**I used Claude [Anthropic] to help draft/edit this post; all arguments were reviewed and modified by me.**
In the recent Manifund + Inkhaven essay contest on the topic "What systems might manage the coming torrent of funding?", I submitted an essay titled "The Funding Pipe Is the Problem. Here's How to Build a New One."
Link: https://open.substack.com/pub/timcamerlinck/p/the-funding-pipe-is-the-problem-heres
The essay argued for a new Discovery Layer in EA funding — using scouts, work-based evaluation, and small hardware grants to find capable independent researchers who fall outside normal legibility filters.
I used my own experience building ICAF (a full AI safety companion framework developed entirely on a phone under other constraints) as the central case study.
On April 24th, the essay was accepted and publicly visible on the Airtable submissions list.
On the morning of April 25th, it was silently removed. Every other submission stayed visible.
No warning. No explanation.
No response to two emails I sent Austin Chen on April 25th and May 1st asking for clarification.
I disclosed AI use clearly, submitted on time, and followed all published rules. Yet my essay — the one directly challenging how the current funding system filters talent — was the only one taken down.
For context, I also have an active hardware grant proposal currently live on Manifund:
https://manifund.org/projects/icaf-safe-ai-companion-framework-for-isolated-users--hardware-request
I’m not here to start a fight. I just want to know: what rule did I actually break? And why was there zero communication?
Happy to answer questions.
Hey! In response to what we judged to be low quality LLM submissions, we changed the Airtable view to only feature submissions we thought were past a particular quality bar (not strictly a filter on LLM usage, but there was definitely some correlation.)
Yours was not the only essay we filtered from the Airtable view, I would estimate about half were filtered.
I continue to be optimistic about LLM assistance for producing good essays, but I'd say the base rates are not great unfortunately.
Austin,
Thank you for responding.
Your explanation raises a few other questions, however. The original rules didn't answer these: the published criteria stated "AI use permitted; disclosure required." It did not describe a secondary quality filter applied specifically to AI-disclosed submissions.
I disclosed honestly and completely, as required. If the actual filtering standard was "quality of AI assistance" rather than "presence of AI assistance," that standard wasn't visible to submitters before the deadline. Honest disclosers couldn't calibrate to a bar they couldn't see.
I'm not arguing my essay should have won.
I'm asking whether the published rules accurately described how submissions would actually be evaluated.
On the essay itself: I'd invite you to read it against your stated quality bar. The argument — that discovery, validation, and scaling require structurally separate functions with work-based rather than credential-based handoffs — directly answers the prompt you posed.
The voice is mine. The framework is mine. The specifics are mine. Claude helped with polish, which is what I disclosed.
If, after reading it, you still judge it below your quality threshold, I'd genuinely like to understand why. That feedback would be useful.
What I can't reconcile is weeks of email silence followed by a public response only after I posted publicly. Whatever the merits of the filtering decision, the process of communicating it — to someone with an active grant application on your platform — deserved better than that.
Tim Camerlinck
I'm unfortunately not interested in providing feedback on primarily AI-generated work or replying to AI-generated comments (Pangram flags the entirety of your response as AI-generated).
If you have specific questions or critiques you will write in your own words, I'm open to reading & engaging.