Except for the adopted ones, the ART-conceived (assisted reproductive technology) kids wouldn’t exist otherwise. And besides, the whole point of IVG (in-vitro gametogenesis) is to reduce the need for donor gametes.
How is being conceived in a different way to the norm being 'commodified'? I want to have kids with my partner, and right now that's not possible for us. If the Ivy Natal Fertility group succeed, it would be. The ability to have biological children is no more than what straight couples have, with the added bonus that all children born of this method would be intentional and desperately wanted.
Scott has some interesting thoughts outside the mainstream such that I am tentatively excited for some of these grants. If 20%+ end up paying off at least somewhat that would considerably raise the prestige and interest in later ACX grants I'd think.
I assume Scott has already done a forecasting success thing that he will reveal some years from now about which ones he feels most confident about. Of course like start ups having a 1 or even 2 in 10 hit rate is actually quite good.
I love the beetle one. Can we make that an ACX meme somehow?
(I also like that a nuclear war one showed up. EAers have always rated nuclear war and pandemic/bioterrorism as two of the 3 worst existential risks, but generally had an attitude that those two big problems were mostly better left to establishment government & science. Covd-19 suggests that this may have been misplaced confidence when it came to public health; perhaps we have misplaced confidence in the other one too.)
Of course we wouldn't eat the beetles, except to fend off starvation in desperate🪲circumstances. Obviously.
But then, there's some elasticity around what counts as "desperate circumstances," depending on how the beetles taste.🪲And we can't very well claim to know the exact hedonic exchange rate between eating the beetles versus other🪲food sources, if we haven't tried them even once...
🪲Of course we wouldn't eat the beetles, except for experimental purposes, to determine under what circumstances🪲we should reconsider our anti-beetle-eating🪲stance. Obviously.
Also we should take the relative supply🪲🪲of beetles and other goods into consideration.🪲We do produce a lot of plastic waste,🪲after all. Look at them. Just crawling around,🪲not🪲being put to any better use...🪲🪲🪲
🪲🪲Of course🪲we should🪲put🪲🪲the beetles🪲to the🪲most🪲🪲🪲economically efficient🪲use.🪲Obviously.🪲And if that🪲🪲means eating them,🪲well,🪲it's not like🪲they🪲were so🪲bad that🪲one🪲🪲time...🪲🪲🪲🪲
Half of me loves the beetle one and half of me is thinking, if 20 years from now we're looking back on this and one of these has gone horribly wrong it's going to be that one.
There are already many species of bacteria that consume crude oil. They're all over the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, for example, where oil seeps from the sea floor and has for umpty millions of years. They're sometimes used to hasten the breakdown of oil when it's spilled accidentally.
So about three months equivalent of fossil fuel burning - not really a material consideration for a one-off even assuming a full plastic to CO2 conversion.
Thank you. (Hmm I think there is a math mistake here. One ton of CO2 is 12/(12+2*16) tons of carbon, call it 1/3, so total carbon in plastic is equal to carbon (w/ hydrogen) that we burn every year. We should just burn all plastic and get whatever energy we can out of it.
Yes, you're right, I didn't take into account the combustion chemistry (albeit it's not an order of magnitude difference).
You joke about burning plastic (I assume) but some forms are reasonably good feedstock for energy from waste power plants (assuming you've got all your filters up to date to clean out the toxic emissions resulting from it). That said, it's not a particularly efficient fuel by any means, but it's just a way to get some use out of what would otherwise go to landfill.
I specifically came here to say the same thing - these are generally great, but the plastic beetle one seems the most perfect fit for this kind of grant. Some smart biologist just needs a bit of funding for some equipment to keep beetles in; low probability of success, potentially hugely impactful.
To address a comment below, I'm not too concerned about catastrophic risk on this one as the plastic itself is unlikely to be nourishing enough to sustain explosive population growth. Perhaps the ideal outcome is that there is some kind of cheap spray that makes the plastic much more digestible to the beetles, thereby controlling spread (but that's a problem that only happens if this project is *wildly* successful).
Covid-19 has boosted my skepticism of establishment government & science so much as to make me fear for the entire EA project - I feel like if we don't find a way to address rampant demosclerosis nothing else matters, nothing else will work. I'd feel a lot happier if any of Scott's grants or Zvi's grants explicitly addressed the issue. Or if I had an idea of my OWN to address it - I might then have applied for a grant myself!
I just keep noticing that in areas of concern for which people successfully "raise awareness" the government's response is to build a bureaucracy to "address" the issue...and that bureaucracy near-inevitably makes the problem WORSE.
The TSA, created to make travel statistically safer, makes airports SO "safe" as to become so inconvenient/expensive/annoying it causes more people to drive instead of fly. The increased driving means more car accidents; net effect (at least on the current margin) is to make travel statistically less safe.
Nuclear power regulations, created to make power generation safer, require SO MUCH "safety" that nuclear power plants are unaffordable and take too long to develop, so states end up relying more on coal/oil/gas for baseline power. Which is more polluting and kills more people (mining accidents and air pollution); net effect is to make power generation less safe.
The FDA/CDC/WHO, created to make us healthier, have killed over 100,000 Americans in the last few years (and a great many foreigners) by postponing vaccine approval, by preventing cheap instant covid tests or challenge tests, by not letting firms update vaccines to new variants or letting them optimize dosage levels to produce more doses or letting them optimize vaccine timing to improve effectiveness etcetera; net effect is to make us less healthy. (and fewer of us alive).
If we can't fix this dynamic I have to expect the result of *successfully* bringing more attention to nuclear war prevention or asteroid strike prevention or unfriendly AI prevention or what-have-you is that once we show the way - once we demonstrate progress along a promising path toward improving things - our government will make these issues a priority and form an Official Department to be in charge of each issue whereupon said departments will end up making THESE problems worse too.
We might be better off trying to fix these kind of problems IN SECRET to avoid regulatory attention! A private EA cabal with secret symbols, handshakes, meetings. Like the FreeMasons.
I hadn't thought about the net effects of nuclear power regulations and TSA hassles. But you have to think about the public reaction to those: how would the public feel about having a nuclear reactor built if the government wasn't endorsing it as safe to an extreme extent? And would people be willing to fly in a post-9/11 world without the security theater of TSA? It's true that the regulatory agencies may have swung the pendulum too far toward safety, but the public probably wouldn't accept is as far the other way as you might like.
Without the TSA (especially once we privatize the airports and air control) it would be between airlines, their insurers, and their customers what level of security is chosen. Security measures that aren’t cost-effective (eg taking off shoes because one crazy guy once tried a thing involving shoes that failed and couldn’t possibly have worked) would tend to fall by the wayside. Measures which *actually matter* (eg, hardening the cockpit doors) would tend to stay. The reason the dumb measures would go away is that companies could offer lower prices by getting rid of that stuff.
Personally I would pay EXTRA for a flight with NO SECURITY AT ALL at the customer level. Let people walk straight to the gate without lining up anywhere at all. Let ‘em even have open-carry or concealed-carry guns if they like!
The funny thing is that this level of security *already exists* in the form of small-airport private planes. Very rich people CAN get on a plane with no security; it’s just us plebes in the cattle-car planes that can’t!
Allow companies to COMPETE on security and some may pick more, others less. If everybody LIKES getting felt up by wand-wielding morons after a Rapiscan pass then that will remain the standard but maybe one or two lines experiment with less to drop prices; if it works then more follow.
The main argument FOR federalizing this stuff is externality-based - if a low-security plane gets hijacked and hits a building that affects the people in the building too. But that specific kind of attack became impossible moments after 9/11 and remains so; it’s just not worth worrying about.
9/11 revealed the massive externalities possible from unsecured plane flight, and not just hijacking - also bombing, or bargaining with passenger lives. That security theater wasn't just for passengers' peace of mind, but for everyone in a building that might be struck by a runaway plane. I don't think the mass public would tolerate a full libertarian approach.
Also, how are businesses even going to learn which security measures are effective and which aren't? Counting the number of terrorist attacks that happen under each security regime? I don't think that would be tolerable either.
Fun fact about the TSA: The transporter booth you have to stand in spread-eagled every time you want to board a flight is an X-ray backscatter scanner. When the TSA introduced them, I got a copy of the paper cited to justify the claim that they were safe (which sadly I can't discover the title of now). The paper had shown that if you divide the amount of ionizing radiation shot at a passenger by the volume of the passenger, you got a radiation density considerably lower than levels considered safe for that particular type of radiation.
Unfortunately, most of the radiation is absorbed or scattered by the first 1.5 cm of human, so the radiation density in the parts actually irradiated (mostly skin and subq fat) is much greater than the average over the entire body's volume.
EDIT: BUT not nearly as much greater as I thought when I began typing this. Approximating myself as a perfect sphere of radius 120mm, I find that the average radiation density in the outmost 15mm of spherical me, which gets half of the radiation, is only 1.5 times as great as the average over my entire spherical volume.
The chemical problems are very different. The problem with digesting cellulose is prying apart the tightly-wound fibers to get access to the individual polysaccharide chains, and then cutting some of the glycosidic links (C-O-C linkages). That is, wood is chemically quite different from oil.
If you want to digest the most common plastics, the problem is that (1) they are not soluble, so it must be done in the gut by something that can digest things outside its body fluids, i.e. bacteria, and (2) your organism must be able to oxidize C-C bonds without any kind of chemical "handle" to hold onto them. (Our own mitochondria can oxidize them easily, but only if they have a carboxyl group at the head to grab onto.) Note that it can't oxidize just any old C-C bond, because of course then it would destroy itself.
Even then, it's going to be difficult to find or breed something that can break the benzene rings in polystyrene. They are very sturdy, and it is possible your bacteria, fed polystyrene, might only excrete a variety of small substituted benzenes, which would be worse than useless, since they have a decent chance of being carcinogens.
I think this whole process is awesome. I am excited to see follow-ups with the projects, and would also be interested in seeing which projects weren't funded but might still be interesting, like "runner-ups or honorary ideas". The beetle project and automated / hybrid tutoring seemed very cool to me; I don't know too much about biotech. but it would be cool if someone did a project to modify bacteria/insects/algae to be more nutritious (e.g., altering the taste of crickets or consumable-bacterial-growths) / produce more energy / consume-convert wastes into useful things.
My impression has always been that 4-7 or so, if you select them well, is a superior option for small scall education creating amazing outcomes. 1 on 1 is well ahead of 1-35 and has some advantages in curriculum tailoring, though.
>Despite the growing importance of this field, there are relatively few technical biosecurity centers in the US, and the West Coast is underrepresented. This causes serious problems like poor pandemic readiness, limited understanding of biowarfare risks, and the biosecurity grad student who I'm dating living 3,000 miles away from me.
One of these problems is not like the other ones 😂
Here in Boston, to me it seems like there are lots of biotech people but few biosecurity specialists. I think they're concentrated around Washington DC.
Washington D.C. makes sense. Why is Boston such a biotech hub? My initial hypothesis is proximity to a certain pair of prestigious universities, but I imagine there could be other reasons.
Development at Kendall Square (right behind MIT) has been targeted to biotech for a few years now. (This may be more of a description than an explanation, or half/half.)
The universities started it, but then comes clustering effects and targeted development. We just lost a beloved long-time food market to new lab space. What's really weird is driving around Cambridge and Watertown seeing billboards advertising reagents, next to the usual ads for fast food.
Before this Pandemic, Georgetown and Johns Hopkins were the only two universities that had a decent program in it I could find. Not surprising the experts would concentrate in DC, if that's where they studied. I predict many more will appear in coming years.
> This is the part where I post applications publicly on the blog (if you gave me permission) and readers can look at them and decide to support them or not. About 500 of you gave me permission to do this, and your applications together total about 1,500 pages of text. Substack probably won’t let me write a blog post this long, and you guys won’t read it even if I do, so I’m still thinking about how I want to handle this. Please give me until sometime in January to work something out, but rest assured, I haven’t forgotten about this.
I have a suggestion here. You have 500 ACX++ grants. I'd first weed out the ones you find objectionable. That not only do you not want to fund but you think lack merit. Then I'd pair them in small groups of highly different proposals. Then I'd let each person do a paragraph in a public Open Thread and tell them to be there to answer questions. The ones who won't agree are forfeiting their right to be included in ++.
I suspect this will cut down the number significantly. Those that remain will be rationed out over a year. But in exchange the grantees will get more exposure than people hunting through 2,000 pages or a huge database. And if you like it you can do this on a rolling basis instead of making it into a huge Christmas nut to be cracked like you did this year. (It'll also give you more content for however you weigh that.)
Thirding. As one of the 500 people, I would be in favor of some kind of “write an additional paragraph explaining your project” (perhaps a condensation of the original proposal) and I definitely want to second of the above commentor suggestion of an open thread participation for the AC X plus plus people.
Agreed. As someone with a rather speculative proposal that consumes almost no money apart from my own time, I was planning to post in an open thread if I didn't get "funded" anyway. (I already noted in my application that attention and "signal boosting" is more relevant for my project than money)
500 paragraphs is a whole lot of paragraphs. Even if half of them are meritless, 250 paragraphs is a whole lot of paragraphs. And lots of people never bother with comments on posts, especially open threads.
I think a better idea might be a single post, sorted into categories, with a very short sentence description of each grant as a link to the pages of text in the application, hosted somewhere else. It'd be a very long post, but if it's sorted into categories, people can peruse it for ideas they find interesting, link to the outside information to read more on it, and decide what to do. And maybe the links could include a place to ask and answer questions from founders.
It would probably take a lot of work to set this up, but Scott could probably pay someone to do it.
I like the idea, but this approach would require someone to read 500 ask-me-anything threads, summarize and interpret them, and then pick winners. I recommend also using some other web platform that can automatically collect votes or ratings from paying ACX subscribers, in order to circumvent the Scott-reads-10,000-comments step.
(Paying subscribers in order to reduce potential fraud, to get more paying subscribers, and because having the people who provide the money get to say where it goes would, by some long-standing but now aggressively-disputed standards, be more just, and motivate them to think more carefully.)
Earlier today Matthew Yglesias had a tweet about how despite widespread belief that numerous government institutions failed during the pandemic, there's been virtually no legislative effort to change anything. So I'm really glad to see ACX putting $100k toward a better FDA. Trying to fix what's broken instead of just having fun complaining. Hell yeah!
Oh, and as a biologist I want to strongly endorse the cell culture media testing project. This is the exact kind of thing that is 1) really important and 2) in a kind of hole where it's not the kind of thing any science funding agency would like to fund.
Strong agree - this one is tied with the beetle one for best application in my view. Making the process of doing science less onerous/painful is huge (not to mention the waste in having extremely smart people spending >50% of their time fiddling with petri dishes and whatnot, and another 20% writing grant applications...)
A lot of the stuff that did fail is just not sexy enough for politics to care. Stuff that might be handled by MY's "secret congress" but even there not a huge priority.
It seems like the incentives in American democracy don't actually work toward effective government on the national level. If your local city council can't keep the streets clean, they might get voted out, but very rarely will people vote for a different congressperson or president based on how competent the FDA is.
"SD, $5,000, to fund an honors' thesis on neutrino research. S is an undergraduate who wants to work on neutrino physics with one of his professors, but needs outside funding to be sure it will work."
SD, if you're out there and want any outside help / input / collaboration, please feel free to reach out. I'm a particle physics postdoc (mostly working on dark matter), know a thing or two about neutrinos, and think your idea is super interesting and useful. If nothing else I can connect you with people working in neutrino physics who may be more helpful than me. You can reach me at
SD here! I've emailed you - thanks for the help! I always, always appreciate advice from people who have been doing this for longer than I have.
If anyone else has any input or just wants to talk about the project, feel free to email me at sd10(at)williams(dot)edu (maybe should have asked Scott to put this in the main post but I figure I'll do the self-promo thing at some point closer to the time I begin my work, which should do the trick).
Yeah, I actually mentioned WATCHMAN (and Nucifer, although I don't think they take Americans) in my grant application. I want to join them ASAP or at least work in parallel with them. Thanks!
Well done Scott. It doesn’t look like being “outed” by the NYT was a bad thing in the end. I hope to do some small contribution. I’ll also sign up here.
Thank you for this initiative, Scott. It has surfaced many worthwhile endeavors. It is admirable that you took on all the related effort, with the help of many supporters and funders.
> if they're smart enough to attempt this project, they're smart enough to know about XYZ Grants which is better suited for them (...)
This sounds like the grant reviewers assume that "likely to succeed at project" is very strongly correlated with "able to navigate searching for funding". For some of the projects that got awarded this sounds eminently sensible to me (e.g. the affect public policy things), but not for others (e.g. most of biology-adjacent projects). I wonder if I'm wrong about the latter (i.e. if success at projects that ostensibly are not about influencing people is strongly correlated with ability to navigate social mazes). Thoughts?
I think the grant reviewers already took that into account because they're domain specialists, judging by (for instance) the remark for Todhunter's grant: "I'm not sure anyone will use this, except for me personally I WOULD LOVE THIS SO MUCH", seconded by commenter and biologist Ivan Fyodorovich above: "I want to strongly endorse the cell culture media testing project. This is the exact kind of thing that is 1) really important and 2) in a kind of hole where it's not the kind of thing any science funding agency would like to fund"
The bigger problem I have with this line of thinking is the assumption that
> if XYZ doesn't fund these people then that's strong evidence that they shouldn't be funded
If Scott doesn't fund an applicant, is that strong evidence they shouldn't be funded? It seems obvious the answer is no given the limited amount of people he can fund and the large number of applicants. Why should this not be true for other grantmakers? The assumption here seems to be some variant of the just world fallacy where P(is funded | should be funded) = 1, but it seems more likely that this number is quite low.
I realized this actually makes sense IF it means "since the applications get passed to ACXG+ anyway, let's pick up the ones they're unlikely to fund", but otherwise I agree it's weird (see my top-level comment below)
Beetles which can biodegrade plastic strike me as worryingly double-edged. Plus side, plastic not hanging out in the environment forever is probably better for us, and for the global ecosystem at large. Minus side, aren't there things made out of plastic where its non-biodegradingness is essential to their function? Is anyone in charge of knowing the full list of things which might fail catastrophically if plastic-biodegrading beetles were released into the environment?
My thoughts exactly. Termites (wood eating insects) are a huge problem in some parts of the world. It would be awful if similar issues arose with plastic.
We could always go full on science apocalypse and have an island where we ship plastics loaded with beetles that eventually results in our destruction when they learn to cover the distance to the mainland, possibly through micro-evolution. There are worse apocalyptic scenarios. This one seems almost fun by comparison. Michael Crichton would have to be simulated on a super-computer to write the novel.
According to the application, the beetles can only get a small amount of their subsistence from plastic and wouldn't be very good at this in any case. What the researcher actually wants is the gut microbes, with the hopes that once we understand them better we can figure out some way to use them at scale. Breeding the beetles in a plastic-enriched environment is a means to get better microbes. The microbes presumably can't escape the beetles without human help. At least this is my current understanding.
I can't help side-eyeing the "presumably" there. If plastic-biodegrading bacteria gained the ability to survive independently of the beetles, there's an awfully rich ecological niche waiting for them out there.
This is more worrisome than what I originally thought: first I thought, "Well, if we need boats or landfill liners or nuclear waste containers or whatever to survive the beetles, I guess the beetles can't eat them without oxygen, and we can always lace them with insecticides." I don't insecticides that will work that well with bacteria, and gut bacteria are presumably already anaerobic. So maybe we'll have to resort to teflon or geopolymers or something in order to build bacteria-proof things in the Grim Beetle Future.
On the plus side, the bacteria probably smell better than darkling beetles do.
(Just to be clear, I think the research should definitely be done; I'm just not sure whether deploying the results in the wild would be good or bad.)
I mean, anaerobic bacteria TYPICALLY are outcompeted by aerobic bacteria in situations with plenty of oxygen. Specialization is a big deal for bacteria, so I would expect it to be much much harder to get gut bacteria to thrive in a place they could digest plastic for us than it is to make efficient plastic-eating gut bacteria in the first place.
I don't understand, isn't this just a much *better* outcome than the one projected in the grant? It seems increasingly clear that plastic was a terrible mistake from the get-go, and if Scott's grant intervention leads ultimately to a world where we have to go back to glass, steel, ceramics and tin with a small dash of bakelite (a resin) for flavor because any plastic will just get devoured by omnipresent microbes before you have time to use it, that will be a massive improvement on all fronts.
My prior is that plastics are an integral part of modern life in such a way that we couldn't have much of what we have *at the price we have it for*. In other words, much of the world would be much worse off without the existence of plastics. The "terrible mistake" seems to be not using plastics judiciously, not that plastics exist.
That being said, I have no special insight or knowledge and could be convinced otherwise.
"My prior is that plastics are an integral part of modern life in such a way that we couldn't have much of what we have *at the price we have it for*."
I think this is almost certainly correct (notably, every post-celluloid data storage medium including film that doesn't burn your house down is plastic-based), and I'm willing to bite that bullet. To me, plastic seems like our time's equivalent of asbestos. It's no good telling people how practical it is that once your gloves get dirty you can just throw them into the fire and they're sparkling clean again.
Non-OBSF*: "The Great Fog" by H. F. Heard, in which a very fast mildew takes over the world and rots everything that can rot. There's a fog which makes smoke stay and be intolerable. No wood, no paper... as I recall, humanity is limited to using glass and stone. Fortunately, the fog moderates temperatures and produces sufficient stuff that's good to eat.
* In rec.arts.sf.written, it was a custom to add OBSF (obligatory sf) to posts that weren't about sf.
More that I'm pointing out that this is science fiction, even though I'm not obligated to include it. I tend to see the world through science fiction.
I reread the story. My description is mostly correct. except that I hadn't noticed that the climate-changing mold was the result of an effort to produce a fat-producing mold. Also, there was a big die-off of the people who couldn't handle living in a very humid environment. It was published in1943, so there was no notion of a high proportion of people dependent on medicine.
Well, among other things, no hip replacements, no arterial grafts, no cardiac catheterization to stop heart attacks, no single-use medical instruments so loads more iatrogenic infection and death from same.
The result of the great fog was presented as utopian, and it might actually be a net gain.
People couldn't see to go faster than four miles an hour, though I think Heard was underestimating how well people could go with cleared, familiar paths. It would still be running, at most. Horses couldn't see as well as people.
No war, no car accidents, nothing much to accumulate. Fine stone musical instruments might be about it for valuable items.
Note that this was written in the 1940s, so most of what you're mentioning didn't exist yet. If people are moving more slowly and not using a lot of edged tools, there would be fewer accidents of all sorts.
They live pretty much on food produced by the mold, so a lot of the less healthy food isn't there, and the premise seems to imply that the moss food is at least nutritionally adequate.
Any and all plastic could be totally re-used if only we chose to invest a little bit of energy. It isn't currently economically cost-effective to do so, but if we really wanted to get rid of plastic we could. We just lack the will.
Where can I read more about this? I was under the, likely mistaken, impression that we know how to reuse some plastics, but for vast majority of them once they are polymerized we don't have better ideas than "burn them at high temperature to recover simple compounds".
So warning that I am not a chemist, so I probably don't have all the details quite correct, and am just giving my semi-educated opinion. Burn them at high temperature is basically what I am talking about, but why is that such a problem? Well, because it ends up costing energy.
The way we make plastics now is we start with petroleum, which contains lots of molecules that contain more than three carbon atoms, break them down into mostly molecules that contain less than three (ok, we keep a lot of hex rings too) then re-combine those smaller molecules into large chains of polymer. There is no particular reason we can't start with carbon-containing trash, and use similar processes as we use to crack/refine oil to turn it into the same chemical feed-stocks we use to make plastic.
The reason we don't do this is energy. Oil is actually insanely cheap. I know Americans like to complain when gas costs more than $4 a gallon but. $75 for a 55 gallon drum of oil is extremely cheap. Do you know how much a 55 gallon drum it? It's like the size of a person. If you could buy jugs of oil in the supermarket it would be cheaper than almost anything else, except maybe bottled water.
Because is so cheap, oil refineries burn a substantial amount of their cheapest products to generate the energy required to form their more expensive products that are used to make things like plastic. We can't really do this with garbage because it would generate tons of pollution and garbage isn't as energy dense as petroleum. But if we had much more abundant, cheap energy we could. We wouldn't even need to burn the garbage, we could heat it in a kiln to recover and re-use essentially all of the carbon and other toxins.
I think you can get net energy out by burning plastic... (Hasn't everyone burned plastic by the camp fire?) I'd like to see plastics made that burn better. (Less crap in exhaust 'smoke') Think of plastics as a side step between oil and energy. We make all plastic knowing they will be burned. Or alternative 'green' idea. Keep putting them in land fills, but change the narrative to permeant carbon storage. Burn them or bury them... that's all I got. Putting 'em back into the ecosystem seems to be the worst thing to do.
Re Beetles: Why not termites? They already have the gut bacteria to digest wood.
Calling burying plastic permanent carbon storage seems pretty disingenuous - the carbon in it came from oil, and only helped us in its use as plastic. Burying it instead of burning it is the same idea as leaving oil in the ground.
It's a little more complicated than using high temperature, because many plastics contain heteroatoms (e.g. Cl, S,N) that can create noxious compounds (e.g. HCl, SO2, NOx) even at very high temperatures. So you need to add some fairly expensive flue-gas capture technology to pull out the compounds you don't want in the air -- and then find a way to dispose of them, or someone who wants to buy them. (It goes without saying that low-temperature combustion generates even more evil compounds, PAH and such.)
Really? You know how to remove nurdles from oceans, beaches and the innards of fish? Harmlessly remove microplastics from fetuses? I think you should have submitted an ACX grant application if this is true.
I think GP is talking about the problem of "I have a bucket of plastic trash and want to convert it into usable plastic of the shape I desire" and not "I have a lake that contains a bucketful of plastic in it and want to extract it".
I don't know who you mean by GP here, but I think we must be talking past one another. Let's recap: I asserted that a bacterium which destroys all plastic being released into the wild would be a net good despite the infrastructural damage it would cause, due to the fact that the bacteria would also obliterate all the horrible shit like oceanic nurdles and microplastics presently plaguing ourselves and the rest of the planet. Eric P. replied to this statement of mine with the claim that we can already recover any and all plastic. I replied to that claim in turn, expressing a skepticism which I assure you is very real and sincere. In other words, we're talking about something closer to your scenario #2 here.
I'm still under the impression that Eric meant #1 and not #2 (nonwithstanding the context). I eagerly await Eric's confirmation, refutal, and/or elaboration.
E: By GP I meant Eric's comment (grandparent of my comment).
Yeah, we were talking past each other. I don't have a solution for removing it from the environment, only re-using it industrially.
But while I hate plastic in the environment as much as the next person, I also don't think it is the most important environmental problem to solve. Micro-plastics are disgusting and surely harmful, but I don't believe they are so harmful that we should regret having ever used plastic. It will all eventually break down and settle into sediments. It will take hundreds of years, but the earth is old and life will go on.
The best way to remove plastic from the environment is to stop putting it there, and in my opinion the best way to do that is to develop a robust industrial system for re-processing it.
There's a lot of different types of plastic. I'd be surprised if there's not some high-grade polymer like UHMWPE or something with a bunch of fluorines that the beetles can't get at.
Would it be possible to engineer bacteria so that they were good at digesting micro-plastic, but not strong enough to pull bits off of plastic objects? Or at least cause deterioration very slowly?
I'm not an expert, but based on my limited knowledge of the subject, I don't think that's likely to be practical, because on the scale of a bacterium, basically any piece of plastic represents a large ragged surface. Even microplastics are much too large for bacteria to subsume, they'd still be attacking them in the same way that they would a larger piece. The more weathered the piece of plastic, the higher its surface area to volume ratio, so the more easily it ought to be attacked, but any plastic should be vulnerable to weathering.
Also, once eating plastic becomes a viable ecological niche, any bacteria which is better at it will tend to outcompete ones which are worse at it.
This is amazing. I mostly write to praise Scott and the team. But can't help but to contrast with the many philanthropies I know well....such exciting ideas/people he has curated, in such a short period, with so little red tape.
For peace of mind in the future: a way to avoid mistakes in the worse direction is to compile a list of terms that must not appear in a post (in this case, names of people who want to remain anonymous), and arrange for automation to scream loudly if a draft contains any of them. (Not my idea, this is a pretty common approach to ensuring that various not-intended-to-be-made-public things were redacted from a release of some software.)
This is just incredibly impressive that you pulled this venture out of thin air, roped in all the support and expertise you needed (or could find), let it grow way beyond what you anticipated, and then pulled off this very wide ranging list of worthy projects to support. Wow. It warms my heart to see.
The first part of my career involved a ton of fundraising, in and out of academia, and working with foundations on various joint endeavors. It can be a pretty slow-moving, trend-following world. But also, some of the expertise (to raise money well and to give it away well) are for sure real skills. It's astounding to me that you pulled this off in such a short time, and I hope you will write more about the process of it.
I'm interested in the question of what funded groups might want to talk to each other about. I know a lot of foundations try to start up those kinds of cross-pollinating conversations and that on the side of the people funded, they sometimes say "yes" to whatever the funders propose in the hopes it will lead to more funding, even if they think it's a waste of time. I think funders get impatient encountering the same kinds of organizational stumbling blocks in the groups they fund (I consult for organizations so I get that too). Some kind of honest assessment of when those networking opportunities are seen to be beneficial by the people in them would be nice to have.
Thank you for helping to bring so much good stuff into the world! I hope beyond the exhaustion it sounds like this produced, that you have a real sense of satisfaction in it. It's a remarkable thing you did, in a whole different direction from your writing and your psychiatry practice.
"Why would somebody working on biochemistry want to talk to someone working on political activism just because they got a grant from the same person?"
Going to conferences of people who all think and dress the same way and work on the same issue is beneficial in one way; going to conferences like EA or SciFoo is beneficial in a different way--optimizing for serendipity.
Yeah. People who received an ACX grant probably have many more things in common than two randomly selected people (even if we restrict the selection to compatriots). But also, sometimes just having common knowledge that everyone in a certain group actively wants to meet and chat with everyone else is already valuable.
It would have been useful to know that one option was funding, of some sort, for politics/political careers, not necessarily for me personally. There are some interesting Senate seats up this cycle that might be viable options for third party candidacy who knows what they are doing where the existing brand name options are mediocre or in conflict with the kinds of things you, Scott, care about.
There are, given the divergence in my interests vs Scott, more very exciting projects on this list than I would have expected. Though part of that may be all the extra money and effort many people contributed.
I'll also somewhat second the comment by someone that people involved in grants perhaps associate being able to get grant funding too much with having good ideas, as far as the "why are they asking you and not this other potential option for money".
I hesitate to ask because it seems like surely you've thought of this, but....whatever tax status your grant fund has, have you evaluated if giving to politicians impacts it?
Double-OF-COURSE-YOU-RESEARCHED-THIS-energy: do the laws in Australia allow you to give large sums to political actors, and the actor to accept it? I do note that the person is not running for office themselves, but, ya know.
The grants are coming from two pots: my money, and external funders' money.
External funders are donating through a tax-deductible EA Fund.
I can't do this for tax reasons, so my donations won't be inherently tax-deductible. I plan to cover a combination of whatever grants that the EA Fund can't, plus the recipients who are inherently tax-deductible themselves (eg charities).
Answer to the second part: yes, Australian laws do allow it.
It’s possible I’ll need to register my activities under the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme (https://www.ag.gov.au/integrity/foreign-influence-transparency-scheme) but this doesn’t prohibit any such activities, just makes it public where the money is coming from. And clearly there is no difficulty with that being public in this case.
Very glad to see approval voting (AV) get funded (and promoted) on ACX. We see ranked choice voting (RCV) making inroads around the country, but there seems to be very little awareness of the pathologies of RCV that make it inferior to AV. [This is based on my remembrance of analysis on RangeVoting.org, which smells trustworthy to me.]
Approval voting is probably the best option, that could reasonably happen anyways, for American elections. Something of a limit to the problems that can be solved solely by better voting but at least at the municipal level it is pretty big.
The pathologies of ranked choice voting are that in certain weird theoretical combinations of circumstances, voting for your true preferences makes your preferences less likely to be satisfied.
The problems with Approval Voting are less obvious, because it's Never Been Tried (actually it has been tried, in a few low-stakes elections but not much that we'd learn from). The upside of Approval Voting is that it allows a charismatic centrist to be elected... the downside might be that it precludes anyone else from ever getting elected. In a world where Approval Voting was the norm, what kind of candidates would we get? Would it be a "race to the centre", where candidates work hard to avoid ever unambiguously taking any kind of position that anyone at all could possibly disagree with? And would this be better or worse than what we have now?
>The pathologies of ranked choice voting are that in certain weird theoretical combinations of circumstances, voting for your true preferences makes your preferences less likely to be satisfied.
By Arrow, is that not true for all (non-dictatorial) voting systems, including approval voting?
I think you're correct. The way you can kinda claim otherwise for approval voting is by changing the model of voter preferences (instead of them having preference orders, claim that they have sets of acceptable candidates).
Also: a nit: Arrow also requires determinism, but all the systems we talk about are deterministic.
(Trivial counterexample of a nondeterministic system: choose a voter at random and do as they wish. It's not dictatorial, because the voter is chosen at random.)
Yes, it is somewhat true for all (though Arrow iirc only applies to ordinal voting methods, which AV is not). But for AV, approving a candidate will never help a candidate you did not approve (though it may hurt a different candidate you approve of more). With IRV, your true preferences can potentially elect your least liked candidate.
In a highly polarized environment, you may have a candidate who is everyone’s second choice but no one’s first choice. They get eliminated in the first round of evaluation in the RCV algorithm.
RCV still has the benefit over our current system (PV) that the spoiler effect is avoided. So those third parties can exist, but they still need to beat the conventional parties in popularity.
With AV on the other hand, you're not forced to rank, only to approve, and so any acceptable compromiser has a huge advantage in an otherwise polarized election.
I'm not sure IRV completely avoids the spoiler effect.
With plurality, if a 3rd candidate is at 1-2%, it is not a big deal, but as soon as it is 5-10% it becomes a liability because of being a spoiler. Thus it is hard for them to grow large support. As soon as they start to grow, they become a liability and voters will strategically vote against them.
IRV does handle this better at low ranges of support. A candidate with low enough support to place last won't be a spoiler, but there is still a center squeeze and other cases where there could be a spoiler. This is because IRV does not satisfy Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_of_irrelevant_alternatives)
I mean, doesn't it? in the limit where all the Irrelevant alternatives are truly identical, all their preferences will flow to one another and one of them at random will get all of the votes of the collective bloc of identical candidates. In the real world, of course, the candidates aren't truly identical, but then it is no longer obviously bad that eg. the votes for the Communist don't all preference the Socialist when the Communist party is eliminated.
Note that irrelevant does not mean identical, though it is true that a system that does not satisfy IIA will be subject to 'candidate cloning'. So your intuition is correct, IRV does a much better job at candidate cloning than plurality, but it still fails IIA.
In the communist/socialist example, you are correct it wont be an issue *if* the communist support is relatively low (i assume you are assuming this, since you say they will be eliminated). If their popularity grows, there is a potential for a center squeeze.
Consider this toy example (numbers are completely made up by me to illustrate. I am not implying any political preference here, just following the example provided)
Say there is an IRV election between Socialists and Capitalists with the following support:
Socialist: 55%
Capitalist: 45%
But what if the Communist party decided to enter... if they only have 1-5% support, their votes transfer to second choices, which I think is fair to say will be Socialist, so no difference in outcome, as we noted above.
But say instead, they drew a lot of support, and we had
Communist: 30%
Socialist: 25%
Capitalist: 45%
Now it is the socialists that will be eliminated first. And unlike the communists, where we could be confident that all of the 2nd place support would flow to Socialists, the Socialists 2nd place is more likely to be split. If just 6% of voters were socialist, but not full communist, and put Capitalist as 2nd place, then in the 2nd round we get
Communist: 49%
Capitalist: 51%
This is IIA failing (also 'center' squeeze' with regrads to IRV). By entering the race, the Communist party caused the winner to go from Socialist to Capitalist. This is a worse outcome for them.
Which suggests that approval voting has more problems than ranked voting in getting your “first choice” in, although AV does away with rankings which is an odd way of fixing that problem - pretending it doesn’t exist.
If that is even the problem (I’m not clear what your pathologies are).
As someone living in a country with ranked voting, specifically the single transferable vote, I would often vote for a first ranked candidate destined to lose. Then on the elimination of that candidate my vote goes to the next person. That person might also be destined to lose so the vote percolates up to elect somebody eventually if I kept ranking.
That’s pretty badly written, and it seeks to have handpicked an example where there might be a discrepancy. In order to prove the point the piece has the voter act suspiciously against her wishes.
“In the example, suppose the 1st voter, instead of honestly stating her top-preference was A, were to dishonestly vote C>A>B, i.e. pretending great love for her truly most-hated candidate C, and pretending a lack of affection for her true favorite A.”
There’s no explanation of why she did this, but apparently the voter doesn’t get A elected if she prefers C when voting. Why is that a problem and why are we second guessing her?
And I think it’s pretty clear that most people, if they get this system at all will use the highest rank available to them, 99 then 98 etc. Which is basically ranked voting.
i agree the article is pretty dense, and not very user friendly. There are more accessible writeups out there if you are interested.
But read the example again! The voter causes 'A' to win, not 'C'. By lying and claiming 'C' was her favorite, this causes 'A' to win.
To the 2nd point, "if they get this system at all will use the highest rank available to them, 99 then 98 etc. Which is basically ranked voting."
It is still different! They have implicitly 'ranked' their preferences; similar perhaps to IRV, but the way Score voting determines the winner does not make this equivalent.
And I don't think it is clear people will use the highest ranks. They will use the highest AND lowest (since they don't want the candidates they hate to be ranked high). And this.. is basically Approval Voting.
The voter didn’t lie. She voted as she voted. Why is the writer assuming somebodies internal mind choice as being illegitimate and why is she ever going to with out prior to the count what might have happen. It’s thoroughly contrived.
Of course most people will rank 99,98,97, if a die hard Republican doesn’t do that for the Republican candidates (and I assume there would be multiple candidates from each party) then she will worry about a democrat would rank the top Democrats 99,98,97.
1. I'm not sure I understand your objection... It is pretty standard for analysis of voting methods to consider strategic voting, this is not unique to this article. If you assume no strategic voting, that makes range even better.
If it is just a general 'this is contrived' objection, then yes I don't think anyone would disagree. Contrived, or 'toy', examples are often used to illustrate how a voting method can go wrong, as they are simpler, clearer and cleaner than a more complex example.
2. Yes, the die hard 'R' can rate Republicans '99,98,97...', or can rate them all '99' (you can reuse scores). But they wouldn't rate the Democrats this way. They would give them scores closer to 0. It would be foolish to leave them unranked.
I suppose it comes down to what our objective function is. I’d rather have an official of whom 80% of the population approves than have a candidate who is 53% of the countries first choice.
You make a good point about a strategy of priority ranking candidates unlikely to win, but we face an education barrier to get most of the electorate onboard. I suppose a similar educational barrier exists for AV as well. Voters may still adapt suboptimal strategies.
It could be interesting to write down some objective functions and voter behavior rules and then run simulations to see what would happen. Obviously lots of limitations to modeling, but it could fortify the discussion.
I agree approval voting (AV) is better than plurality voting (PV). Another system that could be beneficial in the current situation is approval/disapproval voting (ADV). You could vote for or against any number of candidates. ("I am for Alice, Bob and Carol, neutral about Dave and Fred, and against Elisabeth"). Where AV is giving [0,1] to each candidate, ADV would be giving [-1,0,1] to each.
AV's advantage indeed is to allow support of outsider candidates without "wasting the vote". ADV goes beyond that, it is the antidote to polarization - it would *actively punish* the "Shiri's Scissors candidates".
The said candidates utilize the scissors as a cheap way of mobilizing a voter base; whether it turns out on election day that they picked the "50%+" or the "50%-" side of the scissors, they have *certainly* swept aside their non-scissor competitors. In terms of ADV, a scissors candidate A would cut the voters pro:neutral:contra as 51:8:41 - often against a candidate B taking the opposite scissor position, with near-opposite ratios. Until the backlash of the next election, that is, where it will be 42:7:51. (it's about topics such as "defund the police" / "prohibit abortion" / etc). Main thing is, both A and B are sweeping aside their "non-scissors" competitors C to H, who'd be around 20:75:5, give or take, and who are getting virtually no votes in PV, and doing only slightly better in AV.
In the PV system, the A and B end up sucking out all the air in the room as far as C to H are concerned. The AV system gives *some* breathing room to the C-H candidates, yes. But the ADV system *punishes* the A & B candidates. They get "51-41=10" versus their "20-5=15" contenders.
Such a system would carry an obvious bias: against the "far positions" on all sides. It would have centrism baked into the cake. Some cite this as a flaw, that it would lead to electing candidates who aren't "anyone's favorite choice" or whatever. One good look at contemporary US proves that to not be a flaw, but as good an outcome as might be hoped for. Nowadays, Rep voters have mixed feelings about Rep candidates and hate the guts of Dem candidates, while Dem voters are in the exact opposite situation. This is the natural outcome of the PV process. The AV would slightly improve this, but the ADV has the potential to replace outcomes of "50%+ mixed-feelings / 50%- hating-guts" with "10% approval / 80% mixed feelings / 10% hating-guts". Arguably the latter *is* a better outcome for democratic governance, or at least a saner outcome for something that aspires to be a unified country.
I don’t see how any of this works without multiple candidates within parties, which can happen with the single transferable vote. That would bypass the primaries.
Using approval voting for primaries but plurality voting for general elections is an interesting case. The main benefit of plurality voting is that it avoids fracturing of parties; systems in which independence of irrelevant alternatives hold tend to have many parties which then can require large and unstable coalitions. Party primaries are already rather fractured. This also avoids a complete "race to the center" that could reduce political innovation.
In general work on how one might combine different voting systems for different purposes seems underdeveloped.
You appear to paint "race to the center" negatively, and "political innovation" positively. You also placed scare quotes around the former only, while I'm inclined to place them around the latter.
What "innovation"? I consider there is hardly any dynamic in contemporary US politics that isn't a rehash of the dynamics happening in end-of-18th-century France, for instance. (if excluding how unprecedentedly blockheaded most participants are around race questions, I would argue there is absolutely nothing new at all). People more versed in history might cite echoes of those dynamics going back to ancient Rome, Greece or even furhter.
"Fracturing of parties" is an illusion created by the perspective that there *should* be a duopoly of parties, rather than the perspective that the duopoly is the degenerate endgame of the plurality voting system. The PV system has the *rewarding* of scissor candidates baked into the cake, while the approval/disapproval voting system has the *punishing* of scissor candidates baked in. Yes, "centrism", if you prefer.
Democracy often labels itself as "rule with the approval of the governed". Running with that label, consider two systems who would give the following typical *outcomes* of the process.
Which of the two comes closer to the label of "rule with the approval of the governed"?
Also, if contemporary US is flip-flopping between "Trump US" and "Biden US" - both of them being 10:50:40 arrangements with flipping polarities - which of the two approaches would you label "stable" in a meaningful way?
I used actual quotes because I wanted to be clear I was referencing the concept in the previous comment. I don't do scare quotes.
I don't think any realistic voting system will come anywhere close to "rule of the governed." People have too varied of preferences. I am therefore generally extremely skeptical of government intervention, which I view as being nearly always and everywhere captured by special interests. That doesn't mean government should do nothing, but I don't see being elected as conferring a large amount of legitimacy. I would not be particularly supportive of democracy except it seems considerably more robust to providing for the general welfare than any other form of government, even if it doesn't do a great job in an absolute sense.
By political innovation I mean primarily policy innovation. If everyone is competing to be the least offensive, that to me suggests that they will avoid confronting entrenched special interests. That seems undesirable. I could care less about grand debates in political philosophy.
One also need only observe Italian, Brazilian, Israeli, or Belgian politics to see the impact of a high degree of fracturing.
I don't want to overly focus on the current political dynamic in the US. Trump wouldn't have been nominated with approval voting in a Republican primary.
Understood, and retracting my comments about scare quotes.
>Trump wouldn't have been nominated with approval voting in a Republican primary.
Correct. Neither would have been Hillary. I do agree AV is a step up from PV, I'm arguing why I consider ADV to be a step up from AV.
As for the entire US system having degenerated to "PV duopoly with PV primaries" in the first place, and that the only "tweak" it needs is to become a "PV duopoly with AV primaries" - because this avoids "party fracturing hell" - I remain skeptical of that view. I consider that having a multitude of parties that are elected by ADV on the general level, would reduce the creeping and seemingly unstoppable polarization of the country.
The examples of fracturing you gave *are* fracturings that evolved inside PV systems (except that they never spiraled down into a duopoly-with-primaries configuration). The ADV system would inherently affect the incentives in which any fracturings are evolving, so the comparisons need not directly apply.
About coming anywhere close to "rule with consent of the governed", if your key metric is the share of the population who does *not* feel unmitigated discontent with the way they are governed, then voting systems that punish scissor candidates provide a doubtlessly better approach than systems which reward them.
> democracy (...) seems considerably more robust to providing for the general welfare than any other form of government
In Christian and Islamic countries throughout past centuries, welfare has generally been organized by religious institutions more than by governments. While this has necessarily waned alongside the large-scale secularization trends - which largely coincide with establishment of democracies - equating government-provided welfare with democracy is confounding issues. I've been to some Islamic non-democratic countries that don't have -any- homeless people sleeping on the benches, and whose welfare stems from religious tradition more than from government-organized redirection of funds. Also, analysts like Sowell can point you to the reasons why the "blank-check government-provided welfare" that is de rigueur since the 1960s, has not really been an unalloyed good for the population receiving them, when compared to other historic welfare arrangements.
Gašo, would it be correct to say that, structurally, RV(2) == AV, and RV(3) == ADV? Here RV(n) refers to Range Voting with a range of n different options.
I believe your ADV proposal may be practically superior to RV(n) because Approval / Disapproval is easier to communicate than the Olympic-style scoring used in RV.
They would be functionally equivalent, yes, but I think that presenting it as zero-centered (i.e. [-1,0,+1] instead of [0,1,2])is better communicating to people the effect of their vote.
In your notation, the Score Voting system which proposes 0 "strongly disapproving" to 9 "strongly approving" plus an "X" for "no opinion", can be represented as "RV(11)"; its functionally equivalent zero-centered system would be [-5..+5], with mappings 0 → -5, 9 → +5 and "X" → 0. Whereas I'd still prefer the ADV ("zero-centered RV(3)") to the RV(11), as it has the advantages of simplicity; it is the simplest of the systems that can counteract the arguably largest pathology of PV systems, "VOTING AGAINST".
By this I mean voting for B because you *really* do not want A to win, and *not* because B is particularly well representing you - whereas voting for D or F (whom you're both reasonably aligned with) is pragmatically a wasted vote that will just let A win. This has been the most pathological dynamic for over a hundred years.
In ADV, if you're really against A, you can simply *vote against A*, and then vote for D and F. One could do a book-length presentation of major historical moments that would have gone quite differently under such a voting system, but the single-sentence summary is that it punishes scissor candidates instead of rewarding them.
Such an exciting list! And I was very happy to see Seattle Approves up there -- they're addressing the meta problem of "why can't the US political process solve more of the country's problems?"
"why can't the US political process solve more of the country's problems?"
Because of human nature. There is no one single utopian perfect nation in the world, even with a different political system. You can have a *bad* system that causes problems or make things worse, but you can also have a perfect, shiny system that people will then try to bend to their own ends or ignore.
Improving bad systems is a good idea, but don't think "we'll create a perfect system and that will be the panacea for the nation's problems" because it won't be.
Some really fascinating grants here (and a couple that I think might be ethically... questionable). Setting those aside, this is a really cool thing you've done here.
> Nils Kraus, $40,000, to experiment with new ways of measuring precision weighting in humans. The precision-weighting of mental predictions is one of the absolute basics of the predictive coding model of the mind, but we know very little about it and have trouble testing hypotheses about how it works.
I'm quite interested in this; is there a way to follow this work as it develops? (And is there a good source on the current state of understanding?)
I can send you the proposal where I have collected some previous studies that have tried to measure precision weighting via several different ways, if you'd like.
I'm one of the three cofounders of Mantic Markets, and I wanted to give a heartfelt thanks to Scott! Not just because we won a grant, or because he's namedropped us, or even because he's been so nice about us blatantly stealing the "Mantic" name...
But because it's fairly (~70%) likely this project would not have existed without ACX Grants. James and I were online friends, and we'd chatted before about collaborating on something. The existence of ACX Grants gave us an excuse to actually do something! I flew out to meet James and Stephen; and in our process of writing the grant application, we got so excited that we decided to just build out the prototype, whether we heard back or not. We've been hacking on it ever since (that's why our prototype is already live)!
Like Scott, I don't really know if Mantic will ultimately work out. (If you think _you_ know, bet on https://mantic.markets/ManticMarkets/will-mantic-markets-have-over-1m !) But this grant has already made me two good friends/cofounders, and a really exciting December so far. Thanks again for running this program!
Re: "Why would somebody working on biochemistry want to talk to someone working on political activism just because they got a grant from the same person?"
I can't speak for anyone else but I'd _love_ to be thrown into a Discord with everyone else who's gotten a grant. Beyond chatting, here are some things I'd look forward to (patterned off of YCombinator):
- Random 1:1s with other fundees, just to learn about their field of expertise
- Weekly check ins where everyone posts updates, as a shared accountability metric
- A "Demo Day", eg in 6 months where each fundee gives a 3min talk on what they accomplished, in front of potential future funders
Everything optional, of course! I'm happy to help organize; in fact, I may just go and do this for the forecasting people. We've already chatted with Nuno before, and I'm planning on reaching out to Nikos and Nathan too!
I winced. It’s certainly a joke, but it’s hard to make something like that land in our environment when so many people treat all Republicans as evil.
I chalk this up to the influence of living in the Bay Area and among his tribe, where casual insults to Republicans come off as harmless political humor that nobody is hurt by, because no actual Republicans would dare out themselves by objecting.
"Other times a reviewer was concerned that if you were successful, your work might be used by terrorists / dictators / AI capabilities researchers / Republicans and cause damage in ways you couldn't foresee"
I agree that this is a joke, but to my reading it is a joke that gently pokes fun at the reviewer (who seemingly equates Republicans with terrorists). If anything, it reads to me as sympathetic to Republicans, not pointed at them.
Maybe it is! The problem is that it can be read both ways, and since the double meaning is implicit and there’s nothing to read against the equivalency, it’s tone-deaf in an environment where just this kind of casual associational slur is terrifically common.
1Day Sooner staff member here—thanks so much, Scott! These grants are an awesome idea, and honestly I’m kind of blown away by the company we’re in. Good luck with your projects, everyone!
> My father has been stalled on an important research project for years for lack of the right kind of statistician
Just out of curiosity, what is it and what would the right kind of statistician be? I'm a statistician and I know a lot of statisticians. Often we feel we are short on important projects, while society is yelling that it is short on statisticians. It's hard to square that circle.
I am a statistician who meets the latter requirement. I have done biostats, though I don't know that I'm A Biostatistician. Is he still looking for help?
Edit: I guess there's enough grading in level of access that my comment might not be super-helpful. Does he need someone *at* the VA who can query their database directly, or somebody who's clear to stare at such data?
Except for the adopted ones, the ART-conceived (assisted reproductive technology) kids wouldn’t exist otherwise. And besides, the whole point of IVG (in-vitro gametogenesis) is to reduce the need for donor gametes.
How is being conceived in a different way to the norm being 'commodified'? I want to have kids with my partner, and right now that's not possible for us. If the Ivy Natal Fertility group succeed, it would be. The ability to have biological children is no more than what straight couples have, with the added bonus that all children born of this method would be intentional and desperately wanted.
Such an impressive and inspiring range of projects. I am excited to live in the world where these dreams become reality. What a cool project, Scott.
Yes. And people seeing these get funded and what happens as a consequence may well be amazing. :)
Definitely bookmarking this post. Excited to follow up over the next few months and years to see where a lot of them end up :)
Scott has some interesting thoughts outside the mainstream such that I am tentatively excited for some of these grants. If 20%+ end up paying off at least somewhat that would considerably raise the prestige and interest in later ACX grants I'd think.
I assume Scott has already done a forecasting success thing that he will reveal some years from now about which ones he feels most confident about. Of course like start ups having a 1 or even 2 in 10 hit rate is actually quite good.
I love the beetle one. Can we make that an ACX meme somehow?
(I also like that a nuclear war one showed up. EAers have always rated nuclear war and pandemic/bioterrorism as two of the 3 worst existential risks, but generally had an attitude that those two big problems were mostly better left to establishment government & science. Covd-19 suggests that this may have been misplaced confidence when it came to public health; perhaps we have misplaced confidence in the other one too.)
Finally a scientific advance related to insects that doesn't require me to eat them! Here's hoping it works.
Amen.
Of course we wouldn't eat the beetles. Obviously.
Unless we ran out of other food or something.
Of course we wouldn't eat the beetles, except to fend off starvation in desperate🪲circumstances. Obviously.
But then, there's some elasticity around what counts as "desperate circumstances," depending on how the beetles taste.🪲And we can't very well claim to know the exact hedonic exchange rate between eating the beetles versus other🪲food sources, if we haven't tried them even once...
🪲Of course we wouldn't eat the beetles, except for experimental purposes, to determine under what circumstances🪲we should reconsider our anti-beetle-eating🪲stance. Obviously.
Also we should take the relative supply🪲🪲of beetles and other goods into consideration.🪲We do produce a lot of plastic waste,🪲after all. Look at them. Just crawling around,🪲not🪲being put to any better use...🪲🪲🪲
🪲🪲Of course🪲we should🪲put🪲🪲the beetles🪲to the🪲most🪲🪲🪲economically efficient🪲use.🪲Obviously.🪲And if that🪲🪲means eating them,🪲well,🪲it's not like🪲they🪲were so🪲bad that🪲one🪲🪲time...🪲🪲🪲🪲
🪲🪲🪲🪲Of🪲course🪲we should🪲🪲eat🪲the🪲beetles.🪲🪲🪲Obviously.🪲What🪲🪲else🪲are🪲🪲🪲our🪲🪲beetle-suppression🪲🪲🪲🪲crews🪲going🪲to🪲🪲eat?🪲🪲It's just🪲a🪲🪲🪲temporary emergency🪲🪲🪲measure.🪲The🪲🪲tide🪲🪲🪲🪲of🪲🪲🪲beetles🪲🪲will🪲🪲🪲recede🪲🪲once🪲🪲🪲🪲they🪲🪲🪲run out🪲🪲of🪲🪲🪲plastic🪲🪲to🪲🪲eat.🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲
🪲🪲🪲🪲Unless🪲🪲🪲they🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲turn🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲to🪲🪲🪲another🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲food🪲🪲🪲source.🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲
🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲Of🪲🪲🪲course🪲🪲🪲🪲the🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲beetles🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲wouldn't🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲eat🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲us.🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲Obviously.🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲
A beetle like that, you wouldn't eat all at once.
That was strangely disturbing. Good job.
Big Food has been feeding us bugs for decades. Ground red beetle is the standard red food coloring.
Half of me loves the beetle one and half of me is thinking, if 20 years from now we're looking back on this and one of these has gone horribly wrong it's going to be that one.
step 1: use plastic for almost everything, everywhere
step 2: breed beetles that can digest plastic
step 3: beetles escape from the lab, civilization collapses
Beetles mutate to digest crude oil, quickly consume all remaining oil reserves.
How would they get to the deep sea reserves?
Yellow submarine.
This comment is amazing
There are already many species of bacteria that consume crude oil. They're all over the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, for example, where oil seeps from the sea floor and has for umpty millions of years. They're sometimes used to hasten the breakdown of oil when it's spilled accidentally.
Estimated total plastic ever produced: c. 8.3bn tonnes (https://www.unep.org/interactive/beat-plastic-pollution/#:~:text=Researchers%20estimate%20that%20more%20than,landfill%20or%20the%20natural%20environment.).
CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels per year: c.35bn tonnes (https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions)
So about three months equivalent of fossil fuel burning - not really a material consideration for a one-off even assuming a full plastic to CO2 conversion.
I think the main concern is less the CO2 and more the plastic not being plastic anymore.
Thank you. (Hmm I think there is a math mistake here. One ton of CO2 is 12/(12+2*16) tons of carbon, call it 1/3, so total carbon in plastic is equal to carbon (w/ hydrogen) that we burn every year. We should just burn all plastic and get whatever energy we can out of it.
Yes, you're right, I didn't take into account the combustion chemistry (albeit it's not an order of magnitude difference).
You joke about burning plastic (I assume) but some forms are reasonably good feedstock for energy from waste power plants (assuming you've got all your filters up to date to clean out the toxic emissions resulting from it). That said, it's not a particularly efficient fuel by any means, but it's just a way to get some use out of what would otherwise go to landfill.
I specifically came here to say the same thing - these are generally great, but the plastic beetle one seems the most perfect fit for this kind of grant. Some smart biologist just needs a bit of funding for some equipment to keep beetles in; low probability of success, potentially hugely impactful.
To address a comment below, I'm not too concerned about catastrophic risk on this one as the plastic itself is unlikely to be nourishing enough to sustain explosive population growth. Perhaps the ideal outcome is that there is some kind of cheap spray that makes the plastic much more digestible to the beetles, thereby controlling spread (but that's a problem that only happens if this project is *wildly* successful).
I'm not even sure the probability of success is very low...
Covid-19 has boosted my skepticism of establishment government & science so much as to make me fear for the entire EA project - I feel like if we don't find a way to address rampant demosclerosis nothing else matters, nothing else will work. I'd feel a lot happier if any of Scott's grants or Zvi's grants explicitly addressed the issue. Or if I had an idea of my OWN to address it - I might then have applied for a grant myself!
I just keep noticing that in areas of concern for which people successfully "raise awareness" the government's response is to build a bureaucracy to "address" the issue...and that bureaucracy near-inevitably makes the problem WORSE.
The TSA, created to make travel statistically safer, makes airports SO "safe" as to become so inconvenient/expensive/annoying it causes more people to drive instead of fly. The increased driving means more car accidents; net effect (at least on the current margin) is to make travel statistically less safe.
Nuclear power regulations, created to make power generation safer, require SO MUCH "safety" that nuclear power plants are unaffordable and take too long to develop, so states end up relying more on coal/oil/gas for baseline power. Which is more polluting and kills more people (mining accidents and air pollution); net effect is to make power generation less safe.
The FDA/CDC/WHO, created to make us healthier, have killed over 100,000 Americans in the last few years (and a great many foreigners) by postponing vaccine approval, by preventing cheap instant covid tests or challenge tests, by not letting firms update vaccines to new variants or letting them optimize dosage levels to produce more doses or letting them optimize vaccine timing to improve effectiveness etcetera; net effect is to make us less healthy. (and fewer of us alive).
If we can't fix this dynamic I have to expect the result of *successfully* bringing more attention to nuclear war prevention or asteroid strike prevention or unfriendly AI prevention or what-have-you is that once we show the way - once we demonstrate progress along a promising path toward improving things - our government will make these issues a priority and form an Official Department to be in charge of each issue whereupon said departments will end up making THESE problems worse too.
We might be better off trying to fix these kind of problems IN SECRET to avoid regulatory attention! A private EA cabal with secret symbols, handshakes, meetings. Like the FreeMasons.
I hadn't thought about the net effects of nuclear power regulations and TSA hassles. But you have to think about the public reaction to those: how would the public feel about having a nuclear reactor built if the government wasn't endorsing it as safe to an extreme extent? And would people be willing to fly in a post-9/11 world without the security theater of TSA? It's true that the regulatory agencies may have swung the pendulum too far toward safety, but the public probably wouldn't accept is as far the other way as you might like.
Without the TSA (especially once we privatize the airports and air control) it would be between airlines, their insurers, and their customers what level of security is chosen. Security measures that aren’t cost-effective (eg taking off shoes because one crazy guy once tried a thing involving shoes that failed and couldn’t possibly have worked) would tend to fall by the wayside. Measures which *actually matter* (eg, hardening the cockpit doors) would tend to stay. The reason the dumb measures would go away is that companies could offer lower prices by getting rid of that stuff.
Personally I would pay EXTRA for a flight with NO SECURITY AT ALL at the customer level. Let people walk straight to the gate without lining up anywhere at all. Let ‘em even have open-carry or concealed-carry guns if they like!
The funny thing is that this level of security *already exists* in the form of small-airport private planes. Very rich people CAN get on a plane with no security; it’s just us plebes in the cattle-car planes that can’t!
Allow companies to COMPETE on security and some may pick more, others less. If everybody LIKES getting felt up by wand-wielding morons after a Rapiscan pass then that will remain the standard but maybe one or two lines experiment with less to drop prices; if it works then more follow.
The main argument FOR federalizing this stuff is externality-based - if a low-security plane gets hijacked and hits a building that affects the people in the building too. But that specific kind of attack became impossible moments after 9/11 and remains so; it’s just not worth worrying about.
9/11 revealed the massive externalities possible from unsecured plane flight, and not just hijacking - also bombing, or bargaining with passenger lives. That security theater wasn't just for passengers' peace of mind, but for everyone in a building that might be struck by a runaway plane. I don't think the mass public would tolerate a full libertarian approach.
Also, how are businesses even going to learn which security measures are effective and which aren't? Counting the number of terrorist attacks that happen under each security regime? I don't think that would be tolerable either.
Fun fact about the TSA: The transporter booth you have to stand in spread-eagled every time you want to board a flight is an X-ray backscatter scanner. When the TSA introduced them, I got a copy of the paper cited to justify the claim that they were safe (which sadly I can't discover the title of now). The paper had shown that if you divide the amount of ionizing radiation shot at a passenger by the volume of the passenger, you got a radiation density considerably lower than levels considered safe for that particular type of radiation.
Unfortunately, most of the radiation is absorbed or scattered by the first 1.5 cm of human, so the radiation density in the parts actually irradiated (mostly skin and subq fat) is much greater than the average over the entire body's volume.
EDIT: BUT not nearly as much greater as I thought when I began typing this. Approximating myself as a perfect sphere of radius 120mm, I find that the average radiation density in the outmost 15mm of spherical me, which gets half of the radiation, is only 1.5 times as great as the average over my entire spherical volume.
But why not termites? They already have the gut biome that breaks down wood.
The chemical problems are very different. The problem with digesting cellulose is prying apart the tightly-wound fibers to get access to the individual polysaccharide chains, and then cutting some of the glycosidic links (C-O-C linkages). That is, wood is chemically quite different from oil.
If you want to digest the most common plastics, the problem is that (1) they are not soluble, so it must be done in the gut by something that can digest things outside its body fluids, i.e. bacteria, and (2) your organism must be able to oxidize C-C bonds without any kind of chemical "handle" to hold onto them. (Our own mitochondria can oxidize them easily, but only if they have a carboxyl group at the head to grab onto.) Note that it can't oxidize just any old C-C bond, because of course then it would destroy itself.
Even then, it's going to be difficult to find or breed something that can break the benzene rings in polystyrene. They are very sturdy, and it is possible your bacteria, fed polystyrene, might only excrete a variety of small substituted benzenes, which would be worse than useless, since they have a decent chance of being carcinogens.
Thanks Carl, so you predict no plastic eating bugs in the near future.
Yes, that would be my odds-on guess.
I think this whole process is awesome. I am excited to see follow-ups with the projects, and would also be interested in seeing which projects weren't funded but might still be interesting, like "runner-ups or honorary ideas". The beetle project and automated / hybrid tutoring seemed very cool to me; I don't know too much about biotech. but it would be cool if someone did a project to modify bacteria/insects/algae to be more nutritious (e.g., altering the taste of crickets or consumable-bacterial-growths) / produce more energy / consume-convert wastes into useful things.
My impression has always been that 4-7 or so, if you select them well, is a superior option for small scall education creating amazing outcomes. 1 on 1 is well ahead of 1-35 and has some advantages in curriculum tailoring, though.
>Despite the growing importance of this field, there are relatively few technical biosecurity centers in the US, and the West Coast is underrepresented. This causes serious problems like poor pandemic readiness, limited understanding of biowarfare risks, and the biosecurity grad student who I'm dating living 3,000 miles away from me.
One of these problems is not like the other ones 😂
Here in Boston, to me it seems like there are lots of biotech people but few biosecurity specialists. I think they're concentrated around Washington DC.
Washington D.C. makes sense. Why is Boston such a biotech hub? My initial hypothesis is proximity to a certain pair of prestigious universities, but I imagine there could be other reasons.
Development at Kendall Square (right behind MIT) has been targeted to biotech for a few years now. (This may be more of a description than an explanation, or half/half.)
The universities started it, but then comes clustering effects and targeted development. We just lost a beloved long-time food market to new lab space. What's really weird is driving around Cambridge and Watertown seeing billboards advertising reagents, next to the usual ads for fast food.
>What's really weird is driving around Cambridge and Watertown seeing billboards advertising reagents
Oh yeah, the first time I saw it, I was shocked.
The other Cambridge (uk) is also a biotech hub.
the universities help, but we also have a number of really great hospitals.
Before this Pandemic, Georgetown and Johns Hopkins were the only two universities that had a decent program in it I could find. Not surprising the experts would concentrate in DC, if that's where they studied. I predict many more will appear in coming years.
Scott is usually so private! I'm so surprised he snuck that in there!
Congrats Scott!
I'm glad to see several worthy projects got funded! I'm especially looking forward to Michael Todhunter's results.
You are a cool dude
This is delightful to see and makes me feel optimistic about the rationalist community having a growing, positive impact on the world.
> This is the part where I post applications publicly on the blog (if you gave me permission) and readers can look at them and decide to support them or not. About 500 of you gave me permission to do this, and your applications together total about 1,500 pages of text. Substack probably won’t let me write a blog post this long, and you guys won’t read it even if I do, so I’m still thinking about how I want to handle this. Please give me until sometime in January to work something out, but rest assured, I haven’t forgotten about this.
I have a suggestion here. You have 500 ACX++ grants. I'd first weed out the ones you find objectionable. That not only do you not want to fund but you think lack merit. Then I'd pair them in small groups of highly different proposals. Then I'd let each person do a paragraph in a public Open Thread and tell them to be there to answer questions. The ones who won't agree are forfeiting their right to be included in ++.
I suspect this will cut down the number significantly. Those that remain will be rationed out over a year. But in exchange the grantees will get more exposure than people hunting through 2,000 pages or a huge database. And if you like it you can do this on a rolling basis instead of making it into a huge Christmas nut to be cracked like you did this year. (It'll also give you more content for however you weigh that.)
Seconding this. You need some kind of filter and this one has several advantages.
Thirding. As one of the 500 people, I would be in favor of some kind of “write an additional paragraph explaining your project” (perhaps a condensation of the original proposal) and I definitely want to second of the above commentor suggestion of an open thread participation for the AC X plus plus people.
Agreed. As someone with a rather speculative proposal that consumes almost no money apart from my own time, I was planning to post in an open thread if I didn't get "funded" anyway. (I already noted in my application that attention and "signal boosting" is more relevant for my project than money)
500 paragraphs is a whole lot of paragraphs. Even if half of them are meritless, 250 paragraphs is a whole lot of paragraphs. And lots of people never bother with comments on posts, especially open threads.
I think a better idea might be a single post, sorted into categories, with a very short sentence description of each grant as a link to the pages of text in the application, hosted somewhere else. It'd be a very long post, but if it's sorted into categories, people can peruse it for ideas they find interesting, link to the outside information to read more on it, and decide what to do. And maybe the links could include a place to ask and answer questions from founders.
It would probably take a lot of work to set this up, but Scott could probably pay someone to do it.
I like the idea, but this approach would require someone to read 500 ask-me-anything threads, summarize and interpret them, and then pick winners. I recommend also using some other web platform that can automatically collect votes or ratings from paying ACX subscribers, in order to circumvent the Scott-reads-10,000-comments step.
(Paying subscribers in order to reduce potential fraud, to get more paying subscribers, and because having the people who provide the money get to say where it goes would, by some long-standing but now aggressively-disputed standards, be more just, and motivate them to think more carefully.)
Earlier today Matthew Yglesias had a tweet about how despite widespread belief that numerous government institutions failed during the pandemic, there's been virtually no legislative effort to change anything. So I'm really glad to see ACX putting $100k toward a better FDA. Trying to fix what's broken instead of just having fun complaining. Hell yeah!
Oh, and as a biologist I want to strongly endorse the cell culture media testing project. This is the exact kind of thing that is 1) really important and 2) in a kind of hole where it's not the kind of thing any science funding agency would like to fund.
Strong agree - this one is tied with the beetle one for best application in my view. Making the process of doing science less onerous/painful is huge (not to mention the waste in having extremely smart people spending >50% of their time fiddling with petri dishes and whatnot, and another 20% writing grant applications...)
Kinda disagree on 2) Nsf funded Dr block $3.5million, part of which is on cell culture media optimisation.( https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/uc-davis-establishes-research-training-cultivated-meat). Will be intresting to see how this builds on existing academic work that uses genetic algorithms and robotic handling machined.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-019-0296-7
Optimization of muscle cell culture media using nonlinear design of experiments
Agreed.
A lot of the stuff that did fail is just not sexy enough for politics to care. Stuff that might be handled by MY's "secret congress" but even there not a huge priority.
It seems like the incentives in American democracy don't actually work toward effective government on the national level. If your local city council can't keep the streets clean, they might get voted out, but very rarely will people vote for a different congressperson or president based on how competent the FDA is.
Agreed.
Sadly, 100k would be a drop in the bucket regarding FDA lobbying.
love everything about this, thank you for putting in so much effort Scott <3
This is super amazing work from all involved.
This is inspiring!
Especially so when you consider that the initial announcement was made on November 12
"SD, $5,000, to fund an honors' thesis on neutrino research. S is an undergraduate who wants to work on neutrino physics with one of his professors, but needs outside funding to be sure it will work."
SD, if you're out there and want any outside help / input / collaboration, please feel free to reach out. I'm a particle physics postdoc (mostly working on dark matter), know a thing or two about neutrinos, and think your idea is super interesting and useful. If nothing else I can connect you with people working in neutrino physics who may be more helpful than me. You can reach me at
joshaebyATgmailDOTCOM
SD here! I've emailed you - thanks for the help! I always, always appreciate advice from people who have been doing this for longer than I have.
If anyone else has any input or just wants to talk about the project, feel free to email me at sd10(at)williams(dot)edu (maybe should have asked Scott to put this in the main post but I figure I'll do the self-promo thing at some point closer to the time I begin my work, which should do the trick).
Again, thanks a bunch!
I've worked on various neutrino experiments during my (ongoing) career as a particle physicist, though neutrinos aren't my primary focus. Regarding your idea, i just wanted to make sure you're aware of WATCHMAN: https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01132, http://svoboda.ucdavis.edu/experiments/watchman/, https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/physics/research/particle/neutrino/watchman. (Meant to be informative, not discouraging - new ideas in this realm or contributions to the existing project are both valuable!)
Yeah, I actually mentioned WATCHMAN (and Nucifer, although I don't think they take Americans) in my grant application. I want to join them ASAP or at least work in parallel with them. Thanks!
Well done Scott. It doesn’t look like being “outed” by the NYT was a bad thing in the end. I hope to do some small contribution. I’ll also sign up here.
Thank you for this initiative, Scott. It has surfaced many worthwhile endeavors. It is admirable that you took on all the related effort, with the help of many supporters and funders.
> if they're smart enough to attempt this project, they're smart enough to know about XYZ Grants which is better suited for them (...)
This sounds like the grant reviewers assume that "likely to succeed at project" is very strongly correlated with "able to navigate searching for funding". For some of the projects that got awarded this sounds eminently sensible to me (e.g. the affect public policy things), but not for others (e.g. most of biology-adjacent projects). I wonder if I'm wrong about the latter (i.e. if success at projects that ostensibly are not about influencing people is strongly correlated with ability to navigate social mazes). Thoughts?
I think the grant reviewers already took that into account because they're domain specialists, judging by (for instance) the remark for Todhunter's grant: "I'm not sure anyone will use this, except for me personally I WOULD LOVE THIS SO MUCH", seconded by commenter and biologist Ivan Fyodorovich above: "I want to strongly endorse the cell culture media testing project. This is the exact kind of thing that is 1) really important and 2) in a kind of hole where it's not the kind of thing any science funding agency would like to fund"
The bigger problem I have with this line of thinking is the assumption that
> if XYZ doesn't fund these people then that's strong evidence that they shouldn't be funded
If Scott doesn't fund an applicant, is that strong evidence they shouldn't be funded? It seems obvious the answer is no given the limited amount of people he can fund and the large number of applicants. Why should this not be true for other grantmakers? The assumption here seems to be some variant of the just world fallacy where P(is funded | should be funded) = 1, but it seems more likely that this number is quite low.
I share this concern. It can be obviated with a note saying "Sorry ACX didn't fund you, but you should seriously consider applying for an XYZ grant".
I realized this actually makes sense IF it means "since the applications get passed to ACXG+ anyway, let's pick up the ones they're unlikely to fund", but otherwise I agree it's weird (see my top-level comment below)
awesome
2021: the year when a blog about medicine, rationality, and fighting Moloch funded a research program about breeding beetles.
If they're good enough for God, they're good enough for me! https://manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/biological/invertebrates/phylum-arthropoda/weird-science-inordinate-fondness-beetles
Seriously this is one of the ones I'm most interested in hearing follow-ups about
I know right? I'm going to continue joking about beetle eugenics but the project is super interesting (also) for non-meme reasons.
Beetles which can biodegrade plastic strike me as worryingly double-edged. Plus side, plastic not hanging out in the environment forever is probably better for us, and for the global ecosystem at large. Minus side, aren't there things made out of plastic where its non-biodegradingness is essential to their function? Is anyone in charge of knowing the full list of things which might fail catastrophically if plastic-biodegrading beetles were released into the environment?
My thoughts exactly. Termites (wood eating insects) are a huge problem in some parts of the world. It would be awful if similar issues arose with plastic.
"Society will be destroyed by a bug!" ... no, a literal bug.
We could always go full on science apocalypse and have an island where we ship plastics loaded with beetles that eventually results in our destruction when they learn to cover the distance to the mainland, possibly through micro-evolution. There are worse apocalyptic scenarios. This one seems almost fun by comparison. Michael Crichton would have to be simulated on a super-computer to write the novel.
According to the application, the beetles can only get a small amount of their subsistence from plastic and wouldn't be very good at this in any case. What the researcher actually wants is the gut microbes, with the hopes that once we understand them better we can figure out some way to use them at scale. Breeding the beetles in a plastic-enriched environment is a means to get better microbes. The microbes presumably can't escape the beetles without human help. At least this is my current understanding.
I can't help side-eyeing the "presumably" there. If plastic-biodegrading bacteria gained the ability to survive independently of the beetles, there's an awfully rich ecological niche waiting for them out there.
Seconded.
This is more worrisome than what I originally thought: first I thought, "Well, if we need boats or landfill liners or nuclear waste containers or whatever to survive the beetles, I guess the beetles can't eat them without oxygen, and we can always lace them with insecticides." I don't insecticides that will work that well with bacteria, and gut bacteria are presumably already anaerobic. So maybe we'll have to resort to teflon or geopolymers or something in order to build bacteria-proof things in the Grim Beetle Future.
On the plus side, the bacteria probably smell better than darkling beetles do.
(Just to be clear, I think the research should definitely be done; I'm just not sure whether deploying the results in the wild would be good or bad.)
Glass and metal still work good.
I mean, anaerobic bacteria TYPICALLY are outcompeted by aerobic bacteria in situations with plenty of oxygen. Specialization is a big deal for bacteria, so I would expect it to be much much harder to get gut bacteria to thrive in a place they could digest plastic for us than it is to make efficient plastic-eating gut bacteria in the first place.
A somewhat related alternative - making some plastics/materials more biodegradable eg. The BioMask https://www.canadianshieldppe.ca/blogs/the-canadian-shield-blog/the-biomask™-infographic
I don't understand, isn't this just a much *better* outcome than the one projected in the grant? It seems increasingly clear that plastic was a terrible mistake from the get-go, and if Scott's grant intervention leads ultimately to a world where we have to go back to glass, steel, ceramics and tin with a small dash of bakelite (a resin) for flavor because any plastic will just get devoured by omnipresent microbes before you have time to use it, that will be a massive improvement on all fronts.
My prior is that plastics are an integral part of modern life in such a way that we couldn't have much of what we have *at the price we have it for*. In other words, much of the world would be much worse off without the existence of plastics. The "terrible mistake" seems to be not using plastics judiciously, not that plastics exist.
That being said, I have no special insight or knowledge and could be convinced otherwise.
"My prior is that plastics are an integral part of modern life in such a way that we couldn't have much of what we have *at the price we have it for*."
I think this is almost certainly correct (notably, every post-celluloid data storage medium including film that doesn't burn your house down is plastic-based), and I'm willing to bite that bullet. To me, plastic seems like our time's equivalent of asbestos. It's no good telling people how practical it is that once your gloves get dirty you can just throw them into the fire and they're sparkling clean again.
What would a world without plastic look like?
Non-OBSF*: "The Great Fog" by H. F. Heard, in which a very fast mildew takes over the world and rots everything that can rot. There's a fog which makes smoke stay and be intolerable. No wood, no paper... as I recall, humanity is limited to using glass and stone. Fortunately, the fog moderates temperatures and produces sufficient stuff that's good to eat.
* In rec.arts.sf.written, it was a custom to add OBSF (obligatory sf) to posts that weren't about sf.
And SF in this case is... science fiction? So you're pointing out that this is science fiction, even when you're not obligated to point it out?
Yes, SF is science fiction.
More that I'm pointing out that this is science fiction, even though I'm not obligated to include it. I tend to see the world through science fiction.
I reread the story. My description is mostly correct. except that I hadn't noticed that the climate-changing mold was the result of an effort to produce a fat-producing mold. Also, there was a big die-off of the people who couldn't handle living in a very humid environment. It was published in1943, so there was no notion of a high proportion of people dependent on medicine.
Well, among other things, no hip replacements, no arterial grafts, no cardiac catheterization to stop heart attacks, no single-use medical instruments so loads more iatrogenic infection and death from same.
The result of the great fog was presented as utopian, and it might actually be a net gain.
People couldn't see to go faster than four miles an hour, though I think Heard was underestimating how well people could go with cleared, familiar paths. It would still be running, at most. Horses couldn't see as well as people.
No war, no car accidents, nothing much to accumulate. Fine stone musical instruments might be about it for valuable items.
Note that this was written in the 1940s, so most of what you're mentioning didn't exist yet. If people are moving more slowly and not using a lot of edged tools, there would be fewer accidents of all sorts.
They live pretty much on food produced by the mold, so a lot of the less healthy food isn't there, and the premise seems to imply that the moss food is at least nutritionally adequate.
Any and all plastic could be totally re-used if only we chose to invest a little bit of energy. It isn't currently economically cost-effective to do so, but if we really wanted to get rid of plastic we could. We just lack the will.
Where can I read more about this? I was under the, likely mistaken, impression that we know how to reuse some plastics, but for vast majority of them once they are polymerized we don't have better ideas than "burn them at high temperature to recover simple compounds".
So warning that I am not a chemist, so I probably don't have all the details quite correct, and am just giving my semi-educated opinion. Burn them at high temperature is basically what I am talking about, but why is that such a problem? Well, because it ends up costing energy.
The way we make plastics now is we start with petroleum, which contains lots of molecules that contain more than three carbon atoms, break them down into mostly molecules that contain less than three (ok, we keep a lot of hex rings too) then re-combine those smaller molecules into large chains of polymer. There is no particular reason we can't start with carbon-containing trash, and use similar processes as we use to crack/refine oil to turn it into the same chemical feed-stocks we use to make plastic.
The reason we don't do this is energy. Oil is actually insanely cheap. I know Americans like to complain when gas costs more than $4 a gallon but. $75 for a 55 gallon drum of oil is extremely cheap. Do you know how much a 55 gallon drum it? It's like the size of a person. If you could buy jugs of oil in the supermarket it would be cheaper than almost anything else, except maybe bottled water.
Because is so cheap, oil refineries burn a substantial amount of their cheapest products to generate the energy required to form their more expensive products that are used to make things like plastic. We can't really do this with garbage because it would generate tons of pollution and garbage isn't as energy dense as petroleum. But if we had much more abundant, cheap energy we could. We wouldn't even need to burn the garbage, we could heat it in a kiln to recover and re-use essentially all of the carbon and other toxins.
I think you can get net energy out by burning plastic... (Hasn't everyone burned plastic by the camp fire?) I'd like to see plastics made that burn better. (Less crap in exhaust 'smoke') Think of plastics as a side step between oil and energy. We make all plastic knowing they will be burned. Or alternative 'green' idea. Keep putting them in land fills, but change the narrative to permeant carbon storage. Burn them or bury them... that's all I got. Putting 'em back into the ecosystem seems to be the worst thing to do.
Re Beetles: Why not termites? They already have the gut bacteria to digest wood.
Calling burying plastic permanent carbon storage seems pretty disingenuous - the carbon in it came from oil, and only helped us in its use as plastic. Burying it instead of burning it is the same idea as leaving oil in the ground.
It's a little more complicated than using high temperature, because many plastics contain heteroatoms (e.g. Cl, S,N) that can create noxious compounds (e.g. HCl, SO2, NOx) even at very high temperatures. So you need to add some fairly expensive flue-gas capture technology to pull out the compounds you don't want in the air -- and then find a way to dispose of them, or someone who wants to buy them. (It goes without saying that low-temperature combustion generates even more evil compounds, PAH and such.)
Really? You know how to remove nurdles from oceans, beaches and the innards of fish? Harmlessly remove microplastics from fetuses? I think you should have submitted an ACX grant application if this is true.
I think GP is talking about the problem of "I have a bucket of plastic trash and want to convert it into usable plastic of the shape I desire" and not "I have a lake that contains a bucketful of plastic in it and want to extract it".
I don't know who you mean by GP here, but I think we must be talking past one another. Let's recap: I asserted that a bacterium which destroys all plastic being released into the wild would be a net good despite the infrastructural damage it would cause, due to the fact that the bacteria would also obliterate all the horrible shit like oceanic nurdles and microplastics presently plaguing ourselves and the rest of the planet. Eric P. replied to this statement of mine with the claim that we can already recover any and all plastic. I replied to that claim in turn, expressing a skepticism which I assure you is very real and sincere. In other words, we're talking about something closer to your scenario #2 here.
I'm still under the impression that Eric meant #1 and not #2 (nonwithstanding the context). I eagerly await Eric's confirmation, refutal, and/or elaboration.
E: By GP I meant Eric's comment (grandparent of my comment).
Yeah, we were talking past each other. I don't have a solution for removing it from the environment, only re-using it industrially.
But while I hate plastic in the environment as much as the next person, I also don't think it is the most important environmental problem to solve. Micro-plastics are disgusting and surely harmful, but I don't believe they are so harmful that we should regret having ever used plastic. It will all eventually break down and settle into sediments. It will take hundreds of years, but the earth is old and life will go on.
The best way to remove plastic from the environment is to stop putting it there, and in my opinion the best way to do that is to develop a robust industrial system for re-processing it.
There's a lot of different types of plastic. I'd be surprised if there's not some high-grade polymer like UHMWPE or something with a bunch of fluorines that the beetles can't get at.
Would it be possible to engineer bacteria so that they were good at digesting micro-plastic, but not strong enough to pull bits off of plastic objects? Or at least cause deterioration very slowly?
And would it be possible to make the bacteria salt-dependent? This would help with cleaning up the oceans, though not fresh water.
I'm not an expert, but based on my limited knowledge of the subject, I don't think that's likely to be practical, because on the scale of a bacterium, basically any piece of plastic represents a large ragged surface. Even microplastics are much too large for bacteria to subsume, they'd still be attacking them in the same way that they would a larger piece. The more weathered the piece of plastic, the higher its surface area to volume ratio, so the more easily it ought to be attacked, but any plastic should be vulnerable to weathering.
Also, once eating plastic becomes a viable ecological niche, any bacteria which is better at it will tend to outcompete ones which are worse at it.
Oh, well. It seemed plausible, but I didn't know enough about bacteria.
This is amazing. I mostly write to praise Scott and the team. But can't help but to contrast with the many philanthropies I know well....such exciting ideas/people he has curated, in such a short period, with so little red tape.
You refer to Nils Kraus as N in a later sentence. Not sure if you forgot to anonymize, or just a typo.
Thankfully, the error was the other direction - he was originally anonymized, and then gave me permission to name him. I've corrected this, thank you.
For peace of mind in the future: a way to avoid mistakes in the worse direction is to compile a list of terms that must not appear in a post (in this case, names of people who want to remain anonymous), and arrange for automation to scream loudly if a draft contains any of them. (Not my idea, this is a pretty common approach to ensuring that various not-intended-to-be-made-public things were redacted from a release of some software.)
This is just incredibly impressive that you pulled this venture out of thin air, roped in all the support and expertise you needed (or could find), let it grow way beyond what you anticipated, and then pulled off this very wide ranging list of worthy projects to support. Wow. It warms my heart to see.
The first part of my career involved a ton of fundraising, in and out of academia, and working with foundations on various joint endeavors. It can be a pretty slow-moving, trend-following world. But also, some of the expertise (to raise money well and to give it away well) are for sure real skills. It's astounding to me that you pulled this off in such a short time, and I hope you will write more about the process of it.
I'm interested in the question of what funded groups might want to talk to each other about. I know a lot of foundations try to start up those kinds of cross-pollinating conversations and that on the side of the people funded, they sometimes say "yes" to whatever the funders propose in the hopes it will lead to more funding, even if they think it's a waste of time. I think funders get impatient encountering the same kinds of organizational stumbling blocks in the groups they fund (I consult for organizations so I get that too). Some kind of honest assessment of when those networking opportunities are seen to be beneficial by the people in them would be nice to have.
Thank you for helping to bring so much good stuff into the world! I hope beyond the exhaustion it sounds like this produced, that you have a real sense of satisfaction in it. It's a remarkable thing you did, in a whole different direction from your writing and your psychiatry practice.
"Why would somebody working on biochemistry want to talk to someone working on political activism just because they got a grant from the same person?"
Going to conferences of people who all think and dress the same way and work on the same issue is beneficial in one way; going to conferences like EA or SciFoo is beneficial in a different way--optimizing for serendipity.
Yeah. People who received an ACX grant probably have many more things in common than two randomly selected people (even if we restrict the selection to compatriots). But also, sometimes just having common knowledge that everyone in a certain group actively wants to meet and chat with everyone else is already valuable.
It would have been useful to know that one option was funding, of some sort, for politics/political careers, not necessarily for me personally. There are some interesting Senate seats up this cycle that might be viable options for third party candidacy who knows what they are doing where the existing brand name options are mediocre or in conflict with the kinds of things you, Scott, care about.
There are, given the divergence in my interests vs Scott, more very exciting projects on this list than I would have expected. Though part of that may be all the extra money and effort many people contributed.
I'll also somewhat second the comment by someone that people involved in grants perhaps associate being able to get grant funding too much with having good ideas, as far as the "why are they asking you and not this other potential option for money".
I hesitate to ask because it seems like surely you've thought of this, but....whatever tax status your grant fund has, have you evaluated if giving to politicians impacts it?
Double-OF-COURSE-YOU-RESEARCHED-THIS-energy: do the laws in Australia allow you to give large sums to political actors, and the actor to accept it? I do note that the person is not running for office themselves, but, ya know.
The grants are coming from two pots: my money, and external funders' money.
External funders are donating through a tax-deductible EA Fund.
I can't do this for tax reasons, so my donations won't be inherently tax-deductible. I plan to cover a combination of whatever grants that the EA Fund can't, plus the recipients who are inherently tax-deductible themselves (eg charities).
Answer to the second part: yes, Australian laws do allow it.
It’s possible I’ll need to register my activities under the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme (https://www.ag.gov.au/integrity/foreign-influence-transparency-scheme) but this doesn’t prohibit any such activities, just makes it public where the money is coming from. And clearly there is no difficulty with that being public in this case.
Thanks to both for the answers to my worries.
I’m sort of curious if there are any ideas that you specifically didn’t fund that you’d feel comfortable talking about
I hope to showcase all the ideas I didn't get to fund in Grants ++.
Looking forward to it :)
Very glad to see approval voting (AV) get funded (and promoted) on ACX. We see ranked choice voting (RCV) making inroads around the country, but there seems to be very little awareness of the pathologies of RCV that make it inferior to AV. [This is based on my remembrance of analysis on RangeVoting.org, which smells trustworthy to me.]
Approval voting is probably the best option, that could reasonably happen anyways, for American elections. Something of a limit to the problems that can be solved solely by better voting but at least at the municipal level it is pretty big.
Agreed.
What are the pathologies?
The pathologies of ranked choice voting are that in certain weird theoretical combinations of circumstances, voting for your true preferences makes your preferences less likely to be satisfied.
The problems with Approval Voting are less obvious, because it's Never Been Tried (actually it has been tried, in a few low-stakes elections but not much that we'd learn from). The upside of Approval Voting is that it allows a charismatic centrist to be elected... the downside might be that it precludes anyone else from ever getting elected. In a world where Approval Voting was the norm, what kind of candidates would we get? Would it be a "race to the centre", where candidates work hard to avoid ever unambiguously taking any kind of position that anyone at all could possibly disagree with? And would this be better or worse than what we have now?
Good points. I look forward to seeing it tried!
>The pathologies of ranked choice voting are that in certain weird theoretical combinations of circumstances, voting for your true preferences makes your preferences less likely to be satisfied.
By Arrow, is that not true for all (non-dictatorial) voting systems, including approval voting?
I think you're correct. The way you can kinda claim otherwise for approval voting is by changing the model of voter preferences (instead of them having preference orders, claim that they have sets of acceptable candidates).
Also: a nit: Arrow also requires determinism, but all the systems we talk about are deterministic.
(Trivial counterexample of a nondeterministic system: choose a voter at random and do as they wish. It's not dictatorial, because the voter is chosen at random.)
Yes, it is somewhat true for all (though Arrow iirc only applies to ordinal voting methods, which AV is not). But for AV, approving a candidate will never help a candidate you did not approve (though it may hurt a different candidate you approve of more). With IRV, your true preferences can potentially elect your least liked candidate.
In a highly polarized environment, you may have a candidate who is everyone’s second choice but no one’s first choice. They get eliminated in the first round of evaluation in the RCV algorithm.
RCV still has the benefit over our current system (PV) that the spoiler effect is avoided. So those third parties can exist, but they still need to beat the conventional parties in popularity.
With AV on the other hand, you're not forced to rank, only to approve, and so any acceptable compromiser has a huge advantage in an otherwise polarized election.
I'm not sure IRV completely avoids the spoiler effect.
With plurality, if a 3rd candidate is at 1-2%, it is not a big deal, but as soon as it is 5-10% it becomes a liability because of being a spoiler. Thus it is hard for them to grow large support. As soon as they start to grow, they become a liability and voters will strategically vote against them.
IRV does handle this better at low ranges of support. A candidate with low enough support to place last won't be a spoiler, but there is still a center squeeze and other cases where there could be a spoiler. This is because IRV does not satisfy Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_of_irrelevant_alternatives)
I mean, doesn't it? in the limit where all the Irrelevant alternatives are truly identical, all their preferences will flow to one another and one of them at random will get all of the votes of the collective bloc of identical candidates. In the real world, of course, the candidates aren't truly identical, but then it is no longer obviously bad that eg. the votes for the Communist don't all preference the Socialist when the Communist party is eliminated.
Note that irrelevant does not mean identical, though it is true that a system that does not satisfy IIA will be subject to 'candidate cloning'. So your intuition is correct, IRV does a much better job at candidate cloning than plurality, but it still fails IIA.
In the communist/socialist example, you are correct it wont be an issue *if* the communist support is relatively low (i assume you are assuming this, since you say they will be eliminated). If their popularity grows, there is a potential for a center squeeze.
Consider this toy example (numbers are completely made up by me to illustrate. I am not implying any political preference here, just following the example provided)
Say there is an IRV election between Socialists and Capitalists with the following support:
Socialist: 55%
Capitalist: 45%
But what if the Communist party decided to enter... if they only have 1-5% support, their votes transfer to second choices, which I think is fair to say will be Socialist, so no difference in outcome, as we noted above.
But say instead, they drew a lot of support, and we had
Communist: 30%
Socialist: 25%
Capitalist: 45%
Now it is the socialists that will be eliminated first. And unlike the communists, where we could be confident that all of the 2nd place support would flow to Socialists, the Socialists 2nd place is more likely to be split. If just 6% of voters were socialist, but not full communist, and put Capitalist as 2nd place, then in the 2nd round we get
Communist: 49%
Capitalist: 51%
This is IIA failing (also 'center' squeeze' with regrads to IRV). By entering the race, the Communist party caused the winner to go from Socialist to Capitalist. This is a worse outcome for them.
Here is a decent independent rundown of the limitations of both https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU
A quick google lands me here:
https://www.fairvote.org/electoral_systems_rcv_vs_approval_voting
Which suggests that approval voting has more problems than ranked voting in getting your “first choice” in, although AV does away with rankings which is an odd way of fixing that problem - pretending it doesn’t exist.
If that is even the problem (I’m not clear what your pathologies are).
As someone living in a country with ranked voting, specifically the single transferable vote, I would often vote for a first ranked candidate destined to lose. Then on the elimination of that candidate my vote goes to the next person. That person might also be destined to lose so the vote percolates up to elect somebody eventually if I kept ranking.
here is a more thorough analysis https://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html
That’s pretty badly written, and it seeks to have handpicked an example where there might be a discrepancy. In order to prove the point the piece has the voter act suspiciously against her wishes.
“In the example, suppose the 1st voter, instead of honestly stating her top-preference was A, were to dishonestly vote C>A>B, i.e. pretending great love for her truly most-hated candidate C, and pretending a lack of affection for her true favorite A.”
There’s no explanation of why she did this, but apparently the voter doesn’t get A elected if she prefers C when voting. Why is that a problem and why are we second guessing her?
And I think it’s pretty clear that most people, if they get this system at all will use the highest rank available to them, 99 then 98 etc. Which is basically ranked voting.
i agree the article is pretty dense, and not very user friendly. There are more accessible writeups out there if you are interested.
But read the example again! The voter causes 'A' to win, not 'C'. By lying and claiming 'C' was her favorite, this causes 'A' to win.
To the 2nd point, "if they get this system at all will use the highest rank available to them, 99 then 98 etc. Which is basically ranked voting."
It is still different! They have implicitly 'ranked' their preferences; similar perhaps to IRV, but the way Score voting determines the winner does not make this equivalent.
And I don't think it is clear people will use the highest ranks. They will use the highest AND lowest (since they don't want the candidates they hate to be ranked high). And this.. is basically Approval Voting.
The voter didn’t lie. She voted as she voted. Why is the writer assuming somebodies internal mind choice as being illegitimate and why is she ever going to with out prior to the count what might have happen. It’s thoroughly contrived.
Of course most people will rank 99,98,97, if a die hard Republican doesn’t do that for the Republican candidates (and I assume there would be multiple candidates from each party) then she will worry about a democrat would rank the top Democrats 99,98,97.
1. I'm not sure I understand your objection... It is pretty standard for analysis of voting methods to consider strategic voting, this is not unique to this article. If you assume no strategic voting, that makes range even better.
If it is just a general 'this is contrived' objection, then yes I don't think anyone would disagree. Contrived, or 'toy', examples are often used to illustrate how a voting method can go wrong, as they are simpler, clearer and cleaner than a more complex example.
2. Yes, the die hard 'R' can rate Republicans '99,98,97...', or can rate them all '99' (you can reuse scores). But they wouldn't rate the Democrats this way. They would give them scores closer to 0. It would be foolish to leave them unranked.
This one may be easier to read https://electionscience.org/approval-voting-faqs/
I suppose it comes down to what our objective function is. I’d rather have an official of whom 80% of the population approves than have a candidate who is 53% of the countries first choice.
You make a good point about a strategy of priority ranking candidates unlikely to win, but we face an education barrier to get most of the electorate onboard. I suppose a similar educational barrier exists for AV as well. Voters may still adapt suboptimal strategies.
It could be interesting to write down some objective functions and voter behavior rules and then run simulations to see what would happen. Obviously lots of limitations to modeling, but it could fortify the discussion.
I agree approval voting (AV) is better than plurality voting (PV). Another system that could be beneficial in the current situation is approval/disapproval voting (ADV). You could vote for or against any number of candidates. ("I am for Alice, Bob and Carol, neutral about Dave and Fred, and against Elisabeth"). Where AV is giving [0,1] to each candidate, ADV would be giving [-1,0,1] to each.
AV's advantage indeed is to allow support of outsider candidates without "wasting the vote". ADV goes beyond that, it is the antidote to polarization - it would *actively punish* the "Shiri's Scissors candidates".
The said candidates utilize the scissors as a cheap way of mobilizing a voter base; whether it turns out on election day that they picked the "50%+" or the "50%-" side of the scissors, they have *certainly* swept aside their non-scissor competitors. In terms of ADV, a scissors candidate A would cut the voters pro:neutral:contra as 51:8:41 - often against a candidate B taking the opposite scissor position, with near-opposite ratios. Until the backlash of the next election, that is, where it will be 42:7:51. (it's about topics such as "defund the police" / "prohibit abortion" / etc). Main thing is, both A and B are sweeping aside their "non-scissors" competitors C to H, who'd be around 20:75:5, give or take, and who are getting virtually no votes in PV, and doing only slightly better in AV.
In the PV system, the A and B end up sucking out all the air in the room as far as C to H are concerned. The AV system gives *some* breathing room to the C-H candidates, yes. But the ADV system *punishes* the A & B candidates. They get "51-41=10" versus their "20-5=15" contenders.
Such a system would carry an obvious bias: against the "far positions" on all sides. It would have centrism baked into the cake. Some cite this as a flaw, that it would lead to electing candidates who aren't "anyone's favorite choice" or whatever. One good look at contemporary US proves that to not be a flaw, but as good an outcome as might be hoped for. Nowadays, Rep voters have mixed feelings about Rep candidates and hate the guts of Dem candidates, while Dem voters are in the exact opposite situation. This is the natural outcome of the PV process. The AV would slightly improve this, but the ADV has the potential to replace outcomes of "50%+ mixed-feelings / 50%- hating-guts" with "10% approval / 80% mixed feelings / 10% hating-guts". Arguably the latter *is* a better outcome for democratic governance, or at least a saner outcome for something that aspires to be a unified country.
I don’t see how any of this works without multiple candidates within parties, which can happen with the single transferable vote. That would bypass the primaries.
Using approval voting for primaries but plurality voting for general elections is an interesting case. The main benefit of plurality voting is that it avoids fracturing of parties; systems in which independence of irrelevant alternatives hold tend to have many parties which then can require large and unstable coalitions. Party primaries are already rather fractured. This also avoids a complete "race to the center" that could reduce political innovation.
In general work on how one might combine different voting systems for different purposes seems underdeveloped.
You appear to paint "race to the center" negatively, and "political innovation" positively. You also placed scare quotes around the former only, while I'm inclined to place them around the latter.
What "innovation"? I consider there is hardly any dynamic in contemporary US politics that isn't a rehash of the dynamics happening in end-of-18th-century France, for instance. (if excluding how unprecedentedly blockheaded most participants are around race questions, I would argue there is absolutely nothing new at all). People more versed in history might cite echoes of those dynamics going back to ancient Rome, Greece or even furhter.
"Fracturing of parties" is an illusion created by the perspective that there *should* be a duopoly of parties, rather than the perspective that the duopoly is the degenerate endgame of the plurality voting system. The PV system has the *rewarding* of scissor candidates baked into the cake, while the approval/disapproval voting system has the *punishing* of scissor candidates baked in. Yes, "centrism", if you prefer.
Democracy often labels itself as "rule with the approval of the governed". Running with that label, consider two systems who would give the following typical *outcomes* of the process.
PV: 10% approval, 50% mixed-feelings, 40% unmitigated discontent
ADV: 15% approval, 75% mixed-feelings, 10% unmitigated discontent
Which of the two comes closer to the label of "rule with the approval of the governed"?
Also, if contemporary US is flip-flopping between "Trump US" and "Biden US" - both of them being 10:50:40 arrangements with flipping polarities - which of the two approaches would you label "stable" in a meaningful way?
I used actual quotes because I wanted to be clear I was referencing the concept in the previous comment. I don't do scare quotes.
I don't think any realistic voting system will come anywhere close to "rule of the governed." People have too varied of preferences. I am therefore generally extremely skeptical of government intervention, which I view as being nearly always and everywhere captured by special interests. That doesn't mean government should do nothing, but I don't see being elected as conferring a large amount of legitimacy. I would not be particularly supportive of democracy except it seems considerably more robust to providing for the general welfare than any other form of government, even if it doesn't do a great job in an absolute sense.
By political innovation I mean primarily policy innovation. If everyone is competing to be the least offensive, that to me suggests that they will avoid confronting entrenched special interests. That seems undesirable. I could care less about grand debates in political philosophy.
One also need only observe Italian, Brazilian, Israeli, or Belgian politics to see the impact of a high degree of fracturing.
I don't want to overly focus on the current political dynamic in the US. Trump wouldn't have been nominated with approval voting in a Republican primary.
Understood, and retracting my comments about scare quotes.
>Trump wouldn't have been nominated with approval voting in a Republican primary.
Correct. Neither would have been Hillary. I do agree AV is a step up from PV, I'm arguing why I consider ADV to be a step up from AV.
As for the entire US system having degenerated to "PV duopoly with PV primaries" in the first place, and that the only "tweak" it needs is to become a "PV duopoly with AV primaries" - because this avoids "party fracturing hell" - I remain skeptical of that view. I consider that having a multitude of parties that are elected by ADV on the general level, would reduce the creeping and seemingly unstoppable polarization of the country.
The examples of fracturing you gave *are* fracturings that evolved inside PV systems (except that they never spiraled down into a duopoly-with-primaries configuration). The ADV system would inherently affect the incentives in which any fracturings are evolving, so the comparisons need not directly apply.
About coming anywhere close to "rule with consent of the governed", if your key metric is the share of the population who does *not* feel unmitigated discontent with the way they are governed, then voting systems that punish scissor candidates provide a doubtlessly better approach than systems which reward them.
> democracy (...) seems considerably more robust to providing for the general welfare than any other form of government
In Christian and Islamic countries throughout past centuries, welfare has generally been organized by religious institutions more than by governments. While this has necessarily waned alongside the large-scale secularization trends - which largely coincide with establishment of democracies - equating government-provided welfare with democracy is confounding issues. I've been to some Islamic non-democratic countries that don't have -any- homeless people sleeping on the benches, and whose welfare stems from religious tradition more than from government-organized redirection of funds. Also, analysts like Sowell can point you to the reasons why the "blank-check government-provided welfare" that is de rigueur since the 1960s, has not really been an unalloyed good for the population receiving them, when compared to other historic welfare arrangements.
Would direct democracy qualify as rule of the governed for you?
I like the phrase "Scissors Candidate". Apt.
Gašo, would it be correct to say that, structurally, RV(2) == AV, and RV(3) == ADV? Here RV(n) refers to Range Voting with a range of n different options.
I believe your ADV proposal may be practically superior to RV(n) because Approval / Disapproval is easier to communicate than the Olympic-style scoring used in RV.
They would be functionally equivalent, yes, but I think that presenting it as zero-centered (i.e. [-1,0,+1] instead of [0,1,2])is better communicating to people the effect of their vote.
In your notation, the Score Voting system which proposes 0 "strongly disapproving" to 9 "strongly approving" plus an "X" for "no opinion", can be represented as "RV(11)"; its functionally equivalent zero-centered system would be [-5..+5], with mappings 0 → -5, 9 → +5 and "X" → 0. Whereas I'd still prefer the ADV ("zero-centered RV(3)") to the RV(11), as it has the advantages of simplicity; it is the simplest of the systems that can counteract the arguably largest pathology of PV systems, "VOTING AGAINST".
By this I mean voting for B because you *really* do not want A to win, and *not* because B is particularly well representing you - whereas voting for D or F (whom you're both reasonably aligned with) is pragmatically a wasted vote that will just let A win. This has been the most pathological dynamic for over a hundred years.
In ADV, if you're really against A, you can simply *vote against A*, and then vote for D and F. One could do a book-length presentation of major historical moments that would have gone quite differently under such a voting system, but the single-sentence summary is that it punishes scissor candidates instead of rewarding them.
I'm awed and inspired to read about so many cool projects happening around this community. Thank for doing this, Scott!
Also I'm super proud to be Beny's brother even if I don't understand enough biochemistry to know what he's actually doing :)
Such an exciting list! And I was very happy to see Seattle Approves up there -- they're addressing the meta problem of "why can't the US political process solve more of the country's problems?"
"why can't the US political process solve more of the country's problems?"
Because of human nature. There is no one single utopian perfect nation in the world, even with a different political system. You can have a *bad* system that causes problems or make things worse, but you can also have a perfect, shiny system that people will then try to bend to their own ends or ignore.
Improving bad systems is a good idea, but don't think "we'll create a perfect system and that will be the panacea for the nation's problems" because it won't be.
GIGO
Some really fascinating grants here (and a couple that I think might be ethically... questionable). Setting those aside, this is a really cool thing you've done here.
Lots of fascinating projects, thanks for sharing
> Nils Kraus, $40,000, to experiment with new ways of measuring precision weighting in humans. The precision-weighting of mental predictions is one of the absolute basics of the predictive coding model of the mind, but we know very little about it and have trouble testing hypotheses about how it works.
I'm quite interested in this; is there a way to follow this work as it develops? (And is there a good source on the current state of understanding?)
Happy to hear that people are interested :)
I can send you the proposal where I have collected some previous studies that have tried to measure precision weighting via several different ways, if you'd like.
Yes, please!
I'm one of the three cofounders of Mantic Markets, and I wanted to give a heartfelt thanks to Scott! Not just because we won a grant, or because he's namedropped us, or even because he's been so nice about us blatantly stealing the "Mantic" name...
But because it's fairly (~70%) likely this project would not have existed without ACX Grants. James and I were online friends, and we'd chatted before about collaborating on something. The existence of ACX Grants gave us an excuse to actually do something! I flew out to meet James and Stephen; and in our process of writing the grant application, we got so excited that we decided to just build out the prototype, whether we heard back or not. We've been hacking on it ever since (that's why our prototype is already live)!
Like Scott, I don't really know if Mantic will ultimately work out. (If you think _you_ know, bet on https://mantic.markets/ManticMarkets/will-mantic-markets-have-over-1m !) But this grant has already made me two good friends/cofounders, and a really exciting December so far. Thanks again for running this program!
Re: "Why would somebody working on biochemistry want to talk to someone working on political activism just because they got a grant from the same person?"
I can't speak for anyone else but I'd _love_ to be thrown into a Discord with everyone else who's gotten a grant. Beyond chatting, here are some things I'd look forward to (patterned off of YCombinator):
- Random 1:1s with other fundees, just to learn about their field of expertise
- Weekly check ins where everyone posts updates, as a shared accountability metric
- A "Demo Day", eg in 6 months where each fundee gives a 3min talk on what they accomplished, in front of potential future funders
Everything optional, of course! I'm happy to help organize; in fact, I may just go and do this for the forecasting people. We've already chatted with Nuno before, and I'm planning on reaching out to Nikos and Nathan too!
Send me an invite when you do!
Thanks Austin! I 100% agree and add my thanks to Scott for this grant that brought us together.
I am only here to say that "sufficiently advanced beetles" is the sort of Vorkosigan chaos energy that I hope there is more of in the world.
Makes me wonder if it’s the beatles or their micro-/mycobiome. There’s some exciting work happening with plastic-eating fungi.
Interesting how "sufficiently advanced beetles" mentally primed me to read that word as 'Volkswagen' on first glance.
Wow. Republicans are evil. I wish I hadn't read that.
I'm actually fairly surprised by that too. I expected it to be a set up for a joke that never came.
Seems to pretty obviously be a joke.
Scott's already admitted to hating Republicans in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans
in a post where it was just joking enough that he would have plausible deniability if anyone called him on it and he wanted to deny it.
Comedians--and non-comedians playing at comedy--like to say things they may need to later deny as part of humor.
Unless Scott also believes that AI capabilities researchers are evil too (seems unlikely), then this is obviously a joke.
I winced. It’s certainly a joke, but it’s hard to make something like that land in our environment when so many people treat all Republicans as evil.
I chalk this up to the influence of living in the Bay Area and among his tribe, where casual insults to Republicans come off as harmless political humor that nobody is hurt by, because no actual Republicans would dare out themselves by objecting.
"Other times a reviewer was concerned that if you were successful, your work might be used by terrorists / dictators / AI capabilities researchers / Republicans and cause damage in ways you couldn't foresee"
I agree that this is a joke, but to my reading it is a joke that gently pokes fun at the reviewer (who seemingly equates Republicans with terrorists). If anything, it reads to me as sympathetic to Republicans, not pointed at them.
This was my impression as well. A little eyeroll at partisanship that was bound to crop up in some reviews.
Maybe it is! The problem is that it can be read both ways, and since the double meaning is implicit and there’s nothing to read against the equivalency, it’s tone-deaf in an environment where just this kind of casual associational slur is terrifically common.
1Day Sooner staff member here—thanks so much, Scott! These grants are an awesome idea, and honestly I’m kind of blown away by the company we’re in. Good luck with your projects, everyone!
> My father has been stalled on an important research project for years for lack of the right kind of statistician
Just out of curiosity, what is it and what would the right kind of statistician be? I'm a statistician and I know a lot of statisticians. Often we feel we are short on important projects, while society is yelling that it is short on statisticians. It's hard to square that circle.
Biostatistician who is allowed to look at VA data.
I am a statistician who meets the latter requirement. I have done biostats, though I don't know that I'm A Biostatistician. Is he still looking for help?
Edit: I guess there's enough grading in level of access that my comment might not be super-helpful. Does he need someone *at* the VA who can query their database directly, or somebody who's clear to stare at such data?