LESSWRONG
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by Austin Chen
Linkpost from manifund.substack.com
5 min read
8

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Manifund is hosting a $200k funding round for EA community projects, where the grant decisions are made by you. You can direct $100-$800 of funding towards the projects that have helped with your personal journey as an EA. Your choices then decide how $100k in matching will be allocated, via quadratic funding!

Sign up here to get notified when the projects are live, or read on to learn more!

Timeline

  • Phase 1: Project registrations open (Aug 13)
    • Project organizers can now create a page for their projects here, to raise funding as part of this EA Community Choice round.
    • Community members can sign up for updates here, or recommend projects to sign up here.
  • Phase 2: Community members receive funds (Aug 20)
    • We’ll give everyone $100 to donate; more if you’ve been active in the EA community. Fill out a 2-minute form to claim your $100, plus bonuses for:
      • Donor: $100 for taking the GWWC 🔸10% Pledge
      • Organizer: $100 for organizing any EA group
      • Scholar: $100 for having 100 or more karma on the EA Forum
      • Volunteer: $100 for volunteering at an EAG(x), Future Forum, or Manifest
      • Worker: $100 for working fulltime at an EA org, or full-time on an EA grant
      • Senior: $100 for having done any of the above prior to 2022
      • Insider: $100 if you had a Manifund account before August 2024
    • You can then donate your money to any project in the Community Choice round!
    • You can also leave comments about any specific project. This is a great way to share your experiences with the project organizer, or the rest of the EA community.
    • Funds in Phase 2 will be capped at $100k, first-come-first-served.
  • Phase 3: Funds matched and sent to projects (Sep 1)
    • Projects and donations will be locked in at the end of August. Then, all money donated will be matched against a $100k quadratic funding pool.
    • Unlike a standard 1:1 match, quadratic funding rewards a project with lots of small donors more than a project with few big donors. The broader the support, the bigger the match!

    • Specifically, the match is proportional the square of the sum of square roots of individual donations. A toy example:

    • Learn more about principles behind quadratic funding by reading Vitalik Buterin’s explainer, watching this video, or playing with this simulator.

What is an EA community project?

We don’t have a strict definition, but roughly any project which helps you: learn about EA, connect with the EA community, or grow your impact in the world. We’re casting a wide net; projects do not have to explicitly identify as EA to qualify (though, we also endorse being proud of being EA). If you’re not sure if you count, just apply!

Examples of projects we’d love to fund:

FAQ

  • What is Manifund?
    • Manifund is a platform for funding impactful projects. We’ve raised over $5m for hundreds of projects across causes like AI safety, biosecurity, animal welfare, EA infrastructure, and scientific research. Beyond crowdfunding, we also run programs such as AI safety regrants, impact markets, and ACX Grants.
  • Why are you doing this?
    • We want to give the EA community a voice in what projects get funded within our own community. Today, most funding decisions are centralized in the hands of a few grantmakers, such as OpenPhil, EA Funds, and SFF. We greatly appreciate their work, but at the same time, suspect that local knowledge gets lost in this process. With EA Community Choice, we’re asking everyone to weigh from their own experiences, on what projects have helped with their personal journey towards doing good.
  • Why these criteria for donation bonuses?
    • We chose these to highlight the different ways that someone can contribute to the EA movement. EA Community Choice aims to be more democratic than technocratic; we want to ensure a wide range of activities get recognized, and that a broad swathe of the EA community feels bought in to these donation decisions.
  • Why quadratic funding?
    • Quadratic funding is theoretically optimal to distribute matching funds towards a selection of public goods (and we’re suckers for elegant theory). The crypto community has pioneered this with some success, eg with Gitcoin Grants and Optimism’s Retroactive Public Goods Funding rounds. Closer to home, the LessWrong Annual Review is an example of a quadratic voting system in practice, which produces pretty good results.
  • Where did this $200k come from?
    • An anonymous individual in the EA community. Manifund would love to thank them publicly, but alas, the donor wishes not to be named for now. (It’s not FTX.)
  • Can I direct my funds to a project I work on or am involved with?
    • Yes! We ask that you mention this as a comment on the project, but otherwise it’s fine to donate to projects you are involved with.
  • How should I direct my funds? Eg should I fund projects based on their past work, or how they would use marginal funding?
    • We suggest based on how much value you have gotten out of it (aka retroactive instead of prospective), but it’s your charity budget; feel free to spend it as you wish.
    • We’d appreciate if you leave a comment about what made you decide to give to a particular project, though this is optional.
  • Can I update my donations before Phase 3?
    • Yes! If later donations or comments change your mind about where you want to give, you can change your allocation
  • If I think a project has negative externalities, can I make a “negative vote” aka pay to redirect money away from it?
    • TBD. This may be theoretically optimal and has been used by other projects, but leaning no because of bad vibes/potential for drama and additional complexity it introduces.
  • Can I contribute my own money towards a community project?
    • Yes! You can make a personal donation to any project in this community choice round; these donations will also be eligible for the quadratic funding match (as well as a 501c3 tax deduction, if you’re based in the US).
  • How about contributing towards the matching fund?
    • Yes! We’re happy to accept donations to increase the size of the matching pool for this round. Reach out to austin@manifund.org and I’ll be happy to chat!
    • Or, if you’re excited by this structure but want to try a different focus (eg a funding round for “technical AI safety projects” or “animal welfare projects”), let us know!

Get involved!

As the name “EA Community Choice” implies, we’d love for all kinds of folks in the community to participate. You can:

Excited to support the projects that y’all choose!

Thanks to Rachel, Saul, Anton, Neel, Constance, Fin and others for feedback!

Grants & Fundraising OpportunitiesAI
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Announcing the $200k EA Community Choice
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[-]kave82

Thank you for the Lightcone project shoutouts (Lighthaven, LessOnline)!

Also, for the avoidance of confusion, I don't think the characterisation of Lighthaven as a coworking space is right. Sometimes clients of Lighthaven run it as a coworking space (like MATS is currently running their program there, which uses space similarly to how a coworking space would). But it's not a (major) part of how Lightcone runs the space. (We do have about 5 people who work from Lighthaven regularly and maybe 5 more who work from there very intermittently).

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[-]Austin Chen40

Thanks for the correction! My own interaction with Lighthaven is event space foremost, then housing, then coworking; for the purposes of EA Community Choice we're not super fussed about drawing clean categories, and we'd be happy to support a space like Lighthaven for any (or all) of those categories.

Reply
[-]habryka60

How do I enter Lightcone as a project when we've already applied to Manifund here? Is the recommended action to apply again, or with a narrower project, or is there some way to add the existing Lightcone application to the EA-community-choice grants?

Reply
[-]Austin Chen42

I recommend adding "EA Community Choice" existing applications. I've done so for you now, so the project will be visible to people browsing projects in this round, and future donations made will count for quadratic funding match. Thanks for participating!

Reply1
[-]sapphire59

I'm sending my funds/votes to lighthaven. It's a very well run venue and afaik needs funding. It should eventually be profitable or break even but needs some help getting started. Really useful and important to support well executed projects.

Reply1
[-]Michaël Trazzi20

Like Habryka I have questions about creating an additional project for EA-community choice, and how the two might intersect.

Note: In my case, I have technically finished the work I said I would do given my amount of funding, so marking the previous one as finished and creating a new one is possible.

I am thinking that maybe the EA-community choice description would be more about something with limited scope / requiring less funding, since the funds are capped at $200k total if I understand correctly.

It seems that the logical course of action is:

  1. mark the old one as finished with an update
  2. create an EA community choice project with a limited scope
  3. whenever I'm done with the requirements from the EA community choice, create another general Manifund project

Though this would require creating two more projects down the road.

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[-]Austin Chen20

For now I've just added the your existing project into EA Community Choice; if you'd prefer to create a subproject with a different ask that's fine too, I can remove the old one. I think adding the existing one is a bit less work for everyone involved -- especially since your initial proposal has a lot more room for funding. (We'll figure out how to do the quadratic match correctly on our side.)

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[-]harfe12

I have doubts that the claim about "theoretically optimal" apply to this case.

Now, you have not provided a precise notion of optimality, so the below example might not apply if you come up with another notion of optimality or assume that voters collude with each other, or use a certain decision theory, or make other assumptions... Also there are some complications because the optimal strategy for each player depends on the strategy of the other players. A typical choice in these cases is to look at Nash-equilibria.

Consider three charities A,B,C and two players X,Y who can donate $100 each. Player X has utilities , , for the charities A,B,C. Player Y has utilities , , for the charities A,B,C.

The optimal (as in most overall utility) outcome would be to give everything to charity B. This would require that both players donate everything to charity B. However, this is not a Nash-equilibrium, as player X has an incentive to defect by giving to A instead of B and getting more utility.

This specific issue is like the prisoners dilemma and could be solved with other assumptions/decision theories.

The difference between this scenario and the claims in the literature might be that public goods is not the same as charity, or that the players cannot decide to keep the funds for themselves. But I am not sure about the precise reasons.

Now, I do not have an alternative distribution mechanism ready, so please do not interpret this argument as serious criticism of the overall initiative.

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