I think it's a shame the Nucleic Acid Observatory are getting so few votes.

They are relatively cheap (~$2M/year) and are working on a unique intervention that on the face of it seems like it would be very important if successful. At least as far as I'm aware there is no other (EA) org that explicitly has the goal of creating a global early warning system for pandemics.

By the logic of it being valuable to put the first few dollars into something unique/neglected I think it looks very good (although I would want to do more research if it got close to winning).

Ah, I hadn't thought of that, and I can see how this makes the results indeterminate (because reallocating the votes from one joint-last candidate could bump the other joint-last candidate up from the bottom).

I'll have a think about how to handle this and get back to you, my initial thought is still to break ties randomly (with a stable-but-random ranking of the precedence of each candidate in a tie).

(Discussed separately) I think it would be best to split the pot 4 ways if this happens, because there is some chance of introducing a bias by deciding when to end based on a property of the votes. Or if there is some reason we can't do this that I'm not aware of (e.g. legal constraints), then breaking the tie with a coin flip.

(@Lorenzo Buonanno🔸 You can consider this the official answer unless I hear otherwise).

I'm curating this post. This was my favourite post from Funding Strategy Week. It makes a straightforward but important point that is useful to keep in mind.

Yup new accounts can downvote immediately, unlike on LessWrong where you need a small amount of karma to do so. Can't confirm whether this happened on this post

I'm curating this post (and by extension, part 2). These posts are very clearly written, and include a lot of detail like:

1. Figure 2^[1] on the lifecycle of viruses within the body
2. Which viruses we might be able to detect in blood
3. In part 2, an overview of where collected blood and plasma comes from in the US

As someone who is not familiar with this topic, this was a great concise introduction.

I stumbled across this via Trendlines in AIxBio evals, also by @ljusten. This author's contributions seem highly underrated to me.

1. ^{^}

   

In the spirit of Funding Strategy Week, I'm resharing this post from @Austin last week:

See the doc linked in the quick take for our thinking on this. These are the main reasons from there (ones below number 3 are not that important imo), upon reflection I would now swap 2 and 3 in terms of importance:

1. You can browse past editions with a much nicer + more familiar UI. I would guess this would convert a lot more people per impression than a signup box with no context
2. We want to start crossing over with substack in various other ways (getting authors from there to crosspost on the forum), so it would be useful for us (Toby) to become more familiar with how the platform works, particularly in terms of social dynamics rather than features per se. E.g. I don’t really understand whether most people discover newsletters on substack itself vs being linked from elsewhere
3. Substack has a good recommendations algorithm, which will hopefully recommend people other EA relevant content (this feels complementary with the thing above, where it’s facilitating some cross-flow of users between our owned channels and substack)

I'm curating this post. The facets listed are values that I believe in, but that are easy to forget due to short term concerns about optics and so on. I think it's good to be reminded of the importance of these things sometimes. I particularly liked the examples in the section on Open sharing of information, as these are things that other people can try and emulate.

Thanks for the comments everyone. This won't be done in time for this week's edition, but hopefully the next one