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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: .01% Fund - Ideation and Proposal, published by Linch on March 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Pronounced: Basis Fund. Alt: Point-O-One-Percent Fund Summary The basic idea is for a new funding agency, or a subproject within existing funding agencies, to solicit proposals for research or startup ventures that, assuming everything goes well, can reduce existential risk by > 0.01 percentage points (pp) at a price point of between 100M-1B/0.01% of absolute xrisk reduced (including both financial costs and reasonable models of human capital). The two main advantages of having a specific fund or subfund that focuses on this are: Memetic call to increase ambition and quantification: Having an entire fund focused on projects that can reduce existential risk by >0.01% can help encourage people to look really hard and actively for potentially really amazing projects, rather than “settle” for mediocre or unscalable ones. Assessor/grantmaker expertise: Having a fund that focuses on specific quantitative models of this form helps to develop individual and institutional expertise in evaluating the quality of grants a) quantitatively and b) at a specific (high) tier of ambition. More specifically, we give initial seed funding in the between 30k - 10M region for projects that have within-model validity, where we don’t detect obvious flaws, and seem healthily devoid of very large (EV) downside risks. The idea is that initially successful projects will have an increasingly strong case for impact later, and then can move on to larger funders like Open Phil, Future Fund, SFF, Longview, etc. We don’t care as much about naive counterfactual impact at the initial funding stage, as (for example) projects that can save other people’s time/$s to do other important things are also valuable. We will preferentially fund projects that other people either a) are not doing or b) not doing well. The fund will primarily fund areas with more strategic clarity than AI safety or AI governance, as the “reduce x-risk by 0.01 percentage points” framing may be less valuable for those ventures. We may also fund projects dedicated towards increasing strategic clarity, especially if we think the arguments for their research directions feel qualitatively and quantitatively compelling. What does this funding source do that existing LT sources don’t? Point people heavily at a clear target. I feel like existing ventures I see, including both public EAIF/LTFF grants and the small number of grants/research questions that come across my desk at RP to (implicitly) evaluate, rarely have clear stories and never have numbers for “assuming this goes extremely well, we’d clearly reduce xrisk by X% through ABC” Having a clear target to aim for is often helpful Force quantification Quantification is often good, see (ironically) qualitative arguments here. Provide both a clear source of funding and specialization/diversification of grantmakers. Grantmakers here can focus on assessing quantitative claims of a certain ambition bar for seed funding, while leaving qualitative claims, non-seed funding, and grant claims of much lower ambition to other grantmakers. How will we determine if something actually reduces x-risk by 0.01pp if everything goes well? We start with high-level estimates of xrisk from different sources, such as as Michael Aird’s Database of existential risk estimates or Ord’s book, as well as someone (maybe Linch? maybe a reader?) who’s good at evaluating quantitative models to look at the within-model validity of each promising grant. A process such as the one outlined here could also be used when attempting quantification. As the fund progresses and matures, we may have increasingly more accurate and precise high-level quantitative estimates for levels of xrisk from each source (through a network of a...