Thank you for weighing in, Aaron. I'll note that Manifund is unusually, primarily "bootstrapped"; which is to say, we have received comparatively few direct donations for our operating expenses -- perhaps $100-300k in total over 3 years, primarily from SFF rounds? Instead, we earn our operating expenses on a 5% fiscal sponsorship + operating fee, taken on large donations made through the platform, probably north of $500k in total. We've also earned some money via treasury operations and other arrangements, including, at one point, a loan to Lightcone.
Of course, it's possible that some of our past donors will be unhappy with their 5% fee being used in this way; but I would argue that this is a bit more like paying a 2.9% fee to Stripe and then Stripe hiring someone you don't like.
Thank you for writing this, Grace! I'd like to link to another article on this subject, which argues somewhat against your sentiment (while also agreeing in many places): “PR” is corrosive; “reputation” is not
Thank you for weighing in. And I appreciate that this announcement, as timed and as stated, probably makes your job (and the job of others at CEA, not to mention the rest of EA) somewhat harder. Please let me know if there are things you believe I should do moving forward to mitigate this impact (including, renouncing EA. I've written elsewhere, but I'm considering holding a plebiscite on whether we should be cast out).
I am sorry for not having provided more advance notice; for what it's worth, we decided and pulled together this announcement on a very short timeline overall. I think we decided to announce on Tuesday (pacific time), finished the writeup Wednesday, and started forwarding to people on Wed and Thursday. (I believe we emailed you more like 24h before the announcement, but I agree that this is still very low, and nitpick-y.)
Two reasons we decided to announce on Friday were that 1) Caroline was visiting in-person through the week and 2) my son is due to be born later this week, and I wanted this announced before paternity leave.
To be clear, I hired Caroline because I thought she was an excellent candidate for the role. I talk about my feelings towards the Future Fund and FTX to explain why I would consider an action that other people would find controversial.
I wish this weren't the case, for what it's worth. I have some aspiration of Manifund being a neutral utility or infrastructure, similar to Twitter or Substack or Stripe, where it's understood that people and orgs of very different backgrounds will still use it for funding.
There's some evidence of this. I believe Manifund is the only platform that has hosted projects receiving donations from people as disparate as Marc Andreessen and Beth Barnes.
Reasonable, thank you for flagging! @richard_ngo has been writing a series on this, how AI safety-motivated people, inside and outside of labs, may have contributed significantly to speedup. And he argues that even orgs that many people admire, like METR, are not immune to this -- I think he has a quote like "the METR graph has significantly contributed to race dynamics"
I don't have a settled thought on whether I agree overall, but I certainly appreciate his speaking up. I believe his stance is also that we should give up on "EA", which, I currently disagree with. (But, perhaps "EA" will give up on me...)
I made this comparison because I am personally Catholic, fwiw, and that feels similarly important to me as my EA-ness. You might make make a comparison for your own community, or religion, or city or country, whatever feels appropriate.
To tie things to current events: it's plausible to me that some frontier lab employees working on AI capabilities, may be grappling with situations that rhymes with Caroline's at FTX. I think Jacob Coxon (and others) are acting admirably in this regard. (I may try to write out more thoughts on this later.)
I believe the entire EA Bahamas Fellowship was Caroline's idea? (But to be clear, Joel Becker was the one who took over and organized most of it.)
One kind-of-funny detail in all this: Caroline herself interviewed, then rejected Manifold initially in Dec 2021. (I doubt she remembers this; I'd forgotten until this week.) It was a later Future Fund regrantor who got us into that fellowship.
Anyways: I agree that the Future Fund team definitely deserves more of the credit than FTX -- and also, FTX's creditors deserve a lot of that credit rather than FTX management. I've offered at times to support folks who worked on the Future Fund or FTX Foundation; happily I think they are all now off doing amazing things.
(Without yet taking a stance on agreement or disagreement, I've strong upvoted this comment; I think it is well researched and engages with some of the tricky questions of ethics and "doing good", which I am myself always trying to understand better.
I want to be clear that I don't have all the answers, and am often wrong. I appreciate you, and everyone else commenting, who are contributing to our shared state of this understanding.)
Thank you for weighing in, Aaron. I'll note that Manifund is unusually, primarily "bootstrapped"; which is to say, we have received comparatively few direct donations for our operating expenses -- perhaps $100-300k in total over 3 years, primarily from SFF rounds? Instead, we earn our operating expenses on a 5% fiscal sponsorship + operating fee, taken on large donations made through the platform, probably north of $500k in total. We've also earned some money via treasury operations and other arrangements, including, at one point, a loan to Lightcone.
Of course, it's possible that some of our past donors will be unhappy with their 5% fee being used in this way; but I would argue that this is a bit more like paying a 2.9% fee to Stripe and then Stripe hiring someone you don't like.
Thank you for writing this, Grace! I'd like to link to another article on this subject, which argues somewhat against your sentiment (while also agreeing in many places): “PR” is corrosive; “reputation” is not
Thank you for weighing in. And I appreciate that this announcement, as timed and as stated, probably makes your job (and the job of others at CEA, not to mention the rest of EA) somewhat harder. Please let me know if there are things you believe I should do moving forward to mitigate this impact (including, renouncing EA. I've written elsewhere, but I'm considering holding a plebiscite on whether we should be cast out).
I am sorry for not having provided more advance notice; for what it's worth, we decided and pulled together this announcement on a very short timeline overall. I think we decided to announce on Tuesday (pacific time), finished the writeup Wednesday, and started forwarding to people on Wed and Thursday. (I believe we emailed you more like 24h before the announcement, but I agree that this is still very low, and nitpick-y.)
Two reasons we decided to announce on Friday were that 1) Caroline was visiting in-person through the week and 2) my son is due to be born later this week, and I wanted this announced before paternity leave.
To be clear, I hired Caroline because I thought she was an excellent candidate for the role. I talk about my feelings towards the Future Fund and FTX to explain why I would consider an action that other people would find controversial.
I wish this weren't the case, for what it's worth. I have some aspiration of Manifund being a neutral utility or infrastructure, similar to Twitter or Substack or Stripe, where it's understood that people and orgs of very different backgrounds will still use it for funding.
There's some evidence of this. I believe Manifund is the only platform that has hosted projects receiving donations from people as disparate as Marc Andreessen and Beth Barnes.
Reasonable, thank you for flagging! @richard_ngo has been writing a series on this, how AI safety-motivated people, inside and outside of labs, may have contributed significantly to speedup. And he argues that even orgs that many people admire, like METR, are not immune to this -- I think he has a quote like "the METR graph has significantly contributed to race dynamics"
I don't have a settled thought on whether I agree overall, but I certainly appreciate his speaking up. I believe his stance is also that we should give up on "EA", which, I currently disagree with. (But, perhaps "EA" will give up on me...)
I made this comparison because I am personally Catholic, fwiw, and that feels similarly important to me as my EA-ness. You might make make a comparison for your own community, or religion, or city or country, whatever feels appropriate.
Thank you for saying this.
To tie things to current events: it's plausible to me that some frontier lab employees working on AI capabilities, may be grappling with situations that rhymes with Caroline's at FTX. I think Jacob Coxon (and others) are acting admirably in this regard. (I may try to write out more thoughts on this later.)
I believe the entire EA Bahamas Fellowship was Caroline's idea? (But to be clear, Joel Becker was the one who took over and organized most of it.)
One kind-of-funny detail in all this: Caroline herself interviewed, then rejected Manifold initially in Dec 2021. (I doubt she remembers this; I'd forgotten until this week.) It was a later Future Fund regrantor who got us into that fellowship.
Anyways: I agree that the Future Fund team definitely deserves more of the credit than FTX -- and also, FTX's creditors deserve a lot of that credit rather than FTX management. I've offered at times to support folks who worked on the Future Fund or FTX Foundation; happily I think they are all now off doing amazing things.
(Without yet taking a stance on agreement or disagreement, I've strong upvoted this comment; I think it is well researched and engages with some of the tricky questions of ethics and "doing good", which I am myself always trying to understand better.
I want to be clear that I don't have all the answers, and am often wrong. I appreciate you, and everyone else commenting, who are contributing to our shared state of this understanding.)