Astral Codex Ten

ACX Grants

39 min read

ACX Grants

Article

ACX Grants is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 31 times across 31 issues between November 12, 2021 and October 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “What is ACX Grants? I want to give grants to good research and good projects”; “I’ll see if I can fund you through ACXG+ or ACXG++”; “fund Charter Cities Institute through ACX Grants this year”. It most often appears alongside Manifund, Scott, effective altruism.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 31
  • Issue count: 31
  • First seen: November 12, 2021
  • Last seen: October 13, 2025

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
November 12, 2021 · Original source
What is ACX Grants?
ACX Grants proper will involve $250,000 of my own money, but I’m hoping to supplement with much more of other people’s money, amount to be determined. See the sections on ACX Grants + and ACX Grants ++ below.
What is ACX Grants + ?
Open Thread 201
December 06, 2021 · Original source
6: I beg continued patience from ACX Grants applicants and funders. The most likely schedule is that I’ll give funders more information around December 14, and announce most winners around December 25, with Grants ++ coming some time after that. I’m not considering late applications; please don’t email them to me.
21
December 06, 2021 · Original source
I’m not going to be able to fund Charter Cities Institute through ACX Grants this year, but I told them I’d give them a signal boost here. They’re a great organization, they could be doing more work with more funding, and if you’re at all interested in charter cities they’re the people you want to be supporting. If you can’t get in touch with them directly, let me know and I’ll make an introduction.
Inline links: Charter Cities Institute
ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
Thanks to everyone who participated in ACX Grants, whether as an applicant, an evaluator, or a funder.
Without further ado: ACX Grants Awardees Pedro Silva, $60,000, to use in silico reverse screening and molecular dynamics simulations to discover the targets of seven promising natural antibiotics and to try to develop wider-spectrum derivatives. Antibiotic resistant infections kill a 5-6 digit number of people each year, and this is the kind of basic research that could lead to new drugs somewhere down the line.
…via ACX Grants + : This is the part where I sent your grants around to interested rich people and foundations, and let them decide if they wanted to fund some on their own. Unfortunately, rich people and foundations don’t have huge amounts of time to evaluate grants on super-short notice around the Christmas season, so I haven’t heard back from many of them yet. I know of two projects that are on track to get funded this way. but I don’t have permission to talk about them here yet. Your funders should be reaching out to you shortly.
Links For December
December 30, 2021 · Original source
20: Markus Strasser on why projects along the lines of “use AI to extract insights from journal articles” are doomed. I read this the week I was considering lots of ACX Grants applications about these, so if I didn’t fund your brilliant AI journal extraction idea, blame Markus.
Inline links: are doomed
Resubmit And Summarize Your Proposals For Grants ++
January 21, 2022 · Original source
I promised you all that once I was done with the main round of ACX Grants, I would run Grants ++, where I publish the proposals that didn't get funded here, so readers could look at them, see if they’re interesting, and maybe get in touch and offer funding.
Inline links: ACX Grants
So You Want To Run A Microgrants Program
February 09, 2022 · Original source
GiveWell estimates that if you donate to their top charity, Against Malaria Foundation, you can probably save a life for about $5000. ACX Grants raised $1.5 million. Donated to AMF, that’s enough to save 300 lives. I didn’t donate it to AMF. I believed that small-batch artisanal grant-making could potentially outperform the best well-known megacharities - or at least that it was positive value in expectation to see if that was true. But if your thesis is “Instead of saving 300 lives, which I could totally do right now, I’m gonna do this other thing, because if I do a good job it’ll save even more than 300 lives”, then man, you had really better do a good job with the other thing.
Inline links: for about $5000
If you solve all these problems, congratulations! You can write a blog post announcing that you are giving out grants! People you respect will say nice things about you and be happy! @slatestarcodex’s small grants program awards. Many/most of these seem both worthy and unlikely to get funding through established means. Hopepunk in the real world :) ","username":"Meaningness","name":"David Chapman","profile_image_url":"","date":"Wed Dec 29 00:18:22 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":10,"like_count":90,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-results","image":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/50475988-7554-494a-a3c9-7a7851d0eb0f_964x675.jpeg","title":"ACX Grants Results","description":"...","domain":"astralcodexten.substack.com"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> @slatestarcodex⁩’s EV-style grant looks fantastic. A very diverse group. Congrats to all the winners. More about the grant and winners here. ","username":"srajagopalan","name":"Shruti Rajagopalan","profile_image_url":"","date":"Wed Dec 29 03:23:17 +0000 2021","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":2,"like_count":32,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-results","image":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/66cd5371-eb2f-49e2-97f9-798e63574631_964x675.jpeg","title":"ACX Grants Results","description":"...","domain":"astralcodexten.substack.com"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">
Because you have a comparative advantage in soliciting proposals. Big effective-altruist foundations complain that they’re entrepreneurship-constrained. That is, funders give them lots of money, they’ve already funded most of the charities they think are good up to the level those charities can easily absorb, and now they’re waiting for new people to start new good charities so they can fund those too. This is truest in AI alignment, second-truest in animal welfare and meta-science, and least true in global development (where there are always more poor people who need money). ACX Grants got some people who otherwise wouldn’t have connected with the system to get out there and start projects, or at least to mention that their project existed somewhere that people could hear it. One of my big hopes is that next year or the year after OpenPhil gives $10 million or something to some charity they learned about because of me. I don’t know if this will happen but I think the possibility made this grants round worthwhile in expectation.
ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
February 10, 2022 · Original source
This is the closing part of ACX Grants. Projects that I couldn’t fully fund myself were invited to submit a brief description so I could at least give them free advertising here. You can look them over and decide if any seem worth donating your money, time, or some other resource to.
Inline links: ACX Grants
#78: Research Questions In Progress Studies With funding from ACX Grants I will investigate a set of specific and crucial open questions for Progress Studies: What is our capacity to slow technological progress if desired? What are general properties of technology which limit or exacerbate existential risk? How robust are recommendations to different sets of moral ethics? These are crucial to understanding the importance of accelerating progress, but relatively little effort has been devoted to these questions outside of AppliedDivinityStudies’ The Moral Foundation of Progress, and my own Stubborn Attachments From Behind The Veil. In the past, I’ve interned on economic policy at the CATO Institute and The Charter Cities Institute where I published on growth and governance. ADS has also agreed to mentor me over the summer, and provides a vote of confidence. If you’re able to provide funding, please email maxwell.tabarrok@gmail.com.
Open Thread 212
February 21, 2022 · Original source
2: ACX Grants recipient Trevor Klee writes:
Open Thread 215
March 13, 2022 · Original source
5: There was an ACX Grants winner that I didn’t describe too clearly on the announcement post because they were still in stealth mode. They’ve asked me to post the following update:
22
March 14, 2022 · Original source
If you like getting your news in this format, subscribe to the Metaculus Alert bot for more (and thanks to ACX Grants winner Nikos Bosse for creating it!)
Inline links: Metaculus Alert bot
22
March 21, 2022 · Original source
If you like getting your news in this format, subscribe to the Metaculus Alert bot for more (and thanks to ACX Grants winner Nikos Bosse for creating it!)
Inline links: Metaculus Alert bot
Open Thread 250
November 13, 2022 · Original source
3: I have no idea what’s going to happen with ACX Grants now. Some of the infrastructure I was hoping to use was being funded by the FTX Foundation and may no longer exist. It might or might not be more important to use all available funding to rescue charities about to go under from losing FTX support. I still want to do something, because of the increased need and urgency mentioned above, but give me a while to hide under my bed and gibber before I sort out specifics.
4: None of last year’s ACX Grants were funded by the FTX Foundation or anyone else linked to FTX, so if this is you, don’t worry.
Announcing Forecasting Impact Mini-Grants
February 24, 2023 · Original source
I still dream of running an ACX Grants round using impact certificates, but I want to run a lower-stakes test of the technology first. In conjunction with the Manifold Markets team, we’re announcing the Forecasting Impact Mini-Grants, a $20,000 grants round for forecasting projects.
A: This is Astral Codex Ten, a blog about various science / technology / philosophy / politics issues, which sometimes does grants rounds and projects like this one. I think I have a good reputation of paying for things I say I am going to pay for, see for example last year’s ACX Grants. Manifold Markets is a company that runs a prediction market website and is generally interested in unusual market structures solving social problems. We’re co-sponsoring this impact market in order to test impact markets as a charitable funding mechanism.
Inline links: ACX Grants, Manifold Markets
Q: I have a project that isn’t about forecasting / requires more than $20,000 / won’t be done by September 1 / is a bad match for the ACX Grants team - may I add it to the impact market?
Impact Market Mini-Grants Results
October 09, 2023 · Original source
So the next step is to scale things up to something more real. And we need to find a way to do that makes it less negative-sum. My tentative plan for version 2.0 is to talk to a few serious charities and ask them to agree to consider “buy my impact certificate” a reasonable grant to make, at the same funding schedule as any other prospective grant they consider. I’d also like to do this myself via ACX Grants. Since investors can look at charities’ track records and see what they’ve previously funded, that will make them more confident in their ability to predict likely returns. I’ll talk more about this once I get this year’s ACX Grants set up (current ETA: late November).
Quests And Requests
November 03, 2023 · Original source
I’ll be starting a new round of ACX Grants sometime soon. I can’t guarantee I’ll fund all these projects - some of them are more like vanity projects than truly effective. But I might fund some of them, and others might be doable without funding. So if you’re feeling left out and want a cause to devote your life to, here are some extras.
Contra DeBoer On Movement Shell Games
November 30, 2023 · Original source
Cause evaluation works the same way. Every year, I feel bad free-riding off GiveWell. I tell myself I’m going to really look into charities, find the niche underexplored ones that are neglected even by other EAs. Every year (except when I announce ACX Grants and can’t get out of it), I remember on December 27th that I haven’t done any of that yet, grumble, and give to whoever GiveWell puts first (or sometimes EA Funds).
Inline links: ACX Grants, EA Funds
Apply For An ACX Grant (2024)
December 08, 2023 · Original source
I’m running another ACX Grants round. If you already know what this is and want to apply, use the form here to apply, deadline December 29. Otherwise see below for more information.
Inline links: the form here
What is ACX Grants?
ACX Grants is a microgrants program where I help fund ACX readers’ charitable or scientific projects. You can see the 2022 cohort here and my 2022 retrospective here.
Inline links: here, here
Does Capitalism Beat Charity?
January 04, 2024 · Original source
RIP …so this doesn’t support the “invest in whatever companies give the best rate of return” narrative either. What’s left is strategy 3: Do something like donating to charity, but the donation should go to charities that promote capitalism somehow, or be an investment in companies doing charitable things (impact investing) I find this promising, but I don’t know what a good charity along these lines would be. There are some charities that send economists (or other professionals) to developing countries and advise them on how to do more capitalism. This kind of development aid has been roundly criticized and did especially badly in Russia. I’ve supported some of these that seem especially careful in the past, and would be willing to support them more if someone found a very good one with a strong track record. (also, I’m concerned that even though rich countries got rich because of capitalism, it’s no longer that easy for poor countries to get rich with the same type of capitalism - existing rich countries will outcompete them - and we’re not entirely sure how to help poor countries get rich now, although probably good institutions are always better than bad institutions) I am partial to Charter Cities Institute, which helps advise developing countries on creating charter cities that have better governance and less corruption than the rest of the region. But EA evaluator group Rethink Priorities has a report on why they don’t think this is quite as valuable as traditional charity (they’re not sure special economic zones consistently make areas develop faster, and they think this finding should be applied to charter cities too). Here’s CCI’s counterargument (they think SEZs aren’t a good reference class for the charter cities they want). I think both sides make good points but I’m currently more convinced by Rethink Priorities’ (although I do still donate to CCI sometimes). Finally, you could invest in developing-world projects and companies that seem unusually likely to make an overall economic difference there. I’m nervous about this because of China’s Belt and Road initiative, which did this at huge scale for infrastructure, but doesn’t seem to have done much good (and might have done some bad). Also, I’m not smart money, which means I’m exposed to adverse selection - if there’s a company that can’t raise enough money to build a dam in Kenya and needs your charity dollar to make the budget work, why hasn’t Wall Street come through for them? One plausible answer is “because it’s a bad company with a bad plan”. Admittedly another plausible answer is “because it has a 5% RoI, the next Instacart has a 6% RoI, and so Wall Street would prefer the next Instacart but you as a charitable individual should prefer the Kenyan dam.” I would potentially be willing to believe this if some smart charity evaluator would tell me which projects were good. But $1 million only gets you a fraction of a dam, and does get tens of thousands of clean water dispensers, so I would also want someone to present the specific case for why the dam would be better (not just the heuristic “capitalism is always better than charity”). I’m willing to believe that some capitalist charities - whether these are development aid think tanks, or investment in developing-world projects - could potentially be better than usual charities. The reason I’m not donating to these is that nobody’s done the hard work of identifying these and calculating their expected value, and I don’t feel qualified to do that work myself. I have a high prior that any nonprofit that hasn’t been rigorously shown to be good is probably bad, and the potential advantage of capitalism over normal charity usually isn’t enough to overcome my decreased certainty in its efficacy2. UPDATE: I respond to your comments and counterarguments here. 1Instacart is worth $10 billion and has 10 million customers, so naively you might say that it cost $1000 in investment per customer. But successful companies are worth more than the amount of investment it took to create them. I don’t know how much has ever been invested in Instacart total, but this also seems like the wrong question. You, today, can’t invest in “the next Instacart” - everyone wants to invest in the next successful company, but nobody can be sure which one it will be. All you can do is invest in a basket of promising-looking startups: most will fail but some will succeed. Because of this, I thought the best way to represent “the amount of investment money it originally took back when Instacart was founded in 2012 to create Instacart today” as the current value of $10 billion discounted by the rate of return a good VC gets on their investments, which I think is about 7.5%. That suggests it took about $5 billion of investment in 2012 to create the amount of value represented by Instacart today, ie 10 million customers getting a good deal on grocery delivery. That means $500 in investment per customer. Because most charities can’t take $5 billion in new funding, I chose to represent this as per million dollars, so 2,000 customers per $1 million. I understand this is a very shaky estimate and I’m hoping that all the comparisons I’m going to make are so order-of-magnitude different that nobody really cares about the specifics. There’s one thing that confuses me here, which is that Instacart has 10 million customers and makes $2.5 billion in revenue per year, suggesting each customer spends $250. But you can get a yearly subscription to Instacart for $100, after which the service is free. So either customers are overwhelmingly being stupid, not buying the subscription, and paying much more than it should cost - or I’m missing something here and the numbers are wrong. Again, I’m hoping all of this is done across so many orders of magnitude that it doesn’t matter. 2Doesn’t this principle also mean I shouldn’t do ACX Grants, where I donate to fledgling projects with no evidence of efficacy? Maybe, and every year I debate whether I should really do this. I think the arguments for a distinction are: ACX Grants go to charities where my donation potentially has a very high upside, so I’m not as concerned about the high prior on failure.
Inline links: roundly criticized, in Russia, no longer that easy, how to help poor countries get rich now, Charter Cities Institute, has a report, CCI’s counterargument, Belt and Road initiative, 2, here, 1, 2
ACX Grants go to charities where my donation potentially has a very high upside, so I’m not as concerned about the high prior on failure.
Highlights From The Comments On Capitalism & Charity
January 11, 2024 · Original source
The Effective Altruist Forum now has a post on Economic Growth - Donation Suggestions And Ideas, listing suspected top charities for helping countries develop. These include ACX Grants winner Growth Teams, the Charter Cities Institute, GiveDirectly, and Overseas Development Institute.
Inline links: Economic Growth - Donation Suggestions And Ideas, Growth Teams, Charter Cities Institute, GiveDirectly, Overseas Development Institute
ACX Grants Results 2024
February 10, 2024 · Original source
Thanks to everyone who participated in ACX Grants, whether as an applicant, an evaluator, or a funder.
The best part of ACX Grants is telling the winners they won, which I’ll do in a moment. The worst part of ACX Grants is telling the non-winners they didn’t win. If I wasn’t able to give you a grant, it doesn’t mean I hate your project. Sometimes I couldn’t find the right evaluator to confirm that you were legit. Sometimes I sent your project to foundations or VCs who I thought it would be a better match for, or wanted to leave it as a test case for the impact market. Most of the time, I just didn’t have enough money1, and I spent what I had according to my own imperfect priorities.
Inline links: 1
Greg Sadler, $65,000, for policy advocacy in Australia. Last ACX Grants, we funded Nathan Ashby to do this. Nathan and his team were able to get some significant victories, influencing government policy on pandemic preparedness, charitable tax deductions, and AI safety. This time around, he recommends his colleague Greg Sadler at Good Ancestors to continue his work. You can read more about their agenda here.
Inline links: Good Ancestors, here
Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
33: Asimov Press: Scaling Phage Therapy. One of this year’s ACX Grants went to a phage research group, and I mentioned the contrast between the years of research on phages with generally good results and the limited clinical applications. This piece tells more of the story: bacteriophages do work, but they’re usually hyperspecialized to specific strains of bacteria, and it’s hard to keep a giant library of thousands of phage types around and then match whatever bacterium your patient has to the right phage. Still, people are working on it and the tech is gradually advancing.
Inline links: Scaling Phage Therapy
ACX Grants Followup Impact Market
March 07, 2024 · Original source
We got 351 proposals for ACX Grants, but were only able to fund 34 of them. I’m not a professional grant evaluator and can’t guarantee there aren’t some jewels hidden among the remaining 317.
Inline links: ACX Grants
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.
There are 44 projects available right now. I’m hoping other ACX Grants applicants will put their projects up and there will be more by the time you look at it. I can’t discuss all 44, but here are some that I find interesting:
Open Thread 320
March 18, 2024 · Original source
3: The ACX Grants impact market on Manifund is up to 53 proposals, including growing blood vessels in the lab, an online psychiatry/psychology journal, and a swarm of robotic bees. In case you’ve forgotten, the link for the overall ACX Grants impact market is here, and my explanation of what’s going on is here.
Inline links: growing blood vessels in the lab, online psychiatry/psychology journal, a swarm of robotic bees, ACX Grants impact market is here, here
Sorry, I Still Think MR Is Wrong About USAID
May 29, 2025 · Original source
The overhead for ACX Grants is 0%; I agree that it’s important to try to keep overhead as low as possible. So why do USAID charities have higher overhead than Tyler’s regrants?
There’s nothing wrong with this - ACX Grants maintains its 0% overhead because Manifund covers our bills. My point is that it’s nothing to be proud of either. Mercatus hasn’t discovered some amazing new way to do charity without overhead costs, such that USAID charities that charge overhead are bloated and wasteful, but Mercatus is innovative and lean. They’ve just found someone who covers many of their bills for free.
Inline links: Manifund
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
The first cohort of ACX Grants was announced in late 2021, the second in early 2024. In 2022, I posted one-year updates for the first cohort. Now, as I start thinking about a third round, I’ve collected one-year updates on the second and three-year updates on the first.
Inline links: late 2021, early 2024, one-year updates
ACX Grants (almost) always approves of pivoting to AI safety research, but I still wonder what might have been with the original project. Michael says that “The types of software projects in clinical trials that we were initially intending to do seem on track to fall to AI by 2030. We DID succeed at deriving new math techniques, and AI does not yet have a clear path to solving that kind of creative research-level math.”
Manifund, an experimental charity platform which now co-runs ACX Grants, an impact certificate platform, and various innovations in regranting.
Inline links: Manifund
Open Questions For Future ACX Grants Rounds
June 19, 2025 · Original source
Related to: ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
Inline links: ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
Arguments for no: Forprofit companies already have a VC ecosystem to help fund them. ACX Grants maintains relationships with several VCs and sends them promising applicants. Either those VCs will fund these companies (in which case our help isn’t required), or they will turn them down (and since they’re the experts, we should be skeptical that their rejects really deserve funding).
Arguments for investing: If we invested, they might succeed, and then we would get money. We could spend this money to future ACX Grants rounds, making the program self-sustaining without threatening our nonprofit status.
Apply For An ACX Grant (2025)
July 24, 2025 · Original source
We’re running another ACX Grants round!
What is ACX Grants?
ACX Grants is a microgrants program that helps fund ACX readers’ charitable or scientific projects. Click the links to see the 2022 and 2024 cohorts.
Inline links: 2022, 2024
Open Thread 396
August 25, 2025 · Original source
He had absolutely amazing taste in architecture. Of these, it was #1 that caught my interest. Fascism is in the news a lot these days. Liberals suggest the Trump administration is fascist; conservatives retort that this perspective owes its prominence to a sophomoric version of historiography where “fascism is when you do things liberals don’t like; the less liberals like it, the fascismer it is” […] Maybe (I figured) it was time to learn more than four things about Mussolini. So here’s a fifth: he wrote a short essay, The Doctrine Of Fascism to explain the true nature of fascism once and for all to curious future readers. Subscribers can read it here. 5: Thanks to everyone who offered to be an evaluator for ACX Grants. We still have a few gaps in our team and are looking for volunteers with the following expertise: A volunteer to do a small amount of consulting work on ~5 environment/geoengineering/climate tech grants.
Inline links: absolutely amazing taste in architecture, The Doctrine Of Fascism, here
In Search Of AI Psychosis
August 26, 2025 · Original source
I think now there might be several dozen subreddit moderators who could accurately describe their job as “witch webmaster who runs an online service giving advice to new witches”. And partly it was because there are so many crazy beliefs in the world - spirits, crystal healing, moon landing denial, esoteric Hitlerism, whichever religions you don’t believe in - that psychiatrists have instituted a blanket exemption for any widely held idea. If you think you’re being attacked by demons, you’re delusional, unless you’re from some culture where lots of people get attacked by demons, in which case it’s a religion and you’re fine. This is partly political self-protection - no psychiatrist wants to be the guy who commits an Afro-Caribbean person for believing in voodoo. But it also seems to track something useful about reality. Nietzsche wrote “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” Most people don’t have world-models - they believe what their friends believe, or what has good epistemic vibes. In a large group, weird ideas can ricochet from person to person and get established even in healthy brains. In an Afro-Caribbean culture where all your friends get attacked by demons at voodoo church every Sunday, a belief in demon attacks can co-exist with otherwise being a totally functional individual. So is QAnon a religion? Awkward question, but it’s non-psychotic by definition. Still, it’s interesting, isn’t it? If social media makes a thousand people believe the same crazy thing, it’s not psychotic. If LLMs make a thousand people each believe a different crazy thing, that is psychotic. Is this a meaningful difference, or an accounting convention? Also, what if a thousand people believe something, but it’s you and your 999 ChatGPT instances? III. A Hidden Army Of Crackpots I have a family member who believes that the theory of evolution, as usually understood, cannot possibly work. He has developed an alternative theory called “noctogenesis” which patches Darwinism using ideas from the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, and he works on-and-off on various related books and papers. I have told him I suspect he might be a crackpot; he stands by his claims. It’s fine; when I got into the technological singularity and AI safety, lots of people suspected I was a crackpot, and I stood by my claims too. You’ve got to stand by your family members even when they’re slightly crackpottish. This family member is happily married, retired after running a successful business, and generally a normal likeable person. He has no signs of mental illness, and doesn’t talk about quantum evolution unless someone else brings it up first. There must be millions of people like him. Used car dealers with proofs of P = NP, dentists who think they’ve discovered something important about Mary Magdalene, math professors obsessed with destroying the moon. I’m working on evaluating ACX Grants, and these people are out in force. A few propose literal perpetual motion machines. Others have vaguer plans, like some kind of social media app (it’s always a social media app) that will cause world peace. Many of them have decent jobs and seem like upstanding members of society. Their secrets are known only to themselves, their family members, and their would-be grantmaker. …and, increasingly, their chatbots. After years of hiatus (or at least not talking to me about his work) my family member is back on the quantum evolution beat, and LLMs appear to be involved. If I knew him less well, I would think the LLM had caused the quantum evolution theory - but no, it just made it much easier to research and write about. Is this psychosis? The answer has to be no, but it’s once again hard to draw the line. A very small number of crackpots will be vindicated by history. A larger number will be erroneous but sympathetic - the official account of the Kennedy assassination is pretty weird, and reasonable minds can disagree. From there, we get to ones that are maybe not so sympathetic: flat earth, QAnon, the thing where the Queen was an alien lizard. If only one person thought the Queen was an alien lizard, and they never managed to convince anyone else, would that be sufficient evidence for a delusional disorder? I’m not sure. (psychiatry has a diagnosis, schizotypal personality, which sort of involves being a normal person with a few odd ideas, but it’s not a great match for many of these people, and interesting mainly as a genetic curiosity - it travels in the same families as schizophrenia itself) Maybe this is another place where we are forced to admit a spectrum model of psychiatric disorders - there is an unbroken continuum from mildly sad to suicidally depressed, from social drinking to raging alcoholism, and from eccentric to floridly psychotic. People who are eccentric can remain so their whole lives, with the level of expression depending on their social connections and the ease of pursuing their rabbit holes. LLMs, by making it easier to pursue odd theories and serving as a surrogate social connection who always agrees with you, can bring latent crackpottery into the open. IV. Cause And Effect Bipolar disorder has an interesting relationship with sleep. Most manic people sleep very little, or not at all - maybe an hour or two a night. But also, poor sleep can cause bipolar episodes in people prone to them. In a typical case, a bipolar who’s been well-controlled for years will get assigned a big report at work and get poor sleep for a few nights until they finish. At first, this will be just as bad as it sounds, and they’ll be working through a fog of tiredness. Then the tiredness will lift. They’ll feel normal, then better-than-normal, until finally they can’t sleep even if they want to. Then they’ll email the report to their boss and it will be written entirely in Assyrian cuneiform. I increasingly think this isn’t just an incidental feature of bipolar, but part of the reason it exists as a diagnostic category at all. Most people have a compensatory reaction to insomnia - missing one night of sleep makes you more tired the next. A small number of people have the reverse, a spiralling reaction where missing one night of sleep makes you less tired the next. Solve for the equilibrium and you reach a stable attractor point where you never sleep at all. But this does other bad things to your brain - hence the cuneiform. I’m not claiming that bipolar is “just” sleep loss. As Borsboom et al will tell you, psychiatric disorders can be viewed as complex networks of symptoms, each reinforcing the others. In a few pure cases, you can get a ratchet going with sleep alone, and the sleeplessness will spark everything else. More likely, there will be lots of interactions between poor sleep and everything else, and the “everything else” can sink or hypercharge an impending manic episode. Still, I find this a fruitful way to think about bipolar. Sleeplessness is both the cause and the effect. Can delusions also be like this? That is, suppose there’s some personality trait where having one delusion makes you even more delusional. Maybe the delusion makes you excited (who wouldn’t be excited to learn they’re the Messiah?), and you’re more delusional when you’re in an excited state and not thinking clearly. Or maybe it’s a three-symptom cycle - the delusion causes excitement, which makes you unable to sleep, which scrambles your thinking, which makes you more delusional (which makes you even less able to sleep, etc). The point is: delusions are certainly an effect of bipolar disorder. And in the dynamical system model of psychiatric disorders, we should expect that effects are often also causes; that’s how the vicious cycle gets going. This is the best I can do at modeling true LLM psychosis. Someone with a trait where delusions lead inevitably to more delusions starts using an LLM. The LLM accentuates whatever usual tendency towards crackpottery they have and makes them believe something a little crazier than whatever they believed before. Then that crazy belief feeds upon itself and causes other things like excitement and sleep loss, which (if the person is predisposed) precipitates a true psychotic episode. V. Folie A Deux Ex Machina If one person believes a crazy thing, it’s a delusion; if a thousand people believe it, it’s a religion. What if exactly two people believe it? In psychiatry, this is called folie a deux. It fits awkwardly into our nosology and is rarely seen. Still, it happens enough to generate a few case studies. In a typical case, one person has psychosis for some normal reason, like schizophrenia or bipolar, and the second person is a shut-in who lives with them and rarely talks to anyone else. The psychotic person gets some normal psychotic delusion - they’re God, the Feds are after them, etc - and sort of psychically steamrolls over the second person until they believe it too. Usually removing the second person from the first is sufficient for a cure. This slightly challenges the view of psychosis as a biological disorder - but only slightly. Again, think of most people as lacking world-models, but being moored to reality by some vague sense of social consensus. If your social life is limited to one person, and that person themselves becomes unmoored, then sometimes you will follow along. I would expect second-sufferers to believe delusions in a sort of cognitively normal way, the same way people believe true facts, honest mistakes, and conspiracy theories. I would expect them to be less likely (though not zero likely) to have other psychotic features like sleep disturbances, hallucinations, disorganized speech, or a tendency to autonomously generate delusional ideas aside from the one they absorbed from the index case. An introverted person using an LLM has some similarities to folie a deux. If they use the chatbot very often, it might be a large majority of their social interactions. Here the primary vs. secondary distinction breaks down - the most likely scenario is that the human first suggested the crazy idea, the machine reflected it back slightly stronger, and it kept ricocheting back and forth, gaining confidence with each iteration, until both were totally convinced. Compare this to normal social interactions, where if someone expresses a crazy idea that isn’t common in their culture, other people will shoot them down or at the very least nod politely and stop the conversation. So my working theory of LLM psychosis is: Some patients were already psychotic, and LLMs just help them be psychotic more effectively.
Inline links: the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, math professors obsessed with destroying the moon, ACX Grants, a spectrum model of psychiatric disorders, As Borsboom et al will tell you, the dynamical system model of psychiatric disorders, folie a deux
ACX Grants Results 2025
October 13, 2025 · Original source
Thanks to everyone who participated in ACX Grants, whether as an applicant, an evaluator, or a funder.
Markus Englund, $50K, for software to detect data fabrication. This kind of thing is a perennial ACX Grants favorite, and we don’t always expect it to go anywhere, but Markus got our attention by saying that he’s already built the tool, already scanned 92 published papers, and found “irregularities” in five of them, inspiring two corrigenda and one likely upcoming retraction. Five out of ninety-two is a crazy result, and we’re almost scared to see what happens when he applies his program to a further 20,000 papers, which is the amount that our grant will be paying for. If you’re interested in helping verify cases of suspected data fabrication and presenting the evidence in Pubpeer comments or emails to journal editors, please contact Markus at markus@englund.dev, especially if you have solid knowledge of statistics or biology.
Inline links: markus@englund.dev
Nuno Sempere, $50K, for disaster forecasting and response. Nuno runs Sentinel, a team of superforecasters which tracks incipient disasters (pandemics, wars, etc) and brainstorms pre-hoc and post-hoc responses. Their model for response are groups like VaccinateCA, a small team of Californians who noticed that the state’s COVID vaccine policy was disorganized and made a site that helped connect people with spare vaccination capacity. You can see their blog here. Nuno is an ACX Grants evaluator; due to conflict of interest, this grant is being covered in conjunction with an outside funder.
Inline links: here