Astral Codex Ten

Elaine

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Elaine

Article

Elaine is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 10, 2022 and June 18, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Elaine suggests, ‘Your cranium called…’”; “Elaine works with the Coalition To Modify NOTA”; “Elaine and her org have been working extremely hard”. It most often appears alongside 1DaySooner, ACX, ACX Grants.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: May 10, 2022
  • Last seen: June 18, 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.

Book Review: The Gervais Principle
May 10, 2022 · Original source
The mediocre develop faster than either the talented or the untalented An alternative way of looking at these three laws is to note that defense mechanisms emerge to sustain addictions even when the developmental environment that originally nourished it vanishes. Defense mechanisms though, are more useful as a partial catalog of phenomenology than as a foundational idea. These then are the developmental psychology roots of the Gervais Principle. Recall that Cluelessness goes with overperformance. That overperformance is caused by arrested development around a strength, which has been hooked by an addictive environment of social rewards. Mediocrity is your best defense against addiction, and guarantor of further open-ended psychological development. And yes, for the alert among you who have spotted a connection, arrested development is the dark side of strengths in the sense of Positive Psychology. A strength in one situation is merely an entrenched piece of arrested development in another. In our model, the three development stages – Clueless, Losers and Sociopaths – correspond to different patterns of arrested development and different strength-addictions. That is, development involves progressing from one stage (eg school) to another stage (eg the real world). But if you’re too good at an early stage, you become accustomed to the reward you get from success. Suppose you loved school and did great at it. Then you get invited to participate in the real world, a noticeably non-school-like environment. You try it, and instead of getting praise/reward/validation all the time, you get those things rarely or not at all. If you can, maybe you go back to school (ie get a PhD), a strategy with problems of its own. But if you can’t real-world actually go back to school, instead you might remain permanently stuck at a psychological stage where everything feels like school, where you try to distort your perceptions until your world-model looks vaguely school-like, and where you use your school-based skills and coping mechanisms for everything. The particular example I just gave, about school, is Rao’s explanation for Dwight Schrute: Dwight, with his stern German upbringing, lacked the normal encouragement of early-childhood creative-performance instincts (we see several glimpses of this, including his attempt to read horrifying medieval cautionary tales to the kids during bring-your-child-to-work day, and his own description of his childhood, which left his brother actually developmentally disabled). He has therefore developed none of the addiction to childhood applause-seeking performance behaviors that have trapped Michael. Instead, Dwight found relief in the graded, performance-oriented worlds of school and varied medieval-guild-like worlds, such as farming, animal husbandry and karate. His attempts to understand the world of management, which is decidedly not a world of grades or guilds, are based entirely on peripheral guild-like elements. He is the only one excited about the Survivor-style successor-selection event Michael arranges (in the bus on the way over, he asks, “Will there be business parables?”). When he attempts manipulation, his mind naturally turns to hidden microphones, doctored documents and other elements of tradecraft learned from spy novels, and only rarely to psychology. He banks the occasional tactical victory, but cannot play or win the mind games required to beat the Sociopaths. In Dwight’s world, everything worth learning is teachable, and medals, certificates and formal membership in meritocratic institutions is evidence of success. Even where play behaviors are concerned, the Dwights of the world can more easily get lost in points-and-rules worlds. It is significant that Dwight has never seen/read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (which is about creative-performance play), but is obsessed with gaming worlds and sci-fi/fantasy universes. Perhaps the clearest example of Dwight’s need for formal affiliation is his lame attempt at the insider stand-up comedy routine, The Aristocrats. To Dwight, everything is a formal contest, and there are always authority figures who provide legitimacy and rankings. He has no sense of humor (thanks to skipping early childhood), and has no idea how to actually evoke laughter, so he tries to ace the only formal membership test he can see, the ability to tell the Aristocrats joke. Michael, by contrast, can at least tell juvenile jokes, and Andy can manage some bad frat-boy humor. Rao argues that Michael Scott, the “boss” in the show, is stuck at an even lower level: Little children in normal environments win their first victories through creative performance: reciting nursery rhymes, drawing pictures, and demonstrating creative play behaviors. If they succeed too much, they get addicted to the typical adult reaction: Wow, aren’t you cute/clever? and, to a lesser extent, to admiration from younger siblings. In learning to thrive in this particular reward/penalty environment, little children rely mostly on responding to the emotional content of what they hear and see, since they do not understand much. With a few evolved defense mechanisms thrown in, to protect against adult realities that don’t conform to childhood environments, that’s exactly what it feels like to be Michael. When he hears somebody talking, all he hears is “blah blah blah good job, blah blah blah, how could you do this Michael?” in conjunction with facial expressions and body language. Michael’s head is a massive library of childlike mappings between situations, canned phrases and reactions. He is not completely responsible for his actions and utterances because he genuinely does not understand them. There is coherence in what Michael says though; he does not sound completely nonsensical because he reacts meaningfully to body language, facial expressions and emotional cues. “You talkin’ to me?” (borrowed from De Niro) is a belligerent line, and by pulling out that line when he feels threatened, and then displacing the tension with laughter, Michael is able to derail the conversation. His trademark joke, “That’s what she said!” is an extreme example. It makes no sense in most contexts where he trots it out; its only purpose is to dissolve tension and displace threats. Either laughing with Michael or throwing up your hands in frustration is a victory for him. The only effective response is to calmly ignore his disruptive actions, wait for the reaction to die down, and continue the conversation in dominant mode, like Cesar Milan with his dogs … Around Packer, his boorish friend, insulting and objectifying ways of talking about women gain approval, so he trots out borrowed, misogynistic man-talk. Withering under the collective glare of his politically correct employees, phrases like “respect women” gain smiles and halt frowns, so that’s what he offers. […] Here is why: delusions are closed logical schemes, where reality is mangled into the service of a fixed script through defense mechanisms, with the rest of the meaning thrown away. To manufacture original thought you have to look at/listen to reality in open ways for data. That is why Michael’s database is so full of movie lines. Movies are goldmines of canned situation-reactions that don’t require much present-reality data to retrieve. When kids quote adults or movies, they seem precocious, and gain approval. In an era where more kids are raised by TV than by parents, parroting movie lines comes more naturally than repeating bromides learned from parental figures or at churches and temples. Recall that social calendars force you through later stages whether or not you master previous ones. So what about later stages? Michael is not quite as enamored of medals and certificates as Dwight because (as a lousy student) he never got very good at earning them, and could therefore not get seriously addicted to them. Finally, Michael has poorly developed peer-affiliation drives. He wants to be the center of attention, not one among many equals in a huddle of peers. When Michael appears to be operating under a peer-affiliation drive (the sort that animates Andy), he is really casting child behaviors into a teen mould. He believes that specific people, rather than formal or informal groups, are cool or admirable (proxy parental figures, older siblings). If they are not cool or admirable, they must be made to view him as cool and admirable (younger siblings). I was struck by a line in an appendix, saying this is the same level that Nazi bureaucrats were at. Just for fun, let’s compare the rest of Rao’s profile of Michael with Arendt’s profile of Adolf Eichmann (all quotes taken from my Eichmann In Jerusalem review): Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the whole enterprise, and was also rather hard to sustain, in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused so many millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed. What could you do with a man who first declared, with great emphasis, that the one thing he had learned in an ill-spent life was that one should never take an oath (“Today no man, no judge could ever persuade me to make a sworn statement. I refuse it; I refuse it for moral reasons. Since my experience tells me that if one is loyal to his oath, one day he has to take the consequences, I have made up my mind once and for all that no judge in the world or other authority will ever be capable of making me swear an oath, to give sworn testimony. I won’t do it voluntarily and no one will be able to force me”), and then, after being told explicitly that if he wished to testify in his own defense he might “do so under oath or without an oath,” declared without further ado that he would prefer to testify under oath? And: The judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was “empty talk” – except that they thought the emptiness was feigned, and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such. And finally (this time in my voice): If [Arendt] has any thesis at all, it’s that Eichmann believed in something larger than himself. We usually encourage this sort of thing, but I think the prosocial version involves having a specific larger-than-yourself thing in mind. Eichmann (says Arendt) just liked larger-than-himself things in general, and the Nazi vision of eternal struggle for racial supremacy was the biggest thing he could find in the vicinity. We’ll later see that he had a strange respect for Zionists, and this was because they too believed in something larger than themselves. Eichmann’s infamous cliches were the cliches of pomp and circumstance and glory and high words, the ones which made him feel like he was engaged in a great enterprise whether or not there was anything behind them. The reason he admitted neither to “just following orders”, nor to a deep personal belief in anti-Semitism, was that his loyalty to Hitler came from neither. When Hitler said to kill all the Jews, he gladly complied; if Hitler had said to kill all the Christians, he would have done that too. Not because he was a drone following orders to save his skin, but because he believed. Not in any of the specifics of Nazi ideology. Not even in Hitler’s personal judgment. Just in whatever was going on at the time. IV. When he gets to the next section, on Losers, Rao mostly forgets the developmental psych. Now this is a book on status economics. Rao’s poetic description: Each of them – and they constitute 80% of humanity – is born the most beautiful baby in the world. Each is an above-average child; in fact the entire 80% is in the top 20% of human beings (it’s crowded up there). Each grows up knowing that he or she is deeply special in some way, and destined for a unique life that he or she is “meant” to live. In their troubled twenties, each seeks the one true love that they know is out there, waiting for them, and their real calling in life. Each time they fail at life or love, their friends console them: “You are a smart, funny, beautiful and incredibly talented person, and the love of your life and your true calling are out there somewhere. I just know that.” The friends are right of course: each marries the most beautiful man/woman in the world, discovers his/her calling, and becomes the proud parent of the most beautiful baby in the world. Eventually, each of them retires, earns a gold watch, and somebody makes a speech declaring him or her to be a Wonderful Human Being. You and I know them as Losers. Being a Loser means clinging to the delusion of being special, while also being fully accepted by your social group (indeed, your specialness only matters instrumentally and insofar as other people appreciate you for it). But these two imperatives are Scylla and Charybdis: insist too hard on actually being special and you’re a narcissist who everyone hates; try too cravenly to seek acceptance, and you’re acknowledging other people are better than you. Rao views Loserdom as a series of conspiracies to manage this paradox. The end solution looks something like "everyone is special in their own way”. Loser dynamics are largely driven by Lake-Wobegon-effect snow jobs, which obscure pervasive mediocrity. But unlike the delusions of the Clueless (false confidence of the Dunning-Kruger variety which we saw last time), which are maintained through the furious efforts and desperate denials on the part of the deluded individuals themselves, Loser delusions are maintained by groups. You scratch my delusion, I’ll scratch yours. I’ll call you a thoughtful critic if you agree to call me a fascinating blogger. And we’ll both convince ourselves that our lives are to be valued by these different measures. Loser above-averageness is generally not based on an outright falsehood. Unlike Michael’s pretensions to comic genius, which are strictly not true, Pam really is the best artist in the group. The delusion lies not in a false assessment of her artistic skills, but in the group choosing to evaluate her on the basis of art in the first place. In other words, Losers are too smart to fool themselves. They enter into social contracts which require them to fool each other […] At the life-script level, the game-playing social contract creates complete nominal illegibility. Each individual in a group is judged according to a custom life script that makes it impossible to compare two lives within the group. Pam’s life has a redemptive script based on the fact that she is the cutest one in the office, can paint well, and forms the “It” couple with Jim. Kevin’s is based on the fact that he is in a band. Creed’s uniqueness lies in his weirdness…Remember, you are unique, just like everybody else. A second, corollary paradox: Groucho Marx joked that he wouldn’t belong to any club that would accept him as a member. But then why do people ever associate in clubs? Suppose you joined a club that was clearly not good enough for you - maybe you’re a famous billionaire and they’re a bunch of losers who watch crappy TV in a basement once a week. Why would you be in this club? But suppose you tried to join a club that was clearly too good for you - you’re a poor person with no social skills, and you apply to the rich billionaires’ country club. Why would they ever accept you? This suggests that people won’t join clubs that are too much higher or lower status than they are. But why would they join clubs that are even slightly higher or lower status? Wouldn’t you expect nobody ever joins anything except in the vanishingly rare case where their status and the club’s status are exactly the same? Rao is trying to make the point that all associations require some level of status illegibility. If you knew status perfectly - if you went around with “Status: 6.8/10” tattooed on your forehead - then you could see a club all of whose members had statuses 6.2 - 6.5, and know that you could do better. So instead, the same social conspiracy that keeps people convinced they have useful talents, also keeps status illegible. This takes the form of everyone teasing each other, creating a constant churn of minor status increases and decrements which is too complicated for anyone to track properly. (Rao says that the single-highest and single-lowest status people in any group can sometimes be legible - creating an observable range for what status people in the group can be, ie “we’re for people between 6/10 and 7/10” - but the middle always has to be illegible, to allow the majority of people to preserve their polite fiction that they’re among the higher-status members of their group.) This section on status economics ends with a digression on jokes. Not as in knock-knock jokes. Jokes where one person makes fun of another, gaining status at their expense. These kinds of jokes are status economics transactions. According to Rao, the minimum viable Loser joke is three people: the joker, the victim, and an audience. The joker makes a joke. The victim has a chance to retort (eg “takes one to know one!”) and the audience decides how to mentally update everyone’s status. Rao uses examples from The Office, but I haven’t seen it, so I was thinking about an episode of Seinfeld: When George was stuffing himself with shrimp at a meeting, Reilly remarked, "Hey, George, the ocean called. They're running out of shrimp." Slow-witted George could not think of a comeback until later, while driving to the tennis club to meet Jerry. His comeback was: "Oh, yeah, Reilly? Well, the jerk store called, and they're running out of you." Jerry, Elaine, and Kramer did not think 'jerk store' was a good comeback mainly because "there are no jerk stores." Elaine suggests, "Your cranium called. It's got some space to rent." Jerry suggests, "The zoo called. You're due back by six." Kramer finally thinks George should just tell Reilly that he slept with his wife. After discovering that Reilly was let go from the Yankees and now works for Firestone, George flies to Akron, Ohio just to try the jerkstore line. When he says it, however, Reilly responds, "What's the difference? You're their all-time best seller." George, unprepared for this, ends up using Kramer's line. He's then told that Reilly's wife is in a coma. Rao asks: in what sense did Reilly successfully “score” on George? Suppose George had been a very stupid person, and hadn’t understood that Reilly’s comment was supposed to be teasing/hurtful; he would have been unaffected. Or suppose he had something totally outlandish (“Yes, but there are canyons on Mars”), then insisted that it was a brilliant comeback and let Reilly exhaust/embarrass himself trying to prove it wasn’t? In contrast, if there had been a third person there (let’s say a love interest who both George and Reilly were pursuing), this pointless narcissistic zero-stakes game would become relevant: the love interest gets to evaluate the two against each other, and award status to the victor. This isn’t always the wittier of the two. You can also imagine a world where George says “Excuse me, I have an eating disorder, I think it’s incredibly stigmatizing for you to bully me like this.” Then the third person gets to decide whether to treat this as Reilly making a hilarious joke and George being too thin-skinned to take it, or as Reilly saying something offensive and George bravely calling him out. Crucially, if she wants, she can let her decision hinge on whether she liked Reilly or George better to begin with, or whether one or the other would be a better ally in the future - so this is part status-transaction and part status-test. But in the actual Seinfield episode, there is no love interest. George and Reilly are trying to score points on each other, totally unaware that this is meaningless. For Rao, this is a sure sign of Cluelessness - anyone with social skills would realize no status could be gained or lost and the whole game is pointless. So Loser jokes are 3+ people, and Clueless jokes are 2 people. Continuing the pattern, a Sociopath joke must be for one person - the joker amusing himself, totally unconcerned whether anyone else appreciates it. V. Sociopaths aren’t necessarily evil. They’re just . . . unbeholden to anyone else. They might still follow the rules because it advantages them to do it, or because they have personally chosen to follow some moral code they happen to like. But they don’t crave approval from anyone, not even abstract concepts. If the Clueless come from arrested development, and Losers from normal development and its attendant status economics, Sociopaths are formed by a sort of dark enlightenment. They have a moment when they realize nothing is true and everything is permissible. Rao’s poetic side writes: Sociopathy is not about ripping off a specific mask from the face of social reality. It is about recognizing that there are no social realities. There are only masks. Social realities exist as a hierarchy of increasingly sophisticated and specialized fictions for those predisposed to believe that there is something special about the human condition, which sets our realities apart from the rest of the universe. There is, to the Sociopath, only one reality governing everything from quarks to galaxies. Humans have no special place within it. Any idea predicated on the special status of the human — such as justice, fairness, equality, talent — is raw material for a theater of mediated realities that can be created via subtraction of conflicting evidence, polishing and masking. Mask is an appropriate term for any social reality created through subtraction, because an appearance of human-like agency for non-human realities is what the inhabitants require. By humanizing the non-human universe, we make the human special. All that is required is to control people who believe in fairness, is to remove any evidence suggesting that the world might fundamentally not be a fair place, and mask it appropriately with a justice principle such as an afterlife calculus, or a retirement fantasy. […] When a layer of social reality is penetrated and turned into a means for manipulating the realities of others, it is automatically devalued. To create medals and ranking schemes for the benefit of the Clueless is to see them as mere baubles yourself. To turn status-seeking into a control mechanism is to devalue status. To devalue something is to judge any meaning it carries as inconsequential. In terms of our metaphor of masks of gods, the moment you rip off a mask and wear it yourself, whatever that mask represents becomes worth much less. So the Sociopath’s journey is fundamentally a nihilistic one. The climactic moment in this journey is the point where skill at manipulating social realities becomes unconscious. Suddenly, it becomes apparent that all social realities are based on fictional meanings created by denying some aspect of natural, undivided reality. Reality that does not revolve around the needs of humans. The mask-ripping process itself becomes revealed as an act within the last theater of social reality, the one within which at least manipulating social realities seems to be a meaningful process in some meta-sense. Game design with good and evil behaviors. Losing this illusion is a total-perspective-vortex moment for the Sociopath: he comes face-to-face with the oldest and most fearsome god of all: the absent God. In that moment, the Sociopath viscerally experiences the vast inner emptiness that results from the sudden dissolution of all social realities. There’s just a pile of masks with no face beneath. Just quarks and stuff. Both Losers and Clueless are trying to manipulate other people’s impressions of them. Sociopaths are trying to manipulate reality. Reality includes other people’s impressions - if your goal is to become President, in some sense you care what the electorate thinks of you. But it’s an instrumental goal. Sociopaths crave the Presidency (or whatever) and use other people’s good opinions as stepping-stones. Losers and Clueless crave the good opinions directly. Once you stop craving other people’s good opinions, you lose some mental blocks that would normally prevent you from coming up with manipulative strategies. Rao says the most basic Sociopath manuever is “heads I win, tails you lose” - coming up with some way of arranging systems so that they get the credit for good results while avoiding the blame for bad ones. A simple strategy is to come up with a plan and appoint a Clueless pawn as Director Of The Plan. If the plan goes well, it was always your idea and you hand-picked and mentored the person who carried it out. If the plan goes poorly, it was always the director’s idea, you maybe thought it had some promise but he clearly bungled the execution. But this is a weak 101-level version of the maneuver; the real thing involves a bunch of bureaucracies, committees, and total deniability. Rao theorizes that most of the middle layers of companies are giant and powerful machines built by Sociopaths to guide and redirect the flow of blame and credit. Is everyone else against this? Do they view it as duplicity and oppression? Rao says no. Sociopaths aren’t just CEOs. They’re priest-kings, creating meaning for everyone else. The Clueless demand a world of legible rules, legible rewards and punishment, and a legible Authority tracking everyone’s balance. Sociopaths, who create companies, religions, governments, and every other form of authority, help Clueless people live in the legible gamified rank-able worlds their minds crave. I’m less able to follow Rao’s explanation of “Loser spirituality” and how Sociopaths control it. My guess is something like: Losers “worship” positive emotions, belongingness, and “good vibes”, within carefully obfuscated conspiracies of mutual status-blindness. These aren’t really capable of dealing with the real world: a typical fiction is that “we’re all really talented and gave our all on this project”, but in fact the project might be failing. Sociopaths are outside those conspiracies and outside local status competitions, ie your CEO isn’t going to share banter over a glass of beer with you. So they are allowed to (carefully, emotionlessly) communicate/represent/convey reality to the status-maintenance conspiracies in a way where no particular member loses status by admitting reality first. Although in some vague sense the Sociopaths are oppressing and manipulating everyone else, this isn’t how it feels from the inside: both Clueless and Losers are grateful to the Sociopaths for taking the burden of confronting reality off their shoulders. If the Sociopath fails at this, and a Clueless or Loser has to confront reality unmediated, they’ll either have a very bad time but eventually bounce back, or become a Sociopath themselves. VI. So that’s The Gervais Principle. Is any of it true? I don’t find myself or the people I know best falling clearly into any of these archetypes. They’re useful to have around. I can see pieces of all of them. But none are a great match. I can see bits of myself in the Clueless archetype. I like legible systems. I’m the person who did really well on standardized tests, really badly at networking, and ended up in medical school because it was the highest you could go on test scores alone. I’ve occasionally suggested that all politics should be replaced with some kind of system for calculating how much utility every option has, then doing whichever one is best (bonus points if it’s on the blockchain). But I’m bad at listening to authority figures,and quit my last job to start my own company. Also, Clueless people are supposed to be bad at using language in original ways, and I’m a professional writer. Sociopaths are supposed to fiercely distrust collectivism and come up with their own, usually utilitarian-inspired morality, which I identify with. But I can’t manipulate my way out of a paper bag. Also, a few weeks ago I got in an argument with a clerk over the right amount of change, after double-checking it turned out I was wrong and the clerk was right, and even though this was in an airport and I will definitely never see that clerk again, I felt embarrassed about the interaction for hours, and still feel pretty bad about it. Doesn’t really feel very ubermensch-ish or transcended-the-need-for-other-people’s-good-opinion-y. I have a group of friends, and within that group of friends I’m acutely aware of the things I’m unusually good at vs. bad at, and I worry a lot about whether my strengths qualify me to be a member in good standing. My status within that group is illegible and I prefer that to the alternative. Does that make me a Loser? Who controls the microphone in my head? Whose approval do I crave? When I was younger, I remember pretty vividly that it would be whoever I had a crush on at the time. When I started blogging, it became my blog audience. But sometimes it gets hijacked by random store clerks. And I particularly remember being invited to an event with some big name tech people, fretting about whether they would like me, exerting some willpower to remind myself that I was valid with or without their approval, and then realizing afterwards that what I had actually done was fantasize about how if I wasn’t obviously craving their approval, they would be impressed by my independence and put-togetherness and respect me even more. So fine, I (and the few other people I know well enough to use as examples) don’t naturally fall into any of these categories. Whatever, Rao said (in one sentence) that everyone has multiple types. But then what’s the use of this categorization system? If I invent three random types of people: Green: introverted, long hair, likes the cold, complains too much
Inline links: defense mechanisms, The Aristocrats, Eichmann In Jerusalem, an episode, the real thing, that make me a Loser
ACX Grants Results 2024
February 10, 2024 · Original source
Elaine Perlman, $50,000, to lobby for changes in the laws around kidney donation. I discussed this further in part VIII here: there’s a severe shortage of organs, and the easiest way to solve it is to let the government give people tax breaks for organ donation. Elaine works with the Coalition To Modify NOTA, a group of doctors, donors, recipients, and others who are fighting to turn this into law via the End Kidney Deaths Act.
Inline links: here, Coalition To Modify NOTA
ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Codebuff, an AI coding startup I probably can’t take full credit for all of this just from giving them $20K in seed funding, but I continue to appreciate everything they do for this community and the world. 35: Further S’s Political Career This person didn’t win their election, but has since pivoted to AI safety and works in a well-regarded AI policy think tank. 36: Seeds Of Science, A Journal Of Non-Traditional Research No update received, but this was a public journal and it is easy to follow their work, see their website and Substack. They published two dozen articles of widely varying quality through 2023 and 2024, then closed in 2025. A remnant of the original vision survives as a science blogging aggregator. This was about my median expectation for this grant, but it was very inexpensive and I decided to take a chance on it anyway. 37: Good Science Project, Working To Improve Federal Science Funding No update received, but they have a public Substack discussing their progress. Their proposals for NIH reform have influenced Congress and made government agencies pay more attention to scientific integrity. 38: Advising Developing Countries On How To Grow Their Economies With our initial ACX grant, we piloted the Growth Teams model in Rwanda, helping the government jumpstart the export-oriented call center (BPO) industry. Since 2022, that effort has contributed to the creation of 2,000 formal jobs and the emergence of some of the country’s largest private employers. We’ve since expanded to Tanzania, Malawi, and the Indian states of Goa and Meghalaya. To refocus the global development discourse on broad-based economic growth, we co-organized the Growth Summit with the Center for Global Development and the Charter Cities Institute, and have published articles in leading outlets including Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, and the Global Prosperity Institute. Our work has attracted support from Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, and Mulago Foundation, and our advisors now include economists Lant Pritchett, Stefan Dercon, and Kunal Sen. 39: Help Luca De Leo Get Started In AI Safety Research No update received, but Luca now runs the AI safety group at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 40: Typist For Saharon Shelah This was another ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Saharon is a prolific and influential Israeli mathematician, but many of his discoveries are hand-written in an unpublishable format. This grant funded a typist to help make his results suitable for publication. According to this page, they have made over fifty new papers and preprints available. Second Cohort: One Year Updates 41: Lead-Acid Battery Recycling In Nigeria The Nigeria field research was a major success. We spent most of September doing field research in multiple major cities in Nigeria, and got a good sense of the used lead-acid battery supply chain. This field research served as the foundation for expanding our project, and has been very impactful in shaping our ongoing research. We published our findings from Nigeria, which were shared with Nigerian government regulators and global NGOs working on lead poisoning. The grant also gave us the on-the-ground experience we needed to both fully understand and credibly engage with groups, both in Nigeria and globally, on the ULAB issue. In the meantime, beyond continued research, we’ve also launched a dashboard (trade.leadbatteries.org) for analyzing global lead trade data. Right now, we’re: Launching two studies (one RCT, one environmental analysis) in Nigeria in collaboration with local universities to develop a more rigorous understanding of lead pollution due to low-standard ULAB recycling in Nigeria Collaborating with a non-profit incubator to launch an NGO focused on demand-side solutions Beginning a partnership with a West African environmental regulator to scale cheap air monitoring technology to quickly identify and reduce lead pollution from low-standard smelting If any of this sounds interesting to you, please sign up for our Substack (leadbatteries.substack.com) or send us an email at hugosmith@uchicago.edu! 42: Compensation For Kidney Donors The End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687 / EKDA) is a groundbreaking ten-year pilot program designed to save lives and reduce healthcare costs. It provides a refundable tax credit of $10,000 per year for five years, a total of $50,000, to living kidney donors who donate to a stranger, helping those who’ve waited the longest on the transplant list. Between 2010 and 2021, 100,000 Americans died while qualified and waiting for a kidney. The EKDA aims to change that trajectory. Within ten years of its passage, up to 100,000 Americans could receive a life-saving living donor kidney which typically lasts twice as long as a deceased donor kidney. This would not only save lives but also save taxpayers up to $37 billion. The legislation has been reintroduced in the House, and we have a committed Republican Senate lead. Now, we need a Democratic Senator to co-lead and help move this bipartisan effort forward. Time is short, and we are racing to pass the bill this Congressional session. 36 organizations already support the EKDA. Join the movement and help end preventable kidney deaths. Visit EndKidneyDeaths.org to help us get to the finish line. Elaine and her org have been working extremely hard on this; you can read a Vox article on their campaign here. If you want to sign up for her email list and get updates any time there is a representative you can contact or meeting you can join in, go here. 43: Genetic Hack To Prevent Suffering In the estimate of multiple team members, the ACX grant was “worth it” - it likely had a counterfactual net positive impact, even though we had to pivot from our initial fast-track plans for developing the precision anti-suffering therapy. We identify three primary streams of value: a) reducing uncertainty in the emerging field through early exploratory research, helping with the identification of dead ends and promising R&D trajectories; b) a wide range of downstream effects (beyond the “raising awareness” cliché), including talent mobilization and rekindled interest in suffering abolitionism as a distinct cause area; and c) certain developments that cannot yet be publicly disclosed. In December 2024, Marcin Kowrygo (Acting CEO & volunteering contributor), David Pearce (Director of Bioethics), Aatu Koskensilta (President), and a few other team members decided to leave The Far Out Initiative. They look forward to collaborating and applying their experience to advance the suffering abolitionist lineage in the spirit of open science, public good, and thoughtfully decentralized governance. Feel free to reach out to us at suffab at protonmail dot com to discuss collaboration opportunities! I wrote a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here. Unfortunately there were some internal disagreements, and the people ACX Grants was closest to left the organization. I plan to continue to monitor whatever they do next. 44: Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA This team prefers has asked me not to discuss their progress publicly, but you can probably guess what their lives are like right now, and your guess would be correct. 45: Anti-Mosquito Drones We developed a cheap sonar that is able to detect, track and classify the ultrasonic echoes of mosquito wings at more than three meters. I believe it’s a world first! We also have control algorithms that take the sonar data and output control commands that both ram into mosquitoes and avoid the walls of a simulated environment. Our current work is on integrating both components on a real drone, and we expect to be able to kill mosquitoes by June. We’ve also made an internal impact study (napkin-sized) that shows we’ll be more cost-effective than ITNs in urban to periurban environments. So, we’re super excited with what comes next and can’t wait to share the videos of our first interceptions! More information [in the video below] and on our website, https://tornyol.com 46: Tarbell Fellowship For AI Journalism No update received, but they have a public website. I can’t find the Voices program in particular, but the overall fellowship completed their first class of seven fellows and is working on their second. 47: Germicidal UV Lamp Study The research has successfully demonstrated the ability of off the shelf ozone scrubbers to mitigate the ozone production of far-UVC lamps, is now available as a preprint (https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7). The paper has been submitted for publication and is currently undergoing peer review. Any ideas you have for potential funders we can approach to help execute our six-year plan to accelerate far-UVC would be appreciated https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/ 48: Technological Solutions To Animal Welfare Challenges Directly because of Innovate Animal Ag's work, the first U.S. egg producer publicly announced in the New York Times their adoption of in-ovo sexing technology, eliminating the need to cull day-old male chicks. The initial in-ovo sexing machine began operating in the U.S. at the end of 2024, with the first eggs from these hens expected on shelves in mid-2025. External evaluations estimate our work accelerated U.S. adoption of this technology by over seven years, meaning that once fully implemented, more than 2 billion chicks will have been spared. In addition to continuing to support the rollout of in-ovo sexing in the US and globally, we're now exploring other technologies and paths to impact. Current promising projects include developing humane slaughter methods for fish and advocating for USDA approval of a poultry vaccine against bird flu. They add: If you ever meet folks that are interested animal welfare and are partial to more technocratic and practical solutions, please continue to pass them our way, or connect them directly to me. 49: Assurance Contract Website www.Spartacus.app is an ACX grantee that created a platform to help solve coordination and collective action problems. It enables the creation of campaigns that build critical mass through conditional commitments, which only activate when a sufficient number of people join, converting risk and uncertainty into a higher probability of successful outcomes. They are currently facilitating several projects that leverage conditional commitments, including a dominant assurance contract interface for fashion pop-ups, accelerating a community business association's membership drive, and helping an AI safety organization organize petitions and events, among others. They have pivoted from an emphasis on high-stakes coordination problems requiring anonymity (because they occur too infrequently) to a broader range of more common use cases and have successfully run small-scale campaigns, but are still working toward product-market fit. Despite resource constraints and split time commitments that have impeded faster progress, they remain dedicated to the project's growth and success. You can follow its progress on X or Substack, or email Jordan directly here. 50: Cause Prioritization @ Center For Exploratory Altruism Research Moderately good progress on a salt reduction policy advocacy project we funded; informal commitments have been made by the Ministry of Health, and we're awaiting the publication of a formal administrative order. The official description sounds maximally generic, but this is an EA charity with a broad mandate whose current thesis is that dietary guidelines in developing countries can have outsized effects in saving lives. They’re making some progress on a salt reduction campaign in a developing country they prefer not to name publicly. 51: Mark Webb Studying Land Reform The purpose of this project was to identify specific farmland that could be acquired and transferred to the farmers already working the land. This has been difficult to achieve. I have been able to connect with other charities and landless farmers, and was able to interview a number of people about what their situation looks like, as well as what it would look like to them personally if they owned, rather than rented, their farmland. All this was immensely helpful in pushing this long-term project forward, even if I was unable to identify a specific plot of land that could be used to try the experiment. I intend to continue this project. If you have any insights or connections, I am interested. 52: More AI Advocacy In Australia Good Ancestors is focused on AI safety policy in Australia. Middle powers might be a useful path to influence as the US and China focus on racing, rather than safety. The ACX grant helped us give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate alongside Google, Microsoft and Facebook (We were the only nonprofit to give oral evidence to the inquiry. We also engaged government on other AI-related issues, including cybersecurity, biosecurity, consumer law and automated decision making (https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety). We’re currently working to inform voters about where parties stand on AI safety for the election, ahead of engaging on a likely Australian AI Act in 2025 (https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/). This is the same Australian lobbying organization we founded in Year 1, after a change in name and leadership. I continue to be excited about AI safety in middle-tier countries for a few reasons. First, these countries have some power in international organizations to set international standards. Second, companies will usually comply with any not-excessively-burdensome regulation set by any country with a significant market. Third, AI safety is underfunded by the standard of government programs, so Australia setting up a national AI Safety Institute would significantly expand the field. It’s kind of crazy that ACX Grants tier levels of money can have significant effects at this scale, but GA continues to do a great job and we continue to be proud to support them. 53: Campus For African School Of Economics At Zanzibar Charter City The ACX grant helped launch the first research center at the African School of Economics-Zanzibar, which is a main anchor of the Fumba Town charter city project in Zanzibar. This research center is called the Africa Urban Lab (AUL), focused on rapid urbanization across Africa. The AUL launched its first Diploma program in Urban Development with 38 students in our first cohort (now graduated!), including mayors, and deputy mayor, a director of a national Ministry of urban development, and many others. We published our research framing papers for the AUL's research agenda. We raised funding to launch an Urban Expansion Program that's now selecting 15 African cities to support in implementing urban expansion planning on the urban periphery. We held two Public Talks by renowned cities scholars and practitioners. We received additional funding from Emergent Ventures and from the Templeton Foundation. And we've partnered with 8 universities across the region, and with one of these universities (Ardhi) we'll be working with them to update their urban planning and urban economics curriculum (amplifying AUL's impact beyond our own organization). A longer update from end of 2024 is here: https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights) 54: Online Training Program For Health Workers In Developing Countries To date, over 11,000 health workers in Nigeria have completed our course on basic, life-saving newborn care. ACX funding was catalytic for helping us secure government approvals and complete an evaluation of the impact of our training on health workers' clinical practices. The evaluation shows that birth attendants provide better birth care after taking the course. We fed the evaluation results into an updated model, which suggests the program is 24 times more cost-effective than direct cash transfers (a widely recognized benchmark for cost-effectiveness). The program is likely to become even more cost-effective as we scale up. https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model 55: Smartphone Pupillometry To Diagnose Neurological Conditions We have continued to expand our work in the smartphone pupillometry space and the development of our application, PupilScreen (https://www.apertur.ai/). We have expanded our pilot/research program to include new sites across the United States (Missouri, New Jersey, Kentucky, USAC racing, PitFit driver performance training in Indiana) and the world (Nepal, Taiwan, South Africa). We continue to publish at the leading edge of the pupillometry literature as well looking at concussion (https://neuro.jmir.org/2024/1/e58398 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39682632/), cerebral vasospasm (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39128501/), and stroke (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39674431/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39561861/). Currently, we are raising a $3 million seed round via a SAFE to fund the expansion of our work into the hands of healthcare workers and the general public. We will first focus on traumatic brain injury for clinical use and develop a neuro-monitoring wellness application utilizing our technology for the general public. They add: “We would welcome connections to anyone that you think might be interested in supporting our work further by investing in our $3M seed round of funding.” 56: Mike Saint-Antoine’s Biology Tutorial Videos Since getting the grant, I've continued to make Youtube tutorials as planned. One series that I'm especially proud of is about how to make a neural network in the Julia programming language completely from scratch, with no imports, up to the point of being able to solve MNIST (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE). Also, a college student in Pakistan came across my videos and invited me to give a virtual Zoom-lecture to her department, so I ended up teaching a 6-hour "Python-for-Biologists" workshop to more than a hundred college students in Pakistan over Zoom. So that was pretty awesome. Also, lately I've been teaching some in-person classes too, mostly at Fractal University in NYC, and I also recently organized a day-long, in-person Beginner Python class for people in my local area (Philly suburbs) who wanted to learn some basic programming. I'm having a lot of fun with this project, and am grateful to Scott and the grant funders for their generosity! 57: Conceptual Boundaries Workshop On AI Safety The workshop was completed successfully; you can read a writeup here. 58: Apart Research To Incubate AI Safety Scientists No update received, but they have a public website, and you can see their impact metrics here. They seem to be in urgent need of more funding. 59: Primer On How To Achieve Political Change No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 60: Research IVF Clinic Success Rates We've built a predictive model that estimates the odds of having a child at different IVF clinics across the country while controlling for factors like patient age and infertility differences that can falsely make some clinics look better than others. We found that an average patient can increase their odds of having a kid by 43% just by going to a top 10% clinic. Patients unlucky enough to go to a bottom 10% clinic will reduce their odds of having a kid by 40%. Next month, we're adding several more clinics, 2023 data, additional procedural controls, and donor/gestational carrier models, which should push our accuracy beyond state-of-the-art models in this space and better isolate clinic impact on patient outcomes. We've launched ivf.clinic, a website where patients can access personalized IVF reports and browse our clinic rankings (though we're still squashing some bugs). Currently, we're expanding our research to include comprehensive insurance coverage and pricing data across clinics nationwide. If anyone has insights on automating the collection of IVF clinic pricing information, I'd love to hear from you at scelarek@gmail.com. 61: Replicate Study On Brain Wave Synchronization For Speeding Learning We have acquired and configured the OpenBCI UltraCortex Mark IV 8-channel EEG headset and a clinical-grade Biosemi 32-channel EEG system. We’ve implemented the required components for the experimental pipeline (computing alpha from EEG, flashing bright white light, presenting stimulus images). We are currently putting them together into a single system that we’ll use to collect the data from several participants. We are aiming to gather data on several participants in late June / early July and complete the pilot of the replication in July 2025. If you’d like to be a participant in the study, [they might announce a link once they have it]. 62: Advocate Repeal Of Interstate Runaway Compact No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 63: Animal Welfare (Especially Fish) In Turkiye Future For Fish asks companies to sign up to FFF's fish welfare commitment, which requires producers to certify their facilities and enforce specific standards for stocking density and harvest. Luckyfish, İlknak, Divan (35 restaurants, 17 hotels) and NG Hotels (5 hotels) have signed and published FFF's fish welfare commitment with İlknak publishing the commitment on their website. Kılıç published its first sustainability report detailing fish welfare policies, including enforcing a maximum stocking density of 10 kg/m³ and confirmation of electrical stunning practices. Longer version with some caveats: https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w From the longer document, these commitments involve things like reducing overcrowding, or stunning fish before killing them. Over 30 million fish were affected just from their single largest commitment, and they say 100 fish are helped per dollar spent. 64: More Georgism Advocacy Lars and Will used the 2021 grant to co-found ValueBase. Will remained with the company, and Lars left to do advocacy work at the Center For Land Economics. Here’s their summary of how things are going: [Our] organization transitioned leadership with Greg Miller, a former Program Analyst at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lars Doucet, author of Land is A Big Deal and Co-Founder of Valuebase, working full time and Joe Caissie stepping aside. This transition happened naturally as the next career transition for each respective person. Since then, progress has been made on pushing forward legislation. Maryland had two bills introduced to give Baltimore and counties the ability to enact split-rate taxes. One of the bills passed the state senate and would allow Baltimore to enact land value taxes within one mile of rail corridors–this contains 50% of Baltimore’s land value. However, the legislative session ended. We expect the bill to revive next session. The Center for Land Economics has been actively working to help efforts to get this bill passed the line. At the same time, we have uncovered systematic undervaluing of vacant land in assessments. We are writing a report on the assessment issues in Maryland with actionable steps to resolve them.
Inline links: Codebuff, website, Substack, survives, a public Substack, in Rwanda, Growth Summit, Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, Global Prosperity Institute, Saharon, this page, eadbatteries.substack.com, here, here, a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here, https://tornyol.com, a public website, https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7, https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/, our way, connect them directly to me, www.Spartacus.app, X, Substack, here, https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety, https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/, https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights, https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE, here, public website, here, in urgent need, https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w