Epistemic status: written quickly, probably errors
Some thoughts on Manifund
To me it seems like it will be the GiveDirectly of regranting (perhaps along with NonLinear) rather than the GiveWell
It will be capable of rapidly scaling (especially if some regrantors are able to be paid for their time if they are dishing out a lot). It’s not clear to me that’s a bottleneck of granting orgs.
There are benefits to centralised/closed systems. Just as GiveWell makes choices for people and so delivers 10x returns, I expect that Manifund will do worse, on average than OpenPhil, which has centralised systems, centralised theories of impact.
Not everyone wants their grant to be public. If you have a sensitive idea (easy to imagine in AI) you may not want to publicly announce you’re trying to get funding
As with GiveDirectly, there is a real benefit of ~dignity/~agency. And I guess I think this is mostly vibes, but vibes matter. I can imagine crypto donors in particular finding a transparent system with individual portfolios much more attractive than OpenPhil. I can imagine that making a big difference on net.
Notable that the donors aren’t public. And I’m not being snide, I just mean it’s interesting to me given the transparency of everything else.
I love mechanism design. I love prizes, I love prediction markets. So I want this to work, but the base rate for clever mechanisms outcompeting bureaucratic ones seems low. But perhaps this finds a way to deliver and then outcompetes at scale (which seems my theory for if GiveDirectly ends up outcompeting GiveWell)
Epistemic status: written quickly, probably errors
Some thoughts on Manifund
To me it seems like it will be the GiveDirectly of regranting (perhaps along with NonLinear) rather than the GiveWell
It will be capable of rapidly scaling (especially if some regrantors are able to be paid for their time if they are dishing out a lot). It’s not clear to me that’s a bottleneck of granting orgs.
There are benefits to centralised/closed systems. Just as GiveWell makes choices for people and so delivers 10x returns, I expect that Manifund will do worse, on average than OpenPhil, which has centralised systems, centralised theories of impact.
Not everyone wants their grant to be public. If you have a sensitive idea (easy to imagine in AI) you may not want to publicly announce you’re trying to get funding
As with GiveDirectly, there is a real benefit of ~dignity/~agency. And I guess I think this is mostly vibes, but vibes matter. I can imagine crypto donors in particular finding a transparent system with individual portfolios much more attractive than OpenPhil. I can imagine that making a big difference on net.
Notable that the donors aren’t public. And I’m not being snide, I just mean it’s interesting to me given the transparency of everything else.
I love mechanism design. I love prizes, I love prediction markets. So I want this to work, but the base rate for clever mechanisms outcompeting bureaucratic ones seems low. But perhaps this finds a way to deliver and then outcompetes at scale (which seems my theory for if GiveDirectly ends up outcompeting GiveWell)
Am I wrong?