This looks awesome, congrats on announcing this! I would be extremely tempted myself were it not for a bunch of other likely obligations. Approximately how large do you expect this fellowship to be?
Also, structuring Inkhaven as a paid program was interesting; most fellowships (eg Asterisk, FLF, MATS) instead pay their participants. I wonder if this introduces minor adverse selection, in that only writers who are otherwise financially stable can afford to participate. Famously, startup incubators that charge (like OnDeck) are much worse than incubators that pay for equity (like YC or hf0).
I imagine you've thought about this a lot already, and you do offer need-based scholarships which is great; also things like LessOnline and Manifest have proven some amount of success for charging for events. But maybe there's some other way of finding sponsors or funders for these writers? For example, I think Manifund would be quite happy to sponsor 1-3 "full rides" at $5k+ each, for a few bloggers who are interested in topics like AI safety funding, impact evaluations, and new opportunities, which we could occasionally crosspost to the Manifund newsletter. And I imagine other orgs like GGI might be too!
1I agree with the paper that paying here probably has minimal effects on devs, but also even if it does have an effect it doesn't seem likely to change the results, unless somehow the AI group was more more incentivized to be slow than the non AI group.
1Minor point of clarity: I briefly attended a talk/debate where Nate Soares and Scott Aaronson (not Sumner) was discussing these topics. Are we thinking of the same event, or was there a separate conversation with Nate Soares and Scott Sumner?
If you're looking to do an event in San Francisco, lmk, we'd love to host one at Mox!
Thanks Ozzie - we didn't invest that much effort into badges this year but I totally agree there's an opportunity to do something better. Organizer-wise it can be hard to line up all the required info before printing, but having a few sections where people can sharpie things in or pick stickers, seems like low hanging fruit.
This could also extend beyond badges - for example, one could pick different colored swag t-shirts to signal eg (academia vs lab vs funder) at a conference.
I'll also send this to Rachel for the Curve, which I expect she might enjoy this as a visual and event design challenge.
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 for the review! Speaking on Manifund:
Is Manifund overpromising in some way, or is it just that other funders like OP/SFF don't show you the prospective/unfunded applications? My sense is the bar on getting significant funding on Manifund is not that different than the bar for other AIS funders, with some jaggedness depending on your style of project. I'd argue the homepage sorted by new/closing soon actually does quite a good job of showing what gets funded and the relative difficulty of doing so.
I do agree that our regrantors are less active than I'd like; historically, many of the regrantor grants go out in the last months of the year as the program comes to an end.
On matters of regrantor selection, I do disagree with your sense of taste on eg Leopold and Tamay; it is the case that Manifund is less doom-y/pause-y than you and some other LW-ers are. (But fwiw we're pretty pluralistic; eg, we helped PauseAI with fiscal sponsorship through last year's SFF round.) Furthermore, I'd challenge you to evaluate the regrantors by their grants rather than their vibe; I think the one grant Leopold made was pretty good by many lights; and Tamay hasn't made a grant yet.
We are also open to bringing on other regrantors, and have some budget for this -- if you have candidates who you think would do a better job, please do suggest them!