Astral Codex Ten

impact market

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impact market

Article

impact market is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 08, 2023 and March 07, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “a non-traditional charitable funding institution”; “The plan has always been to run an impact market - a site where investors crowdfund some of the remaining grant proposals”. It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, ACX Grants, Manifund.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: December 08, 2023
  • Last seen: March 07, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Apply For An ACX Grant (2024)
December 08, 2023 · Original source
An effort to perform rapid replication of results in psychology journals. You can read the full list here. What are impact certificates / impact markets? This year’s ACX Grants will be a hybrid design. Most of it will use the traditional funding model. But applicants whose projects don’t get funded by the traditional model will have the option (not requirement! you don’t have to think about this if you don’t want to!) to opt in to an “impact market”, a non-traditional charitable funding institution. In an impact market, charitable projects offer to sell a sort of “stock”, called “impact certificates”. Investors buy the impact certificates, funding the project. If the project succeeds, a funder (like a grantmaker or foundation) may choose to buy the impact certificates, becoming the “spiritual owner” of the project (ie endorsing it as something good that ought to have been funded, and getting some sort of social credit for funding it). This money goes to the investors, who hopefully profit off of their investment, vindicating their decision to buy the certificates in the first place. The motivating idea is that a grantmaker might dismiss a charity’s plan as impossible, but an investor might believe they could succeed. The investor can fund the plan, then collect from the grantmaker if they turn out to be right. Everyone benefits: the charity gets funded, the investor makes a profit, and the grantmaker gets more of whatever kind of change they want (since a successful project is able to happen). We ran a test grant of impact markets earlier this year, along with partner Manifund. You can see the announcement here, the results here, and Manifund’s continuing impact market here. How will this year’s ACX Grants (optionally!!!) use impact markets? Most of ACX Grants will happen through the traditional grantmaking structure. But if I don’t fund your grant, you have the option of letting us auto-convert it into an impact certificate and place it on Manifund’s impact market. Then investors might fund your grant. From your perspective, this will just look like you getting the money you wanted, plus an investor who might give you some help and advice if you want. You won’t have to handle any of the impact market details, worry about your “stock price”, or anything like that. (if you do want to do those things, you can work with Manifund to create a bespoke impact certificate contract - but you don’t have to) I’m hesitant to fund AI safety grants and effective altruism community-building grants myself, both because of difficulty judging these things and because of potential conflicts of interest, so these are more likely to end up on the impact market than other things. This is an exception to the “you don’t have to use impact markets if you don’t want to” rule, sorry. (there’s some concern that impact markets have skewed incentives for projects that have a risk of doing severe harm, and I understand AI safety and EA community building are especially dangerous here and we’ve avoided them in the past. We’ll be pre-screening projects before allowing them on the impact market, and eliminating ones in that category. Final oracular funders will also be encouraged not to fund projects that they think ex ante could have caused harm.) We have four potential oracular funders who have expressed interest in impact certificates: Next year’s ACX Grants
Inline links: here, here, here, here
ACX Grants Followup Impact Market
March 07, 2024 · Original source
The plan has always been to run an impact market - a site where investors crowdfund some of the remaining grant proposals. If the project goes well, then philanthropists who missed it the first time (eg me) will pay the investors for funding it, potentially earning them a big profit. In our last impact market test, some people (okay, one person) managed to get 25x their initial investment by funding a charity which did really well.
Inline links: our last impact market test
So in my ideal world, we’d be running an impact market where you could invest your money in the remaining 317 proposals and make a profit if they did well. We’ve encountered two flaws on the way to that ideal world:
First, although about 140 of you expressed interest in and qualified for the impact market round, only 44 have responded to emails from Manifund, signed the necessary documents, and actually gotten featured. So there are only 44 proposals on the market so far. If you want to participate in the impact market, but aren’t on there yet, please check your email and spam folder for messages from Manifund. If you didn’t get any, but you applied to ACX Grants and want to participate, please email rachel@manifund.org.