Out of interested I Googled 'Founders Pledge Terrapraxis' and found this link to a page saying 'We view the $250,000 as a seed grant through which to test whether we should recommend additional funding in 2021.' So I'm curious how that panned out, and also whether there's a more up-to-date version of that page (and if so whether you should delete that one).
There's been a bunch of occasions where I wrote or spoke about how Terra Praxis has developed, including the Changing Landscape report and the 80k podcast, but I agree it would be good to have an updated website post.
The TLDR right now would be:
TP has grown significantly and we've made several grants following the initial grant.
Their work has been quite impactful, in particular they are leading a consortium on repowering coal with advanced heat sources as a high-impact bet I am excited about being made and that would probably not have happened without the incubation of TerraPraxis.
I am not sure this bet will succeed, but it addresses a key decarbonization challenge (emission from new/young coal plants unlikely to be prematurely retired) and the approach had very little attention before the work of TerraPraxis and some other FP grantees (in particular, Staffan Qvist, who wrote the first technical paper on the idea (before he was a grantee)).
[Linkpost] Prospect Magazine - How to save humanity from extinction
This is a story in Prospect Magazine featuring the work of several EAs (full disclosure: including myself) working on existential and catastrophic risks framed around the occasion of Petrov Day.
AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
Adapted from my Substack, Funding Anthropalypse.
Short version: if you want a share of the coming Anthropic and OpenAI windfall - the $37bn+ that could be in play next year - the way in is to become 'legibly excellent', so the evaluators and donors that frontier lab staff already trust point them to yo...
Nice work Johannes!
Out of interested I Googled 'Founders Pledge Terrapraxis' and found this link to a page saying 'We view the $250,000 as a seed grant through which to test whether we should recommend additional funding in 2021.' So I'm curious how that panned out, and also whether there's a more up-to-date version of that page (and if so whether you should delete that one).
Hi Arepo, thanks!
There's been a bunch of occasions where I wrote or spoke about how Terra Praxis has developed, including the Changing Landscape report and the 80k podcast, but I agree it would be good to have an updated website post.
The TLDR right now would be: