[epistemic status: i've spent about 5-20 hours thinking by myself and talking with rai about my thoughts below. however, i spent fairly little time actually writing this, so the literal text below might not map to my views as well as other comments of mine.]

IMO, Sentinel is one of the most impactful uses of marginal forecasting money.

some specific things i like about the team & the org thus far:

• nuno's blog is absolutely fantastic — deeply excellent, there are few that i'd recommend higher
• rai is responsive (both in terms of time and in terms of feedback) and extremely well-calibrated across a variety of interpersonal domains
• samotsvety is, far and away, the best forecasting team in the world
• sentinel's weekly newsletter is my ~only news source
  • why would i seek anything but takes from the best forecasters in the world?
  • i think i'd be willing to pay at least $5/week for this, though i expect many folks in the EA community would be happy to pay 5x-10x that. their blog is currently free (!!)
  • i'd recommend skimming whatever their latest newsletter was to get a sense of the content/scope/etc
• linch's piece sums up my thoughts around strategy pretty well

i have the highest crux-uncertainty and -elasticity around the following, in (extremely rough) order of impact on my thought process:

• do i have higher-order philosophical commitments that swamp whatever Sentinel does? (for ex: short timelines, animal suffering, etc)
• will Sentinel be able to successfully scale up?
• conditional on Sentinel successfully forecasting a relevant GCR, will Sentinel successfully prevent or mitigate the GCR?
• will Sentinel be able to successfully forecast a relevant GCR?
• how likely are the category of GCRs that sentinel might mitigate to actually come about? (vs no GCRS or GCRS that are totally unpredictable/unmitigateable)

i’ll add $250, with exactly the same commentary as austin :)

to the extent that others are also interested in contributing to the prize pool, you might consider making a manifund page. if you’re not sure how to do this or just want help getting started, let me (or austin/rachel) know!

also, you might adjust the “prize pool” amount at the top of the metaculus page — it currently reads “$0.”

thanks for making this post/question!

@NunoSempere seems like you might like this.

epistemic status: extremely quickly written thoughts, haven't thought these through deeply, these are mostly vibes. i spent 10 minutes writing this out. i do not cite sources.

• seems like non-human animals are suffering much more than humans, both in quantity of beings suffering & extent of suffering per being
  • it might be that non-human animals are less morally valuable than humans — i think i buy into this to some extent, but, like, you'd have to buy into this to a ridiculously extreme extent to think that humans are suffering more than non-human animals in aggregate
• seems like animal welfare has been pretty tractable — in-particular, e.g. shrimp or insect welfare, where magnitudinal differences
• it seems like there's currently substantially more of a global focus (in terms of $ for sure, but also in terms of general vibes) on global health than on animal welfare, even holding suffering between the two groups constant
• i generally feel pretty cautious about expanding into new(er) causes, for epistemic modesty reasons (for both empirical & moral uncertainty reasons)
  • this is particularly true for the sub-cause-areas within animal welfare that seem most promising, like shrimp & insect welfare as well as wild animal welfare
  • this is what's preventing me from moving the dial ~all the way to the right
• some things this question doesn't take into acct:
  • within each of these areas, how is the $100mm being spent?
  • how would other funders react to this? would e.g. some other funder pull out of [cause] because $100mm just appeared?
  • etc — though i don't think that these questions are particularly relevant to the debate
• some cruxes around which i have the most uncertainty:
  • extent to which there continue to be tractable interventions in AW (compared to GH)
  • extent to which i believe that non-human lives have moral significance
  • probably some others that i'm not thinking of

i'd be curious to see the results of e.g. focus groups on this — i'm just now realizing how awful of a name "lab grown meat" is, re: the connotations.

There has been a lot of discussion of this, some studies were done on different names

could you link to a few of the discussions & studies?

works! thx

thanks for the response!

looks like the link in the footnotes is private. maybe there’s a public version you could share?

re: the rest — makes sense. 1%-5% doesn’t seem crazy to me, i think i would’ve “made up” 0.5%-2%, and these aren’t way off.

It looks to me that forecasting was 1 - 5% of the Democrats dropping Biden from their ticket.

curious where you're getting this from?