• What drew Peter to Manifund?
  • The impact cert — seemed like a promising idea, worth experimenting with.
  • [D] What in particular excites Peter? Building an ecosystem, in and of itself?
    • A general separation of skills at predicting future impact vs evaluating impact retrospectively. Makes it easier for funders to reward good predictors to allocate their funds efficiently
• Does this feel like a fit for Peter specifically, or the world in general?
  • Peter: world in general should be more like this
• How could we make the world in general to use Manifund for things like this — any thoughts?
  • Need some way to try out impact certs on orgs that are more ambitious than the first time. More money involved. Want to attract institutions that are “more ambitious.”
    • (though, hard without a good track record)
• Dave: What ideas might be particularly exciting to Peter, or to others?
  • Peter: Nothing in mind
  • D: Threading the needle of “what’s exciting” vs “this is where you can have incremental impact relatively quickly”
  • Peter wants “stepping stones” along the way so can find out quickly if predicting well

Topics Peter Cares about:

• Xrisk

  • Definitely interested in this — but mostly this will take many years to produce results

• Carbon Credits

• Pandemic preparedness

  • Peter: Pandemic (or even more tightly-scoped version for flu in SF) idea is interesting, but skeptical that we'll ever be good at it.

• Other areas that Peter cares about?

  • Mind uploading
    • Is this just technically hard? [P] Yeah — challenge is that this might just require big fundamental insights, not so many clear “stepping stones” along theway
  • Another possible area: cure for aging

• [D] Ideal formula for Manifund might be finding things that are big enough to matter, enables & rewards big predictors

• What charitable system is there something you use?

  • Peter: For aging, Aubrey De Gray’s, also invested in a company called Intervene Immune.
  • Thinks Manifund might be more suited to having 1-2 really big prizes
    • It’s possible to come up with a moderately clear & very ambitious goal criteria for success here; and probably going to take 100m or 1b to get key breakthroughs; prizes seem to work best for that size ventures (not quite sure why)
  • D: Would Peter be excited for Manifund to do this, or for others? Can we get a prize in 10m dollar range?

• [D] It’s awesome that people already decide to invest money on their own via Manifund; but there aren’t that many folks. Do we go to the big institutional donors and say “hey, we have this capability of slicing up the ways to run this - impact certs, regranting, etc” and be a service provider for this.

• [D] Are there people who we should be talking to?

  • People who don’t use Manifund; or people who do, and make sure to get their perspective

• [D] General feedback about site usage?

  • [P] Has been a while since using it; adequate
  • [D] What would cause Peter to come back more?
    • More ideas being presented? [P] Want to see proposals that are more ambitious, take a bit longer to produce results. “"Mostly to get my interest, you'd have to do a moderately good job of filtering and get me a bunch of ideas I don't currently see”

• [A] Where does Peter go to find proposals today?

  • LessWrong, EA Forum, various in-person events like Foresight Vision Weekend. Mostly “by accident”, generally finding enough things that Peter isn’t seeking a much larger volume of proposals to evaluate

  • Any examples of proposals Peter was very excited by?

    • Vision Weekend - Michael Andregg, starting a company related to mind uploading
    • Anna Solomon - new series of workshops based on CFAR

  • There’s a broader ecosystem that Peter already participate in, who finds out about them via talking to people

    • Unless Manifund provides additional dealflow, the main value add would be providing convenience?
      • [Peter] Actually not more convenient — need to come up with interesting ideas that Peter wouldn’t have otherwise seen

  • [D] If you were Manifund — pull in ideas that Peter-like people would like? Or pull from other sources instead?

    • [P] Dunno [D] Hearing that it’s difficult to pull out good ideas [P] Agree [D] Okay well if it’s hard to find good ideas, make the most of the ideaflow that we see