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This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Why building and backing Welfare Tech companies may be one of the most promising things we can do for billions of animals.
I used AI to assist in writing this post, but I’ve rewritten it extensively and endorse it.
* Announcing the launch of Spring Innovation Fund, a not-for-profit venture philanthropy studio and fund built specifical...
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Does this initiative includes attempts to mitigate risks regarding incentivizing risky, net-negative projects that can end up being extremely beneficial?
For example, should an impact market fund forecasting about which particular machine learning techniques will end up being most transformative? How about a gain-of-function research effort that was completed successfully and caused the development of an extremely important vaccine? (I'm not saying the efforts in these examples are net-negative, just that they can be.)
Thanks for asking. One reason we decided to start with forecasting was because we think it has comparatively low risks compared to other fields like AI or biotech.
If this goes well and we move on to a more generic round, we'll include our thoughts on this, which will probably include a commitment not to oracular-fund projects that seem like they were risky when proposed, and maybe to ban some extremely risky projects from the market entirely. I realize we didn't explicitly say that here, which is because this is a simplified test round and we think the forecasting focus makes risks pretty unlikely.
In the unlikely event that someone proposes a forecasting project < $20,000 which we think carries significant risk, we're prepared to take those steps this time too.