Hey there~ I’m Austin, currently building https://manifund.org. Always happy to meet LessWrong people; reach out at akrolsmir@gmail.com!
Austin Chen
Karma: 1,986
Fundraising for Mox: coworking & events in SF
San Francisco – ACX Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025
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!
AI for Epistemics Hackathon
Strong upvoted—I don’t have much to add, but I really appreciated the concrete examples from what appears to be lived experience.
This company now exists! Brighter is currently doing a presale, for a floor lamp emitting 50k lumens, adjustable between 1800K-6500K: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/brighter-the-world-s-brightest-floor-lamp#/. I expect it’s more aesthetic and turnkey compared to DIY lumenator options, but probably somewhat more expensive (MSRP is $1499, with early bird/package discounts down to $899).
Disclaimer, I’m an investor; I’ve seen early prototypes but have not purchased one myself yet.
I think credit allocation is extremely important to study and get right, because it tells you who to trust, who to grant resources to. For example, I think much of the wealth of modern society is downstream of sensible credit allocation between laborers, funders, and corporations in the form of equity and debt, allowing successful entrepreneurs and investors to have more funding to reinvest into good ideas. Another (non-monetary) example is authorship in scientific papers; there, correct credit allocation helps people in the field understand which researchers are worth paying attention to, whose studies ought to be funded, etc. As any mechanism designer can tell you, these systems are far from perfect, but I think still much much better than the default in the nonprofit world.
(I do agree that caringness is often a bigger bottleneck than funding, for many classes of important problems, such as trying to hire someone into a field)
Makes sense, thanks.
FWIW, I really appreciated that y’all posted this writeup about mentor selection—choosing folks for impactful, visible, prestigious positions is a whole can of worms, and I’m glad to have more public posts explaining your process & reasoning.
Curious, is the list of advisors public?
Thanks for writing this, David! Your sequence of notes on virtues is one of my favorites on this site; I often find myself coming back to them, to better understand what it might mean to eg Love. As someone who’s spent a lot of time now in EA, I appreciated that this piece was especially detailed, going down all kinds of great rabbitholes. I hope to leave more substantive thoughts at some future time, but for now: thank you again for your work on this.
minifest
How does Lightcone think about credit allocation to donors vs credit to the core team? For example, from a frame of impact certs or startup equity, would you say that eg $3m raised now should translate to 10% of the credit/certs of Lightcone’s total impact (for a “postmoney impact valuation” of $30m)? or 5%, or 50%? Or how else would you frame this (eg $3m = 30% of credit for 2025?)
I worry this ask feels like an isolated demand for rigor; almost all other charities elide this question today. To be clear, I like Lightcone a lot, think they are very impactful, and have donated $5k this year, reflecting just my personal usage. I’m asking this question because:
I’d like to promote impact cert thinking among charities. Lightcone is unusually transparent wrt to funding, revenue and costs, so y’all are well placed to set an example
In a world where more charities answer this question, it’s much easier for donors to compare the total impact of different charities; and also to understand how valuable a marginal dollar is
If/when we fundraise directly for Manifund, having Lightcone’s precedent would be super helpful. I’m currently toying with similar calculations for our own impact certs, as well as our potential SF coworking space
With Lighthaven, Lightcone has expanded to charging for services offered.[1] I think it’s good to delineate what we’re buying when we rent Lighthaven for a day, vs what we’re “buying” when we send unrestricted donations
I’m also curious about credit allocation between donors in this round vs past donors like OP/SFF/FF; and credit allocation between between the different Lightcone team members (which iirc you’ve discussed but maybe never made concrete?)
I think this can be a particularly fraught topic socially, but if anyone can navigate this, it’s the Lightcone folks
- ^
which I totally endorse btw, and is the majority of how Manifund earns revenue
I mean, it’s obviously very dependent on your personal finance situation but I’m using $100k as an order of magnitude proxy for “about a years salary”. I think it’s very coherent to give up a year of marginal salary in exchange for finding the love of your life, rather than like $10k or ~1mo salary.
Of course, the world is full of mispricings, and currently you can save a life for something like $5k. I think these are both good trades to make, and most people should have a portfolio that consists of both “life partners” and “impact from lives saved” and crucially not put all their investment into just one or the other.
Mm I think it’s hard to get optimal credit allocation, but easy to get half-baked allocation, or just see that it’s directionally way too low? Like sure, maybe it’s unclear whether Hinge deserves 1% or 10% or ~100% of the credit but like, at a $100k valuation of a marriage, one should be excited to pay $1k to a dating app.
Like, I think matchmaking is very similarly shaped to the problem of recruiting employees, but there corporations are more locally rational about spending money than individuals, and can do things like pay $10k referral bonuses, or offer external recruiters 20% of their referee’s first year salary.
Basically: I don’t blame founders or companies for following their incentive gradients, I blame individuals/society for being unwilling to assign reasonable prices to important goods.
I think the bad-ness of dating apps is downstream of poor norms around impact attribution for matches made. Even though relationships and marriages are extremely valuable, individual people are not in the habit of paying that to anyone.
Like, $100k or a year’s salary seems like a very cheap value to assign to your life partner. If dating apps could rely on that size of payment when they succeed, then I think there could be enough funding for something at least a good small business. But I’ve never heard of anyone actually paying anywhere near that. (myself included—though I paid a retroactive $1k payment to the person who organized the conference I met my wife at)
I think keeper.ai tries to solve this with large bounties on dating/marriages, it’s one of the things I wish we pushed for more on Manifold Love. It seems possible to build one for the niche of “the ea/rat community”; Manifold Love, the checkboxes thing, dating docs got pretty good adoption for not that much execution.
(Also: be the change! I think building out OKC is one of the easiest “hello world” software projects one could imagine, Claude could definitely make a passable version in a day. Then you’ll discover a bunch of hard stuff around getting users, but it sure could be a good exercise.)
Thanks for forwarding my thoughts!
I’m glad your team is equipped to do small, quick grants—from where I am on the outside, it’s easy to accidentally think of OpenPhil as a single funding monolith, so I’m always grateful for directional updates that help the community understand how to better orient to y’all.
I agree that 3months seems reasonable when 500k+ is at stake! (I think, just skimming the application, I mentally rounded off “3 months or less” to “about 3 months”, as kind of a learned heuristic on how orgs relate to timelines they publish.)
As another data point from the Survival and Flourishing Funds, turnaround (from our application to decision) was about 5 months this year, for an ultimately 90k grant (we were applying for up to 1.2m). I think this year they were unusually slow due to changing over their processes; in past years it’s been closer to 2-3 months.
Our own philosophy at Manifund does emphasize “moving money quickly”, to almost a sacred level. This comes from watching programs like Fast Grants and Future Fund, and also our own lived experience as grantees. For grantees, knowing 1 month sooner that money is coming, often means that one can start hiring and executing 1 month sooner—and the impact of executing even 1 day sooner can sometimes be immense (see: https://www.1daysooner.org/about/ )
@Matt Putz thanks for supporting Gavin’s work and letting us know; I’m very happy to hear that my post helped you find this!
I also encourage others to check out OP’s RFPs. I don’t know about Gavin, but I was peripherally aware of this RFP, and it wasn’t obvious to me that Gavin should have considered applying, for these reasons:
Gavin’s work seems aimed internally towards existing EA folks, while this RFP’s media/comms examples (at a glance) seems to be aimed externally for public-facing outreach
I’m not sure what the typical grant size that the OP RFP is targeting, but my cached heuristic is that OP tends to fund projects looking for $100k+ and that smaller projects should look elsewhere (eg through EAIF or LTFF), due to grantmaker capacity constraints on OP’s side
Relatedly, the idea of filling out an OP RFP seems somewhat time-consuming and burdensome (eg somewhere between 3 hours and 2 days), so I think many grantees might not consider doing so unless asking for large amounts
Also, the RFP form seems to indicate a turnaround time of 3 months, which might have seemed too slow for a project like Gavin’s
I’m evidently wrong on all these points given that OP is going to fund Gavin’s project, which is great! So I’m listing these in the spirit of feedback. Some easy wins to encourage smaller projects to apply might be to update the RFP page to 1. list some example grants and grant sizes that were sourced through this, and 2. describe how much time you expect an applicant to take to fill out the form (something EA Funds does, which I appreciate, even if I invariably take much more time than they state).
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