Review
So, you think you’re an effective altruist? Okay, show us what you got — invest in charitable projects, then see how you do over the coming year. If you pick winners, you get (charitable) prizes; otherwise, you lose your (charitable) dollars. Also, you get to fund impactful projects. Win-win.
Click here to see the projects and to start investing!
Astral Codex Ten (ACX) is a blog written by Scott Alexander on topics like effective altruism, reasoning, science, psychiatry, medicine, ethics, genetics, AI, economics, and politics. ACX Grants is a grants program in which Scott Alexander helps fund charitable and scientific projects — see the 2022 cohort here and his retrospective on ACX Grants 2022 here.
In ACX Grants 2024, some of the applications were given direct grants and the rest were given the option to participate in an impact market.
Impact markets are an alternative to grants or donations as a way to fund charitable projects. A collection of philanthropies announces that they'll be giving out prizes for the completion of successful, effectively altruistic projects that solve important problems the philanthropies care about. Project creators then strike out to build projects that solve those problems. If they need money to get started, investors can buy a “stake” in the project's possible future prize winnings, called an “impact certificate.” (You can read more about how impact markets generally work here, and a canonical explanation of impact certificates on the EA Forum here.)
Four philanthropic funders have expressed interest in giving prizes to successful projects in this round:
So, after a year, the above philanthropies will review the projects in the impact market to see which ones have had the highest impact.
Giving direct donations is great! But purchasing impact certificates can also have some advantages over direct donations:
Direct donation can have pretty bad feedback loops about what sorts of things end up actually being effective/successful. After a year, the philanthropies listed above will review the projects to see which ones are impactful — and award prizes to the ones that they find most impactful. You get to see how much impact per-dollar your investments returned, giving you grounded feedback.
Purchasing impact certificates forces you to put yourself in the eyes of a grant-maker — you can look through a bunch of projects that might be impactful, and, with your donation budget, select the ones you expect to have the most impact. It also pushes you to model the philanthropies with great feedback. What sorts of things do they care about? Why? What are their primary theories of change? How will the project sitting in front of you relevantly improve the world in a way they actually care about?
If you invest in projects that end up being really impactful, then you’ll get a share of the charitable prize funding that projects win! All of this remains as charitable funding, so you’ll be able to donate it to whatever cause you think is most impactful. For example, if you invest $100 into a project that wins a prize worth 2x it’s original valuation, you can then choose to donate $200 to a charity or project of your choice!
Four philanthropic funders have expressed interest in giving prizes[1] to successful projects that align with their interests:
Next year’s ACX Grants round (2025) will be interested in spending some of the money they normally give out as prizes for the projects that succeeded in this year’s (2024) round. ACX Grants 2025 will be most interested in giving out prizes to charities that pursue novel ways to change complex systems, either through technological breakthroughs, new social institutions, or targeted political change. The Long Term Future Fund (LTFF) and the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF) focus on the long-term future, including but not limited to AI safety, forecasting, and longtermist community building. The EA Infrastructure Fund focuses on EA community-building. You can find previous lists of grants funded by ACXG, the LTFF, the EAIF, and the SFF.
Anyone can invest in projects — including you!
Click here to see all of the projects that you can invest in.
If you’re interested in learning more about investing on an impact market, donating to projects directly, or even just chatting about this sort of thing, you can email saul@manifund.org or book a call here.
These “prizes” are sometimes called “retroactive funding."