I am a total novice in this area, but this seems like a really great post!

In addition to great content, it is well written, with crisp, clear points. It's enjoyable to read.

I have a bunch of low to moderate quality comments below.

One motivation for writing this comment is that very high quality posts often don’t get comments for some reason. So please comment and criticize my thoughts!

The main point seems true!

I think the main point of scale and institutional advantages seems true (but I don't know much about the topic). 

Maybe another way of seeing this is that the 1% fallacy applies in reverse: in smaller countries you are much more able to effect change and the institutional lessons can then be transferred and scaled up in a second phase.

Critique: EA contributions are unclear?

I think a potential critique to your goal of attracting EA attention would be that the cause is not neglected. 

To flesh this out, I think a variant of this critique would be:

Nordic planners and experts have both high human capital and are funded by state wealth (vastly larger than any existing granter). Combined with their cultural/institutional knowledge, this could be an overwhelmingly high bar for an outsider to enter into and make an impact.

Another way of looking at this, is that the premise overvalues EA—EA is a great movement. But it’s small, and it's successes has been in neglected causes and meta-charity. 

So a premortem might look like “Ok so a lot of EAs came in, but generally, their initial help/advice amounted to noise. Ultimately, the most helpful pattern was that EAs ended up adding to our talent pool for our institutions (alongside the normal stream of Nordic candidates). This doesn't scale (since it adds people one-by-one) and doesn't really benefit from specific EA ideas.

This point could be responded to with some "vision" or scenarios of how EAs would "win". Maybe the EAF ballot initiative and Jan-Willem's work on workshops would be good examples.

Longtermist policies versus good governance

You mention longtermism being implemented in Nordic countries. 

Your examples included national saving withdrawals being codified at 3% per year, and programs giving explicit attention to time horizons of 40 years.

This looks a bit like "patient longtermism” (?)...but it mainly looks like "good governance" that does not require any attention to the astronomically large value of future generations.

Is it worth untangling this or is it reasonable to round off?

My impression is that at best the top 3% of people in rich countries in terms of ability (intelligence, work ethic, educational credentials) are able to pursue such high impact options. What I have a less good sense of is whether other people agree with this number.

This seems "right", but really, I don't truly know.

One reason I'm uncertain because I don't know the paths you are envisioning for these people.

Do you have a sense of what paths are available to the 3%, maybe writing out very briefly, say 2 paths that they could reliably succeed in, e.g. we would be comfortable advising them today to work on?

For more context, what I mean is, building on this point:

high impact job options like becoming a grantmaker directing millions of dollars or meaningfully influencing developing world health policy will not be realistic paths.

So while I agree that the top 3% of people have access to these options, my sense is that influencing policy and being top grant makers have this "central planner"-like aspect. We would probably only want a small group of people involved for multiple reasons. I would expect the general class of such roles and even their "support" to be a tiny fraction of the population.

So it seems getting a sense of the roles (or even some much broader process in some ideal world where 3% of people get involved) is useful to answer your question.

I think you should write this up as a full post or at least as a question. 

I don't think people will see this and you deserve reasonable attention if its a full time project.

Note that my knee jerk reaction is caution. The value of RCTs is well known and they are coveted. Then, in the mental models I use, I would discount the idea that it could be readily distributed. 

For example, something like the following logic might apply:

• An RCT, or something that looks like it, with many of the characteristics/quality you want, will cost more than the seed grant or early funding for the new org doing the actual intervention.
• Most smaller projects start with a pilot that gives credible information about effectiveness (by design, often much cheaper than an RCT).
• Then "democratizing RCTs", as you frame it, will basically boil down to funding/subsidizing smaller projects than bigger ones.

I'm happy for this reasoning to be thoroughly destroyed and RCTs available for all!

Ok, I see what you're saying now.

I might see this as a creating bounty program for altruistic successes, while at the same time creating a "thick" market for bounties that is crowd sourced, hopefully with virtuous effects.

I am worried academic studies might underestimate how bad looking I am.

I mean, what if I am four, five standard deviations off here?

Hi Linda,

It says here on the page on the website:

Applications are open until further notice and will be assessed on a rolling basis. If we plan to stop accepting applications, we will indicate it on this page at least a month ahead of time.

You're right, I don't immediately see it in the actual post, so it's unclear.

Think of it like a grants program, except that instead of evaluating someone's pitch for what they intend to do, you are evaluating what they actually did, with the benefit of hindsight. Presumably your evaluations will be significantly more accurate this way. (Also, the fact that it's NFT-based means that you can recruit the "wisdom of the efficient market" to help you  in various ways, e.g. lots of non-EAs will be buying and selling these NFTs trying to predict what you will think of them, and thus producing lots of research you can use.)
 

But the reason why you would evaluate someone's pitch as opposed to using hindsight is that nothing would be done without funding?

I don't see what you mean by centralization here, or how it's a problem. 

I think I am using centralization in the same way that cryptocurrency designers/architects talk about crypto currency systems actually work ("centralization pressures").

The point of NFTs, as opposed to you, me, or a giant granter producing certificates, is that it is part of a decentralized system, not under any one entity's control. 

My understanding is that this is the only logical reason why NFTs have any value, and are not a gimmick. 

They don't have any magical power by themselves or have any special function or information or anything like that.

Under this premise, centralization is undermined, if any other structural component of the system is missing. 

For example, if the grantors or their decisions come from a central source. Then the value of having a decentralized certificate is unclear.

Note undermining "centralization" is sort of like having a wrong step in a math theorem, it's existentially bad as opposed to a reduction in quality or something.

As for reliable guarantees the money will be used cost effectively, hell no, the whole point of impact certificates is that the evaluation happens after the event, not before. People can do whatever they want with the money, because they've already done the thing for which they are getting paid.

I meant that you have written out two distinct promises here that seem to be necessary for this system to structurally work in this proposal. One of these promises seem to be high quality evaluation:

Commit to buy $100M/year of these NFTs, and occasionally reselling them and using the proceeds to buy even more. 

Promise that our purchasing decisions will be based on our estimate of how much total impact the action represented by the NFT will have.

Thanks for pointing this out!

Thank you for pointing this out.

You are right, and I think maybe even a reasonable guess is that CSET funding is starting out at less than 10M a year.

I don't understand. Can you explain more what this project would do and how it would create change?

Also, this project seems to involve commitment of i) hundreds of millions of dollars of funding and ii) reliable guarantees that these will be used cost effectively.

These (extraordinarily) strong promises are structurally necessarily and also seem only achievable by "centralization".

Given this centralization, what is the function or purpose of the NFT?

(Note that my question isn't about technical knowledge about "blockchain" or "NFTs" and you can assume gears knowledge of them and their instantiations up through 2020.)