you're likely to have comes from the tail chance of leading the charge on a new legal perspective on animals, rather than object-level improvements for the lives of chickens. i'd be quite interested to hear your takes here — i'm sure you're much more knowledgeable on this than i am!

   i think i model LIC's path to impact as "improve our legal structure's ability to handle animal welfare problems." does that make sense to you, or am i off in some way?

2. "it is hard for me to compare the value of LIC's work with the value of other ways of working for animal welfare because I believe they're all necessary and ideally should be used in tandem"

   soft disagree. i think i'd be quite interested to understand how the LIC's work compares with other potentially highly-impact charities in the animal welfare space, but i can understand why this might be difficult.

3. thanks for clarifying!

@astrosnat well! here are the notes :)

@sjforman really great answers — i appreciate the depth & clarity of your response.

on the first point, i'm convinced. thank you for the citations!

on the second point, although those aren't the only possible retro funders for this market, they are the only ones that manifund has coordinated with — so unless other funders come along and decide to retro fund (which they might! and which you can ask them to do!), they won't. regardless, though, you make a pretty good point re: will jarvis/acxg.

i've offered to buy $50 at a $15k evaluation, mostly as a credible signal to other investors that there's something worth looking at here. good luck!

@saulmunn cc @ms

quick thoughts from scanning this for 5-10 minutes:

• overall, i really like this.

• reasons i like this:

  • it's a pretty cheap & scalable intervention

  • reading HPMOR does seem to be something that i notice a number of alignment researchers mentioning as to how they first got into alignment

• parts i'm most concerned about:

  • what's your plan for going from "a bunch of copies of HPMOR" -> "a bunch of copies of HPMOR in the right hands"?

  • i've also heard that a lot of people that have gone into alignment have read (and loved) HPMOR, but this leaves a few concerns:

    • are these the sorts of people that we would want working on alignment?

    • are there other books/series/etc that would get more impactful people engaged?

    • does HPMOR also unnecessarily alienate people to alignment?

• mikhail samin did exactly this, quite successfully, in russia. you might consider reaching out to him?

i'm donating $50, mostly because i'm excited about this, but also as a positive signal to other investors.

from a quick scan, i'm pretty confused about the theory of change. three questions that sorta get at my confusion:

1. how do you compare the value of chickens to other nonhuman animals (e.g. lamb, fish, or shrimp)?

2. how do you compare the value of the work you're doing for chickens compared to other work that's being done for chickens?

3. what is the basket of values/ethics/ideals that a donor who would want to donate to you have?

(also, it would be helpful — easier to quickly scan, see which parts are relevant, etc — if you had used the common format that the other ACX grantees have been using.)

overall, though, i've heard really great things about LIC, and am quite excited about understanding more wrt the questions above!

@saulmunn oh, one other thing — i'm confused why the minimum valuation is at $60k? seems like with some other numbers you could pretty easily get much smaller numbers. i'd have been a lot more keen to fund this at e.g. a $20k valuation, or even a $5k valuation (and would have probably bought more impact equity!)

quick thoughts:

• things that make me excited about this:

  • AI safety tokyo seems like a really great group

  • you seem like a generally competent organizer/community builder/person/etc

  • i'm excited about there being an AI safety group in tokyo!

• i'm quite interested in supporting retrofunding/impact certs, but i'm wary of supporting this type of retrofunding/impact certs. (here are my thoughts on how impact markets should happen — tldr is "philanthropy gives a prize/outlines their goals; everyone else tries to build stuff to achieve those goals; if they need startup capital, they sell equity [impact certs] in prizes, conditional on them winning.")

  • i'm especially quite wary of this sort of double retroactive funding — everyone else on this impact market is getting retroactive funding "once," but you'd be getting it "twice." haven't thought about the implications of this enough to be sure it's a good (or bad!) idea.

• this seems to obviously be within the range of interest of the LTFF.

• i gave $50 to prevent funder chicken, signal interest, and generally get other investors to put their eyes on this grant.

quick thoughts:

• the "full" version of BRT — one as polished as i wish BRT were — is awesome, and where i hope a large chunk of the prediction market/forecasting community goes.

• however, it doesn't seem like BRT has made much progress over the last ~6 months. this might be because of a lack of funding (which, hopefully, funding through ACXG/Manifund would work to resolve), but i'd be keen to learn more here about why progress hasn't happened.

• i don't see anyone else trying nearly so hard or doing nearly so well at exactly the thing that BRT is doing. the swift newsletter seems like the thing that's closest in the reference class, but it's quite clear that BRT fills a different niche from swift (long-form qualitative pieces with some forecasting to back it up, released ~1ce/month vs quick, quantitative summaries of where the prediction markets & forecasting aggregation platforms stand on a number of topics, released pretty frequently; e.g., the New Yorker vs the NYT).

• this seems well within the bounds of what ACXG25 would be interested in retrofunding, probably within the bounds of what the LTFF is interested in retrofunding, and maybe within the bounds of what the SFF is interested in retrofunding. definitely outside what i'd expect EAIF to retro fund.

• i've booked a meeting with marcel tomorow (friday, march 8), and i'm interested to hear his thoughts on what's preventing BRT from being awesome, and where he wants to take it. i'll drop more thoughts on this project after the meeting.

things that make me excited about this project:

• your track record! "[T]wo notable successes in using software to drive real-world outcomes at a large scale — energy efficiency in one case, voter turnout in the other — with rigorous impact measurement." that's awesome, and makes me more inclined to view the rest of the application positively + give more room for you to pivot.

• the "building political support" section at the bottom seems really cool. i'd be quite excited about things in this vein.

things that make me pause:

• "One factor holding back more housing supply is that the opportunities to build aren’t widely enough known or understood."

  really? i'd be interested in more explanation about why you think this is the case; i appreciate the anecdata story that follows but some hard numbers — even a quick poll or something — would be helpful here.

• why is YIMBYism actually important? the retro funders in this impact market round are ACXG25, LTFF/EAIF, and the SFF. it seems pretty unlikely that any of {LTFF/EAIF, SFF} will be interested in funding YIMBYism; it's outside the cause areas they're interested in. that leaves ACXG25... and there's an unclear explanation of why Scott should value this highly next year — even in the case that you have great success and do exactly what you set out to do.

Current NIMBY rhetoric can be easily rebutted with economically informed reasoning, to show that NIMBY homeowners are selfishly protecting their interests and not promoting the public good. This will improve the effectiveness of YIMBY activism and get more pro-housing reforms passed.

i'm a bit confused here — it seems like you have a lot of great explanation for how you intend to write blogposts/twitter threads/other content, but a lot less explanation for how that caches out to more pro-housing reforms. to be clear, it might be quite possible/easy/doable/etc, but i don't see any explanation of that.

in question form: once you've written the blogposts/twitter threads/other content, what happens next? how does that lead to more pro-housing reforms being passed?

separately, i'd also be interested to see more detail surrounding what pro-housing reforms you think are good, why they're good, why you think this is the most effective way to get them passed, etc.

@saulmunn also, i expect that ACXG25 will be pretty uninterested in this (even if it succeeds!) but that the LTFF and/or the SFF would be pretty interested.

reasons I'm excited about this:

• your track record is really great — you're clearly very experienced & know what you're talking about. this is honestly the primary reason i'm excited; you're a qualified, competent person, interested in making impactful content.

• the topics you listed seem really impactful, and i'd be excited about more people knowing about them & reducing their expected negative impact on the world.

things that make me pause:

• it's unclear to me what the path to impact is after you've made the videos. let's say you make them, they're great, super educational, etc — then what? how do you get to the impact at that point?

  • fwiw, my guess is that the majority of the impact would come from one or both of the following:

    1. the video goes viral, in which case the calls-to-action/"what can you do as a regular person" matters a LOT, and is the primary mechanism for determining the extent to which these videos have impact

    • the video is used by e.g. EA groups/AI safety groups for outreach, in which case the calls-to-action within the videos matter a lot less, but their usage in specific contexts matters more

    either way, though, i'd be interested to hear more about your thoughts here.

1. would you mind listing the titles/descriptions of the talks that were presented at Fluidity Forum 2024?

2. in what category/categories will the talks at Fluidity Forum 2025 be? to what extent do you expect the talks at Fluidity Forum 2025 to be similar to/different from the ones at Fluidity Forum 2024?

3. why are you requesting funding specifically for the online videos? i generally think that unrestricted giving is better, so i feel like i will either end up having the thesis of "Fluidity Forum is really great and ought to be funded, and they know where funding ought to go within Fluidity Forum better than I do" or "Fluidity Forum might be really cool, but not something I'm interested in funding right now." however, neither of those theses really implies that online videos are the best place the money should go, and, if i did end up donating, i'd feel uncomfortable limiting your use of the funding to just the online videos.

(also, this is a bit unrelated, but i'm realizing i can't refer to this as "FF" — since there's already both the Future Forum!)

this looks like a really interesting grant — there are a few things i find exciting, and a few things on which i'm confused. below are quick impressions from spending 20-30 minutes, so i'm probably wrong somewhere. i'd appreciate anyone (including project creators') taking the time to correct me!

exciting aspects:

• translating this sort of content into other languages

• outreach into areas — like thailand — that have seen less of this sort of outreach

positive signals:

• track record is pretty strong — looks like the team has already shipped translations of similar EA content before

• it looks like there's pretty limited downside risk

• relevant connections to academia

remaining questions:

• from a very seems like (potentially!) LLMs could make the process of translation a lot easier, cheaper, faster, etc — do you plan to use them? if not, why not?

• i'm very confused about the budgeting. why does this costs $150k at minimum, and $250k ideally? i could imagine that this is being used well, but $150k-$250k is a lot of money, and it'd be good to better understand how you plan on using this money.

  • "website development" could look pretty close to just... copying utilitarianism.net, and making a few tweaks. domain & hosting can't be more than a few thousand, right? what am i missing here? why would this cost $30k-$50k?

  • why does "translation of essays & video content production" cost $52.5k-$87.5k? how many person-hours would it take? what is their hourly rate?

  • additionally, are there some parts that are particularly expensive? could you get 80% of the translations done on 20% of the funding? (e.g., maybe translating the videos takes up the majority of the costs — perhaps you could scrap the video translations and instead only go for essay translations?)

• i'm a bit confused on your plans for dissemination, which seems fairly important for most parts of your theory of change — once you've created a great website with translated content, how do you plan to get that into the hands of the relevant thai audience? i'd love some more specifics here: do you have workshops/conferences/events planned? are you going to run ads? reach out to professors? how is this happening, concretely?

again — these are quick thoughts & impressions from spending 20-30 minutes reading through. interested to hear others' thoughts too!

i'm skeptical that this will work at-scale. it seems like, for the first purchase or two, this would be a massive help... but eventually, wouldn't the landowners catch on to what you're doing/plan to do, and adjust their prices massively upward? this seems like it would happen fairly quickly, maybe after just 1 or 2 purchases.

there's a fair chance i'm missing something, so please point out where i might be wrong!

@sclmlw hey mark, i'm happy to hear that you have sufficient funding to get started! once you do start seeking additional funding, you can update this grant proposal to raise the funding bar to whatever you need, or create a new project on Manifund for the specific next steps you plan to have :)

two main concerns:

1. is the mosquito's death painful?

2. would this have harmful consequences down the line? (e.g. the frogs starve because they don't have enough food)

otherwise, this seems like a really neat idea!

i really like this — i'd be excited about testing it, providing user feedback, and (ideally!) using it. it feels like it falls in the category of splitwise or lu.ma, as a web/app that "oh, duh, obviously someone should make that, i would totally use it"... and then nobody's actually built it.

to be clear, i don't think this is a grant that's likely to improve the world very effectively. i could totally see myself paying for a premium version of this, though — if i end up finding it especially useful!

it'd be great to have a clear theory of change, if you have one — if you don't, that's okay, but if the goal is (e.g.) "get political researchers to use Estimaker in their research," then you might consider writing out a plan on how you intend to (e.g.) get political researchers to use Estimaker in their research.

tldr: these projects look cool; what is your concrete plan to turn it from "oh cool, this little app thingy" to "a bunch of {key decisionmakers, relevant academics, etc} are using this"?

also, smaller comments:

• i just signed up for estimaker... but i have no idea how to use it? i'm just shown a snowflake, a percentage, and a blanking cursor for code. was there some tutorial, or onboarding process that i missed? i don't even know what language to use :( it'd be really helpful to at least have a documentation! (and if there is one & i couldn't find it in 2-3 minutes of looking, that makes it an easy problem to fix — just make it more prominent!)

• on viewpoints, it'd be awesome if i could use keypresses instead of clicks (maybe up/down/left/right arrows?)

• viewpoints sorta feels like i'm filling out a census report. it almost feels like a game, but there could be much more gamified elements that make it more fun to fill out; after 2-3 minutes, it gets to be pretty much exactly the same, over & over again.

good luck nathan! always here if you want or need help :D

Here's a Notion doc of the below :)

ACX Forecasting Mini-Grants Update

Hey! We’re posting this update as ACX Forecasting Mini-Grants begins the retroactive evaluation period. A quick timeline:

• We ran a pilot, intercollegiate forecasting competition in April 2023. It went really well!

• We wrote a (detailed) postmortem on the pilot competition in May 2023.

• We kept working on OPTIC over the summer, and have a lot of plans for the future (some specifics are below).

Rachel & Austin wanted all of the projects to answer the questions below. If you want the details on the pilot competition, check out the postmortem, but it doesn’t include our future plans.

We’d also be happy to meet — online or in person! Reach out to opticforecasting@gmail.com, or come chat with us at Manifest. Tom is based in the Bay, Jingyi is based in Boston, and Saul is in the Bay for September and Boston for October.

1. How much money have you spent so far? Have you gotten more funding from other sources? Do you need more funding?

   Answers detailed in the table below. We received funding from Manifund and the Long Term Future Fund (LTFF).

   Total Manifund LTFF Original Funding 6001 3901 2100 Used 2208 Committed* 3000 Leftover 792

   *The prize money has not yet been given out, but has been committed — it’s sitting in our bank account waiting to go to the winners.

   Our original Manifund project was funded to run a pilot, intercollegiate forecasting competition. This original, pilot competition doesn’t need more funding — it’s already been completed — but OPTIC as an organization has expanded. We’re seeking funding to run additional competitions and help support forecasting clubs. We are likely to have a moderate through a corporate sponsor and some forecasting organizations, and have pending applications more funding through Open Philanthropy, the Long-Term Future Fund, and Manifund. We also applied to Lightspeed and received no funding.

2. How is the project going? (a few paragraphs)

   1. The pilot went well (see the postmortem for a detailed account), and we’re planning to run 2-4 tournaments in the fall. (This is dependent primarily on funding & high-quality hires.)

   2. We’ve adjusted the mission of OPTIC from purely running forecasting competitions to generally promoting collegiate forecasting. At this point, that means expanding our reach to support about 2-4 forecasting clubs this semester, and more in future semesters. We’re providing fiscal support (fundraising now!), organizational mentorship, instructional content, and outreach materials.

3. How well has your project gone compared to where you expected it to be at this point? (Score from 1-10, 10 = Better than expected)

   1. Our scoring rule:

      1. 1 = much worse than expected

      2. 5 = exactly as expected

      3. 10 = much better than expected

   2. Average response: 7.83

      1. Saul’s response: 8

      2. Tom’s response: 8

      3. Jingyi’s response: 7.5

4. Are there any remaining ways you need help, besides more funding?

   1. Yes! We need:

      1. competitors! Sign up on our website :)

      2. organizers! We’re running competitions in the fall in at least Boston and the Bay Area, and potentially DC and London. We’re bottlenecked on local organizing capacity, and finding good organizers will determine which we can run.

      3. speakers/panelists! We are still looking for speakers/panelists, especially for the non-Bay Area competitions.

5. Any other thoughts or feedback?

   1. Nothing other than gratitude toward Rachel, Austin, and Scott for setting this up :)

@joel_bkr Hey Joel! Thanks so much for your comments — really appreciate your thoughts. I've answered each of your two reasons for your skepticism below.

TLDR: regulatory approval is overrated as a bottleneck for (most) forecasting use-cases, and creating a large pool of forecasters is largely instrumental to acceptance inside influential decision-making institutions. On potentially more effective ways of creating top forecasters (e.g. job postings, public examples), I think it's important to note that universities offer a fairly unique opportunity to immerse students in a shared experience, culture, etc. Meeting for an hour a week with friends is a totally different level of commitment than learning forecasting because it was listed on a job posting. (Also, Misha himself has chatted with us and is very bullish on university-level forecasting!)

The above TLDR probably covers about 60-70% of the content below. Happy to talk more about these and/or answer any other concerns you might have, either in writing or in a chat! :)

(1) LARGER POOL OF (SUPER)FORECASTERS NOT A BOTTLENECK

It doesn't seem like having a larger pool of forecasters is an important bottleneck for use-cases I am aware of. "Regulatory approval" and "acceptance inside prestige institutions" feel like better candidates.

I think this actually might not be true, or at least not how I'm understanding it.

1. Re: regulatory approval, this is only the limiting factor for real-money prediction markets. Although it's hugely important in that particular use-case, I think it's important to note that many use-cases of forecasting besides real-money prediction markets do not rely on regulatory approval. Metaculus (and even Manifold!) are great examples of platforms which provide incredible value, and Open Philanthropy's explicit use of forecasting in their grant-making is a great example of decision-makers using forecasting — neither of these required regulatory approval, and regulatory approval would not have improved their impact. If (e.g.) Metaculus had 10x the superforecasters, we would probably have substantially more forecasts on more topics, leading to more accurate forecasts on a wider variety of important areas.
   
   IMHO, real-money prediction markets are unlikely to be the source of the majority of impact from the field of forecasting. Much more likely, it'd come from people identifying talented forecasters and using those individuals in key situations. This is a hotter take, but I do think it's a crux — real-money prediction markets would be great, but in terms of impact, I'd far prefer a widespread Metaculus to a widespread Kalshi.

2. Re: "acceptance inside prestige institutions," I'm not entirely sure what you mean.
   
   If you mean "acceptance from influential decision-makers/key decision-making bodies, like politicians, big NGOs, etc," that makes sense, and I agree!
   
   Note that:

   1. current students = future key-decision-makers

   2. acceptance from influential decision-makers would be significantly easier if forecasting was a generally accepted way of doing things (see our 2nd goal under our theory of change)

   3. in order for forecasting to be desirable to influential decision-makers, it needs to first work well — one of the best ways for forecasting to work better is if more people are doing it. This is true both for classic "wisdom of the crowds" reasons, but also because if 10x people are doing forecasting, we'll likely discover 10x superforecasters, and forecasts will be much more accurate, and we'll have forecasts on a wider area of topics, etc.

   If, however, you literally mean "acceptance inside prestige institutions," I don't quite agree — I don't think that's a bottleneck to impactful forecasting. Regardless, I do still think college forecasting clubs solve for this — universities are some of the most prestigious institutions in the US, and high-quality clubs (with associated professors, speakers, etc) at said institutions is acceptance.

Another few comments:

• Michael Story (Swift Centre) wrote an essay on where forecasting is & isn't useful. Would recommend!

• I'm in a bit of a unique position to do something, compared to almost all of the rest of the forecasting community — this sort of thing pretty much only works when its student-lead.

• University forecasting seems substantially cheaper to implement than regulatory approval or broad acceptance at prestigious institutions.

• This proposal doesn't trade off with regulatory approval or acceptance from prestigious institutions, except with funding efforts. To my knowledge, although there are efforts that could improve the regulatory regime of prediction markets or the institutional acceptance of forecasting, they require social & legal capital, not money (or at least, not money on the order of $8.4k).

(2) OTHER WAYS OF IDENTIFYING TOP FORECASTERS

I would guess that university forecasting clubs are a less beneficial means of creating top forecasters than "jobs listing forecasting skill as desired qualification," "excellent public examples of forecasting to emulate" (e.g. Misha's AI bio report). Not sure about cost-effectiveness, though.

• There are a lot of potentially effective approaches, and I think a lot of them could should be tried. The space of possible strategies is huge, and we ought to start trying low-cost stuff and seeing what works and what doesn't.

• University clubs are in a pretty unique position. They have the opportunity to very significantly influence the life of someone. Students often structure their friend groups around and spend a lot of time in university clubs — this isn't the case with the other means you mentioned.

  • This is one of the main reasons that university EA groups have been so incredibly popular at building the EA community. I recently chatted with Jessica McCurdy (who runs & started UGAP), and her perspective was (paraphrasing) that university groups are a good if you want students to learn & explore things collaboratively, to make significant changes to their lives, and to group together in a way that allows them to signal-boost a particular idea. All of these apply to forecasting, in a similar way to EA. She was "very excited" about the idea of university forecasting clubs!

• Again, I'm in a fairly unique position — my comparative advantage is that I can start clubs, while others can try other strategies (that they might have a comparative advantage in).

  • E.g. Rethink Priorities might be able to make jobs listings with forecasting skills as a desired qualification, but I probably can't; on the other hand, I can start university forecasting clubs, but they probably can't.

• Forecasting clubs are very measurable, compared to some of the strategies you mentioned. 3 forecasting clubs with about 10 active members each (a roughly median outcome) would mean about 30 new forecasters per year, and probably about 50-100 people who've "heard of it" (friends of friends, those who dropped after half a semester, etc). How many people have gotten into forecasting through jobs listings, or public examples of forecasting? It seems pretty hard to say.

• Also, Misha Yagudin himself has chatted with us and is very bullish on university-level forecasting!

  ---

Just to reiterate from above: thank you for commenting & for your thoughts! I'm happy to talk more about these and/or answer any other concerns you might have, either in writing or in a chat! :)

I’d be happy to chat more about this over a call with any regrantors who’re interested. Book a 25 or 50 minute call here: savvycal.com/saulmunn/optic :)

Update: we held the (successful!!) pilot competition! A postmortem of the pilot competition is below — take a look and share your thoughts!

[ https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4p8RpK2fYKFmEcA9w/optic-forecasting-comp-pilot-postmortem?commentId=T2nKYCfgyyBGxCGP3 ]

We have a website: opticforecasting.com!

You can contact us directly at opticforecasting.com/contact :)