EA - Manifund: what we're funding (week 1) by Austin

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Manifund: what we're funding (week 1), published by Austin on July 15, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.We're experimenting with a weekly newsletter format, to surface the best grants and activity on Manifund!Overall reflectionsIt's been a week since we announced our regrantor program. How are we feeling?Very happy with the publicity and engagement around our grant proposals#1 on Hacker News, multiple good EA Forum posts, and 7 new grassroots donorsFeels like this validates our strategy of posting grant proposals in public.Happy with the caliber of regrantors who've applied for budgetsWe've gotten 15 applications; have onboarded 2 and shortlisted 4 moreNow thinking about further fundraising, so we can give budgets to these awesome folksHappy with grantee experience for the handful of grants we've madeLess happy with total grantmaking quantity and dollar volume so farIn total, we've committed about $70k across 6 large grantsWhere's the bottleneck? Some guesses: regrantors are busy people; writeups take a while; "funder chicken" when waiting for others to make grantsTo address this, we're running a virtual "grantathon" to work on grant writeups & reviews! Join us next Wed evening, 6-9pm PT on this Google Meet.Grant of the weekThis week's featured grant is to Matthew Farrugia-Roberts, for introductory resources for Singular Learning Theory! In the words of Adam Gleave, the regrantor who initiated this:There's been an explosion of interest in Singular Learning Theory lately in the alignment community, and good introductory resources could save people a lot of time. A scholarly literature review also has the benefit of making this area more accessible to the ML research community more broadly. Matthew seems well placed to conduct this, having already familiarized himself with the field during his MS thesis and collected a database of papers. He also has extensive teaching experience and experience writing publications aimed at the ML research community.In need of fundingSome of our favorite proposals which could use more funding:A proposal to cure cavities, forever. Very out-of-left-field (Aaron: "it certainly isn't great for our Weirdness Points budget"), but I'm a fan of the ambition and the team behind it. We're currently seeing how Manifund can make an equity investment in Lantern Bioworks.Also: this proposal hit #1 on Hacker News, with 260 upvotes & 171 comments. Shoutout to our friend Evan Conrad for posting + tweeting this out!Holly has a stellar track record at Rethink Priorities and Harvard EA (not to mention a killer blog). She's now looking to pivot to AI moratorium movement-organizing! As a grant that may include political advocacy, we're still seeing to what extent our 501c3 can fund this; in the meantime, Holly has set up a separate GoFundMe for individual donors.Pilot of electrical stunners to reduce shrimp suffering. Recommended by regrantor Marcus Abramovitch, as the one of the most exciting & unfunded opportunities in the entire space of animal welfare.In a thorough EA Forum post, Matt investigates the cost-effectiveness of this proposal - it's a thoughtful writeup, take a look at the entire thing! One takeaway:Electric shrimp stunning might be worth supporting as a somewhat speculative bet in the animal welfare space. Considerations that might drive donor decisions on this project include risk tolerance, credence in the undiluted experience model of welfare, and willingness to take a hits-based giving approach.New regrantors: Renan Araujo and Joel BeckerSince putting out the call for regrantors last week, we've gotten quite the influx of interest. After speaking with many candidates, we're happy to announce our two newest regrantors: Renan and Joel!We expect regranting to integrate smoothly with Renan's work incubating lo...