The EA Infrastructure Fund
Article
The EA Infrastructure Fund is a recurring organization 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 “The EA Infrastructure Fund”; “Our current impact market has five partners: … The EA Infrastructure Fund”. It most often appears alongside ACX Grants, ACX Grants, impact market.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: December 08, 2023
- Last seen: March 07, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- ACX Grants (2 shared issues)
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- ACX Grants (2 shared issues)
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- impact market (2 shared issues)
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- Manifund (2 shared issues)
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- Rachel (2 shared issues)
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- The Long Term Future Fund (2 shared issues)
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- The Survival and Flourishing Fund (2 shared issues)
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- 501(c) (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Grantee Discord server (1 shared issues)
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- Against Malaria Foundation (1 shared issues)
External Links
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.
The EA Infrastructure Fund
Inline links: The EA Infrastructure Fund
Long Term Future Fund and Survival and Flourishing Fund focus on the long-term future, including but not limited to AI safety, forecasting, and long-termist community building. EA Infrastructure Fund focuses on EA community-building. You can find previous lists of grants funded by LTFF, EAIF, SFF, and ACXG.
Distribute Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality copies to students in Bangalore, India. A surprising number of people get into the rationality/effective altruism ecosystem through this particular fan-fiction, and someone calculated that distributing copies of it was a super-cost-effective way to grow the movement. I didn’t fund this because the last time someone tried this, lots of people got angry at them for spending charity money on printing a fanfiction, and I hate when people get angry at me. Maybe if one of you funded it through an impact cert, and then someone provided evidence that this was good, I could buy back the impact cert without looking like a crazy person. Alternately, we could funnel this one through the EA Infrastructure Fund, which is supposed to do this kind of field-building.
Inline links: Distribute
Convert a hybrid car to chip wood and generate electricity. David Denkenberger works on projects to help humankind survive after global technological collapse. This is one of them: he wants $25K to convert hybrid cars into electrical generators. We didn’t fund this because we’re not sure how a successful result translates to anyone except David Denkenberger knowing how to do this in the case of a technological collapse, but I would be happy to buy an impact cert if someone believed they could make this public enough that the average small community of survivors would be able to take advantage of it. …and 39 others, hopefully more by the time you read this. Even if you’re not interested in investing, I still think it’s fun to browse through some of these and see what kinds of wacky ideas people have. III. Technical Details Remember, an impact market is like a stock market or VC ecosystem for charity. Investors fund projects, and then big philanthropists play the role of an IPO or final acquirer, funding successful projects in a way that gives value back to the investors. A toy example: Suppose I rejected a proposal to grant $50,000 to lobby for an animal rights law in Norway - not because I’m against animal rights, but because I believe the lobbying won’t work. You disagree with me and think this could work really well, so you invest $25,000 to buy 50% of its shares, and someone else buys the other half. The team lobbies for the law. I was wrong about their proposal, the law gets passed, and it’s great. You sell the impact certificates to an animal rights charity, who decide that if they were trying to get a law like this passed ex ante, they would be willing to spend up to $75,000 on it. They have a good sense of this because they fund animal rights proposals all the time. They pay $75,000 to the holders of the certificates, so you and the other buyer each get $37,500, a 50% profit. Obviously this depends on having big philanthropists willing to cooperate with this new system. Our current impact market has five partners: The Long Term Future Fund, The EA Infrastructure Fund, The Survival And Flourishing Fund, The Animal Welfare Fund, and future rounds of ACX Grants. That means if you buy an impact certificate today, you can try selling it to one of those funders later, after the project is done. Each of these charities has specific things they fund, so you might want to check their past history before trusting them to buy one of your certificates. Impact markets are pretty new. We ran a test round last year and it went well, but this round is a bit more complicated and has some new moving parts. Along with the issue where you won’t get real money back, please be aware of the following possible risks: You think your project did great work, but I (or our other funders) don’t find it interesting, don’t buy it, and the certificates go to $0. There are only five funders, and most of them are in pretty specific areas, so you might have only one or two possible buyers, and if they disagree with you, you’re out of luck.