I agree this is a difference and it makes it a worse signal than in the for-profit world, but I still think it has the potential to be a good signal. Our opinions of how much good was done by something or something converge somewhat over time, both because of changing morals and because time simply allows us to better see the retrospective impact of something. We may not have a perfect estimate down to the dollar of how much good a past project did, but I think our estimates do get better over time, which is the motivation behind retroactive funding.
Even if the fraction of equity sold doesn't change, the price can still move. So if more funding comes in, you'd expect to see the price per share of equity to increase--maybe previously a charity would have sold 20% of their impact for $1 million, but now they sell it for $5 million because lots of impact investors are competing.
The 1/(t+5) schedule is just meant to be a suggested default, though--charities would also be able to set their own terms, so they could choose between selling 20% for $5 million or a smaller amount for $2 million.
I do think one important difference in where Will and Zvi are coming from is that Will thinks that conditional on humanity surviving, the spread in how good possible futures are is very wide, so aiming for the best possible future is actually way more valuable than preventing xrisk.
If you're bought into this "narrow target" view, saving your money makes a lot more sense, because you're not that worried about xrisk (relatively speaking) and it might be clearer how to have leverage on the trajectory of the future if you wait until the intelligence explosion
Yep, it's currently tracking how much money was raised. I think this isn't a useless signal, because big funders are evaluating projects' impact when deciding how much to fund them, but it's definitely not the only signal we want. I think a cool next step (for Manifund or for anyone else, and hopefully in the long term to be done by many people) would be to do some rough cost-effectiveness analyses of these orgs and then make markets around those estimates.
Thanks for the thoughtful comments! You and Austin already covered a lot, so I won't respond to everything.
On your point (2), I agree this is a strong point in favor of nonprofits. But I'm unsure how much to expect the future you describe--grantmaking way faster and higher volume, funding ambitious nonprofits and allowing them to grow aggressively--in some default world where a ton of new philanthropic capital gets put into CG, Longview, and similar orgs.
Is the limiting factor in grantmaking at these places not having enough money? Or is it more like wanting to avoid funding things that are net negative or flood the ecosystem with low-quality projects? I would have guessed more the latter, and in that case getting more money won't particularly help things like speed and funder chicken.
I'm sure you don't want to speak for either of those orgs, just speculating.
I agree this is a difference and it makes it a worse signal than in the for-profit world, but I still think it has the potential to be a good signal. Our opinions of how much good was done by something or something converge somewhat over time, both because of changing morals and because time simply allows us to better see the retrospective impact of something. We may not have a perfect estimate down to the dollar of how much good a past project did, but I think our estimates do get better over time, which is the motivation behind retroactive funding.
Even if the fraction of equity sold doesn't change, the price can still move. So if more funding comes in, you'd expect to see the price per share of equity to increase--maybe previously a charity would have sold 20% of their impact for $1 million, but now they sell it for $5 million because lots of impact investors are competing.
The 1/(t+5) schedule is just meant to be a suggested default, though--charities would also be able to set their own terms, so they could choose between selling 20% for $5 million or a smaller amount for $2 million.
I do think one important difference in where Will and Zvi are coming from is that Will thinks that conditional on humanity surviving, the spread in how good possible futures are is very wide, so aiming for the best possible future is actually way more valuable than preventing xrisk.
If you're bought into this "narrow target" view, saving your money makes a lot more sense, because you're not that worried about xrisk (relatively speaking) and it might be clearer how to have leverage on the trajectory of the future if you wait until the intelligence explosion
Yep, it's currently tracking how much money was raised. I think this isn't a useless signal, because big funders are evaluating projects' impact when deciding how much to fund them, but it's definitely not the only signal we want. I think a cool next step (for Manifund or for anyone else, and hopefully in the long term to be done by many people) would be to do some rough cost-effectiveness analyses of these orgs and then make markets around those estimates.
Thanks for the thoughtful comments! You and Austin already covered a lot, so I won't respond to everything.
On your point (2), I agree this is a strong point in favor of nonprofits. But I'm unsure how much to expect the future you describe--grantmaking way faster and higher volume, funding ambitious nonprofits and allowing them to grow aggressively--in some default world where a ton of new philanthropic capital gets put into CG, Longview, and similar orgs.
Is the limiting factor in grantmaking at these places not having enough money? Or is it more like wanting to avoid funding things that are net negative or flood the ecosystem with low-quality projects? I would have guessed more the latter, and in that case getting more money won't particularly help things like speed and funder chicken.
I'm sure you don't want to speak for either of those orgs, just speculating.