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This is wild. Excited to see where this goes

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This is truly one of my favorite developments coming out of the rationalist community/Progress Studies/EA sphere.

What's the point of all this money sloshing around the economy and crypto if it's not gonna fund moonshots?

I thought about starting a rationalist community DAO, bootstrapping the token value a la any of the tokenomics mechanics printing money in crypto, create a community fund, and vote on projects to disburse tokens to.

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Greg Cochran has suggested that if you replace nitrogen with helium in the air you breathe you might increase cognition and alertness. If this is tested and proved true there would be enormous social benefits as we could put scientists (and AGI safety researchers!) in sealed rooms with such air. I've been trying to get someone to test this idea. As an economist, no same person would let me mess with the air people breathe. But if anyone reading this has the qualifications to run the experiment perhaps ACX grants would be the right place to apply for funding.

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I think you are a really good person and I think you are extremely charitable for doing this.

But is this a better use of the money than standard effective charity donations? $250,000/~$3200 = ~78 lives not saved. If it is a better use of the money, then wouldn't it make sense to put your 10% into the research grant? After $250,000 does the research have diminishing returns such that it is better to give to the standard effective charities? It might be worth fleshing this out some more if lives are on the line.

Also, it seems like you should sell more NFTs for sure. Why not? It produces carbon which you could offset. But...I wouldn't offset the carbon, I would just save more lives.

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I'd suggest incorporating a grant making organization to get around the taxes.

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Well done, a very worthy endeavor.

"Some effective altruist organizations suggest that people with large but not billionaire-level amounts of money might want to try acting as charity “angel investors”. They argue that there are enough government agencies and billionaires to fund the biggest and most obvious legible high-impact opportunities."

I have often felt the urge to write up my belief that marginal utility declines faster for charitable giving than for other types of expenditures, but then I feel tired and lie down.

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Can multiple people apply as a team for the grant? I think I have a few grant-worthy ideas but no time to work on them. My main project (in vitro gametogenesis) is already well-funded.

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Re this thread from before:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-11821/comment/3555263

It’s not much, but if you submit a grant proposal that Scott accepts, and it has to do with anything related to what I brought up in the linked comment chain , or any research that could either validate or falsify practical predictions of various Georgist policies, I’ll contribute $1,000 of my book review winnings to your grant.

As well as my attention, personal network of wonks, and anything else I can do for you.

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I haven't done a thorough cost estimation, but I think that using this treatment (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10366-y) against certain transposons (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ui6mDLdqXkaXiDMJ5/core-pathways-of-aging) has a good shot at _reversing_ aging.

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Awesome news. So much of basic work on third rail issues that have great potential to advance our understanding of the human condition are impossible in today's ideological climate.

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You love to see this kind of stuff. Excited to see where this goes!

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This is fantastic.

I've seen this sort of thing done at a lower level - people trying to do things who need money for it, and people gathering to review and fund things. I love this sort of model.

Good luck!

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Surprised you have money to burn, given that you had to quit your daily job due to mob.

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Maybe you could provide a few examples of the kinds of projects you'd be especially excited about?

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Once you sort out the most tax-efficient way to do this, it would be fantastic if you could share — I’ve wondered how to do this, too, and (speaking as a lawyer who sometimes dips shallowly into tax law) I’m not sure any of the explanations in the comments so far are totally accurate

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Couple of thousand bucks to buy a chunk of hafnium, with ~27% Hf178, and a dental X-ray machine to generate the nuclear isomer and trigger gamma-ray release.

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I'm a huge fan, Scott, but I sure hate it when people say they want to make the world a better place. We can't even agree on what would be better.

The best joke ever from the Mike Judge show "Silicon Valley" is the tech CEO speaking to his employees: "I don't want to be a part of a world in which someone else is making the world a better place than we are."

We are all children of Adam Smith, who argued very effectively that our best interest is to have the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker work in their own best interests.

So, sorry but when someone says they want to make the word a better place I think you are Stalin.

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founding

This is very cool. But it'd be even cooler if it were easier to help you out with funding. I would love to donate to your capital pool here, but I think if I were to do that either, you'd have to pay income tax on the money, or i'd have to pay gift tax on it. This basically means one way or the other, half the money immediately goes to the government.

It seems extremely worthwhile to form a non-profit of some kind to prevent this. I think you could easily raise many millions of dollars for a project like this. I'm happy to pay the legal expenses to get it done.

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Couple of questions:

1. Is there any limitation on what the money can be spend on? For example, some fellowships only allow for their funds to be spended on direct costs of the research (e.g. paying participants) but not as a salary for the researchers.

2. Do you have already an idea on how to check the progress of the projects, does one have to write some kind of report every other month? Do you have any other formal prerequisites like open data or preregistration?

3. Can one submit multiple proposals and if so, should you fill out the form just once or for every submission separately?

4. Are there any restrictions concerning the timing? For example if I still need half a year until I am finished with my phd, is it okay to wait until afterwards?

5. How high is the bar for "direct applicability"? If one for example does basic psychological research on happiness and wellbeing, but the research is not directly aimed at applying this to the real world and actually make people feel better, would that still have a chance on being picked?

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Wonderful initiative!

1 question: It's unclear if non-US applicants are permited?

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Tossing this one out here in the hopes that someone else can pick it up....

Most cancers start as mutations in known oncogenes. They are genetically distinct from surrounding tissue. CRISPRs are good at acting when and only when they see a particular sequence. One could use the famous CRISPR-cas9 to transfect exclusively tumor cells with some sort of cytotoxin (an aggressive protease perhaps -- then once the cell is dead, the protease will destroy itself before the membrane lyses). Or CRISPR-cas12 cuts out the middleman and becomes a ravenous nuclease when it sees the trigger-sequence. Delivering these agents could probably be done with standard techniques. ISTR one of those is the envelope of a dna virus which cannot pass myelin -- that would be a useful extra safety feature for non-brain cancers.

How would one go about developing this?

First, take some convenient mammilian cells, transfect them with different colors of florescence, mix them in vitro, then kill one color with the CRISPR. This should require a minimum of sequencing, as the florescent proteins are known, and you just need to find a subsequence not present in the host genome. You can measure effectiveness and false-positive-rate optically, which should also be cheap. This lets you iterate freely on delivery mechanism.

Once that looks good, move to the in vivo version. Use some not-spreading-very-far vector to put florescent polka dots on mice, then remove them with a system-wide CRISPR.

Keep an eye out for behavioral signs of pain. The dying cells might leak enough ATP into the interstitial fluid to trigger an endovanniloid cascade. If so, better to learn sooner than later. Lidocaine may be all that's needed here, but maybe cortisone if there are signs of dangerous local inflammation.

If this part works, move on to cancers. Probably best to use skin cancer, since biopsies will be easier. This is where the sequencing may get expensive, since you need each mouse healthy and tumor, and ideally many cells from the tumor as single-cell-sequencing so that further mutations don't lead you astray.

Have three groups of test animals: no cancer, just cancer, and cancer plus cure. Then make all the comparisons in total lifespan and cancer biomarkers (pick a sufficiently short-lived species that total lifespan is practical to observe. The groups shouldn't need to be very big: just big enough that the proposition "cancer shortens lifespan" will show up unambiguously.

I think this could be done by a grad student with good wet-lab skills on the sort of budget Scott is offering. I have no wet lab skills, so I'm hoping someone who does reads this.

Beyond the cure mice phase, I see two options. One is to proceed to human trials as is classic. This will require more money, but hopefully at that point other attention will arrive. Such a study would probably compare "normal treatment" to "normal treatment plus this", and would keep the clinical oncologists blinded, but warn them all to check signs and adjust dosages frequently.

The other is to establish a commercial veterinary cancer-cure center and let people wonder why we can cure dogs but not people, and maybe whether a human could be slipped in by officially being an orangutan.

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I am super excited about the general project and would love to apply, but am very uncreative when it comes to generating new and fruitful research ideas.

My background: I have a Masters in psychology with a focus on clinical neuroscience. I received 5 years of training in CBT and am about to finish my phd which is about basic research in predictive coding and its conceptions about what emotions are. I know my stuff around statistics and good methodology. If provided by the grant, I could buy testing time at all the machinery usually needed for neuropsychological research (fMRI, EEG, TMS, EDA, etc.). Through the institution I work for at the moment I could get access to patients with all kinds of mental illnesses to recruit them as participants for experiments. I don’t have any medical degree, which is why any research with medications would unfortunately be off the table.

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This is an excellent idea. I run a much small microgrants programme (only 1K) based on the same concept basically borrowed from Tyler Cowen as well. www.ThenDoBetter.com/grants

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Very cool! I think it would be better if 'How much money do you need?' would be a long-form answer field. As it is right now, you can't see the formatting (or most of the text).

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Will there be another one of these in the future?

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Yeah this is really exciting, especially given the current problem EA has of trying to find highly scaleable projects. I'd be excited if people applied with projects that could use this money as a test something that could potentially absorb like millions-10s of millions of dollars.

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Okay, speaking of Mad Scientist Malarkey, I've just read this new post over on The Renaissance Mathematicus and "Wow" is my first reaction.

Funding research on brain transplants during the Cold War - https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2021/11/10/would-you-like-a-new-body-for-that-brain-sir/

"Brain transplants are the subject of science fiction and Gothic horror, right? One of the most famous Gothic horror stories, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus features a brain transplant, of which much is made in the various film versions. But in real life, a fantasy not a reality, or? Wrong, the American neurosurgeon Robert White (1926–2010) devoted most of his working life to the dream of transplanting a human brain, experimenting, and working towards fulfilment of this dream. I’m a voracious reader consuming, particularly in my youth, vast amounts of scientific and related literature, but I had never come across the work of Robert White, which took place during my lifetime. Thanks to Brandy Schillace, this lacuna in my knowledge has been more than filled, through her fascinating and disturbing book 'Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher: A Monkey’s Head, the Pope’s Neuroscientist, and the Quest to transplant the Soul', which tells in great detail the story of Robert White’s dream and his attempts to fulfil it.

The title is of course a play on the title of Robert Louis Stevenson’s notorious Gothic novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the story of a medically induced split personality, with a good persona and an evil one. Here, Mr Humble refers to the neurosurgeon Bob White, deeply religious, Catholic family father and brain surgeon, who always engaged 150% for his patients. A saint of a man, who everybody looked up to and admired.

Dr. Butcher refers to the research scientist Dr White, who carried out a, at times truly brutal, programme of animal experimentation on the way to his ultimate goal, the transplantation of a human brain."

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Given that Scott seems to be doing well enough financially, I'd feel better about renewing my subscription if some of it was going to grants like this.

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Somewhere there is an ACX post which lists the impact of various educational interventions (eg. class sizes, tutoring) but damned if I can find it. If anyone can point me in the right direction I would be grateful!

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If you set up a way to give small donations into the pool, I'd be interested in donating, and I think others would too. I know there are other similar charities, but I'm kind of partial to Scott's judgement and network.

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Two charities you should consider funding are the Center on Long-Term Risk and the Center for Reducing Suffering. These organizations are focused on reducing S-risks, or risks of astronomical suffering.

https://longtermrisk.org/

https://centerforreducingsuffering.org/

https://reducing-suffering.org/donation-recommendations/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiZxEJcFExc

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awesome :) this is very generous scott, thank you for doing this

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I saw a comment on LessWrong recently asking "what if we just gave Terrence Tao (for example) ten million dollars to work on the AI Alignment problem for a year". It is a funny idea, but also seems worth seriously considering. I realize $10M >>> $250K, and I personally am no where near qualified to try to arrange some sort of actual project like this, but I figured this is worth bringing up here when weird high upside risk ideas that cost money are being discussed.

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Love it.

Although the grant space is probably a bit saturated in this particular community considering there's such an overlap between ACX and MR. I would love it if we got other communities to broadcast it.

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founding

Maybe we need a meta organization. A grant-making 501C (Meta-Grant) that's effectively a Donor-Advised-Fund. It works like this:

1) You donate $X to Meta-Grant. This is fully tax-deductible

2) You fwd grant requests to MG. MG does due-diligence to ensure the tax treatment (i.e. you aren't funneling money to relatives or secretly paying for something)

3) For tax purposes MG is solely responsible for decisions.

4) MG keeps track of your account- how much money you've donated that remains to be distributed.

Some other points:

MG can accept appreciated assets- yielding enormous tax leverage (depending on your state/tax situation donating $1 only results in $0.30 less personal consumption)

MG introduces some bureaucracy, but this is probably a good thing as things scale. There will need to be some due diligence of applicants esp if you want to get out of your personal network. Having a team dedicated to this seems reasonable and a small tax to pay.

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Scott, do you plan to make a public list of submitted applications?

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If there are still ones left unfunded, could you post the ones you think are promising so we can see if _we_ want to fund them?

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It'd be also cool to hear about the results of whatever got funded.

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So, "the early stages of your attempt to provide low-cost psychiatric care to uninsured people" are done, and it is up and running?! With the hair-dryer-logo? That would be GREAT - and we would love to hear from it. Plus donate (well I would). Am unable to think of a better project to put the ACX quarter-million to.

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To put this idea out there, I think I see some low hanging charity fruit in the world: 1) subsidising garbage collection in the Phillipines to reduce ocean plastics, 2) try to reduce cousin marriage in the Middle East. Obviously these are too big to solve but maybe someone could investigate the cost/benefits, and plan strategies etc

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I am completely unqualified to do this myself. But it would be worthwhile to test the germ theory of obesity. Is rising obesity a result of a new microorganism, or the deficiency in one?

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When do applicants hear back?

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More questions about experience or successful projects would be good I think because I just realized I didn't mention any

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This is a pretty cool idea. I'm curious to see whether you get any interesting potential projects that no one else is really thinking about.

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> My current understanding is that I will have to pay a gift tax but winners will not have to pay taxes on the grant money. Please double-check this with your local jurisdiction.

Situation in Poland:

According to my understanding, if I am a person who got grant to make something cool and improving world, then I am still obligated to pay taxes.

It appears to me if I am getting money with expectation that I will do something or because I will do something, then it is taxed like regular contract.

No matter whether I will get paid for something that makes world better worse.

Though, if I would get unconditional gift then situation is different.

WARNING: I AM NOT A LAWYER. Also, it is not like contacting lawyer or accountant will help much. I wasted recently way to much time on that, I was in a similar situation and noone was able to really help.

If you accept this money, please budget effort on detangling legal mess or on worrying about tax jurisdiction. And check when you can celebrate expiration of potential tax crimes.

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Is Slime Mold Time Mold going to apply for a grant to test their theories on obesity? How much would it cost to convince a mid-size city to get the lithium out of their water for the next 10 years?

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/11/08/a-chemical-hunger-interlude-i-the-fattest-cities-in-the-land/

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This is very exciting! Scott, is it fair to assume that one can submit more than one idea to the competition or is it one project-per-person type of grant?

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@Scott, could you please give an exact deadline?

Asking on behalf of my philosophy professor friend, who is busily working to apply before Thanksgiving (“a couple weeks” after this was posted). Thanks!

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Hi, so after losing my published articles when a site went 404, I started a project called The Immutable Network. We are building a decentralized, uncensorable and immutable publishing platform using blockchain and smart contracts (we are a DAO). We're also developing the world's first dictionary on a blockchain, almost in beta: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/immutable/

Phase one is a browser extension (called Dara) that saves articles, blogs and sites to IPFS and blockchain, currently in beta. You can watch a demo vid here: https://youtu.be/eYXFdFTESt8

I also took the liberty of saving your post (this page) using Dara! https://ipfs.theimmutable.net/ipfs/QmWSVM9a2jJLb7ocFbp3Um27LvpGdx2kGYe8uaVh5dQ5To

Where "QmW…5To" is the hash of the IPFS file, also recorded in this blockchain transaction (click on "decode input data" to view the hash) https://testnet.bscscan.com/tx/0x8d0c3a6326b7b416800b6412f754d13c96614aa03b1bbe6f8fdedd7f30819ab7

We're a very young project, and would love to hear back from you. If you wish you can email me: gig[at]dara.global (twitter: @ggmesh)

Thanks!

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given that it's a holiday week here in the United States, any chance you would be willing to extend the deadline through the weekend?

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I submitted my application, but did not get a confirmation email. Is that intended?

So the only thing I have in hand, is a screenshot, which feels bad.

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Any update ?

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hello. i'd like to apply, but I was waiting for my work to be published in a local journal before applying. It looks like I missed the window by a day unfortunately. Is there a way I can still apply? If not, pointing me in the right direction would be very helpful. thank you very much for being so generous. I'm sure whomever wins will do good!

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Similar case here. Always wishing faster grants, and now that there is one...

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:)

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Hi Scott. Our team wanted to send you a proposal, but we saw that the form was already closed. Is there any way that we can still send it? Thank you.

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I submitted an application Nov 17, and haven't heard anything back, please let me know at your earliest convenience, thanks! (no rush)

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Having found your announcement on the 20th, and in spite of very hectic days, I barely but determinedly managed to fill and send in the form with what I feel is a very general but clear description of my proposal. As days go by however, I can’t help but think of details I would now include. Specifically to expand a little on information I did include, and to add pieces of information I didn’t and that speak to my current situation, personal and national. Would there be any means to communicate the most important ones to you at this point?

In not wanting to ask for more of your time (600 applications received!), I had been doubting wether to ask this or not and decided that it’s always better to speak one’s mind. Of course, like Varsha, I completely understand if what I’m asking just doesn’t fall within your and the process’ boundaries. Hopefully I can share these details with you later on, at your request, by e-mail or via a short call :) In any case, I’m grateful for causally having been able to apply at all and for the opportunity in general. Thank you.

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I didn't see this until now [lol, a wildly novel excuse]. Can we still submit through a different pathway or will there be another round? I've published extensively and have collected thoughts which would be difficult to fund from standard sources - there no totally heretical bent but it would just likely not have that patina of govt. NIH/NSF/CDMRP tractability.

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There is a brilliant offer of £25k towards these grants, included at the end of Alexandros Marinos's dissemination of Scott's Ivermectin piece...

https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-less-than-you-needed

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Hey everyone, not sure whom to contact! But i was interested in applying but it seems like the last application was in the 2023 cycle and I am looking or was interested to applying now, which is 7th January 2023! Not sure what to do :/

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When will this open again?

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When will this open again?

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