Austin Chen

Hey there~ I'm Austin, currently building https://manifund.org. Always happy to meet LessWrong people; reach out at akrolsmir@gmail.com!

Wikitag Contributions

Comments

Sorted by

Huh, seems pretty cool and big-if-true. Is there a specific reason you're posting this now? Eg asking people for feedback on the plan? Seeking additional funders for your $25m Series A? 

My guess btw is that some donors like Michael have money parked in a DAF, and thus require a c3 sponsor like Manifund to facilitate that donation - until your own c3 status arrives, ofc. 

(If that continues to get held up. but you receive an important c3 donation commitment in the meantime, let us know and we might be able to help - I think it's possible to recharacterize same year donations after c3 status arrives, which could unblock the c4 donation cap?) 

From the Manifund side: we hadn't spoken with CAIP previously but we're generally happy to facilitate grants to them, either for their specific project or as general support. 

A complicating factor is that, like many 501c3s, we have a limited budget to be able to send towards c4s, eg I'm not sure if we could support their maximum ask of $400k on Manifund. I do feel happy to commit at least $50k of our "c4 budget" (which is their min ask) if they do raise that much through Manifund; beyond that, we should chat!

Thanks to Elizabeth for hosting me! I really enjoyed this conversation; "winning" is a concept that seems important and undervalued among rationalists, and I'm glad to have had the time to throw ideas around here.

I do feel like this podcast focused a bit more on some of the weirder or more controversial choices I made, which is totally fine; but if I were properly stating the case for "what is important about winning" from scratch, I'd instead pull examples like how YCombinator won, or how EA has been winning relative to rationality in recruiting smart young folks. AppliedDivinityStudies's "where are all the successful rationalists" is also great.

Very happy to answer questions ofc!

Thanks for the feedback! I think the nature of a hackathon is that everyone is trying to get something that works at all, and "works well" is just a pipe dream haha. IIRC, there was some interest in incorporating this feature directly into Elicit, which would be pretty exciting.

Anyways I'll try to pass your feedback to Panda and Charlie, but you might also enjoy seeing their source code here and submitting a Github issue or pull request: https://github.com/CG80499/paper-retraction-detection

Oh cool! Nice demo and happy to see it's shipped and live, though I'd say the results were a bit disappointing on my very first prompt:

(if that's not the kind of question you're looking for, then I might suggest putting in some default example prompts to help the user understand what questions this is good for surfacing!)

Thanks! Appreciate the feedback for if we do a future hackathon or similar event~

Thanks, appreciate the thanks!

Strong upvoted - I don't have much to add, but I really appreciated the concrete examples from what appears to be lived experience. 

Load More