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Alyssa Riceman

@Alyssa

$107total balance
$0charity balance
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$107 in pending offers

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Alyssa Riceman

8 months ago

I'm not hugely expecting this to be popular among the final funders for the ACX impact certificates, and accordingly am not in fact throwing money at it—despite your intention of drawing connections to AI in your writeups, I'm not expecting it to move much in the AI sphere, and instead expecting it to mostly be of use in the neuroscience sphere—but nonetheless this strikes me as a good project! Neuroscience is a valuable field in its own right, legible collation of previously-illegible insider knowledge can be very useful, and it sounds like you're well-positioned to engage in that here. So, for all that I'm not expecting the final funders here to end up attributing much impact to this project, I still am broadly hoping that it ends up funded, and would happily invest some money in it if I thought the final funders' interests were more aligned with mine in this regard than I in fact think they are.

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Alyssa Riceman

8 months ago

This strikes me as pretty promising, within its field! I'm not throwing money at it in the context of the ACX impact certificates, since I don't know that it's particularly centrally within any of the final funders' core areas-of-interest—improvements to academia are very much off in the Fuzzy Indirect World-Improvement Which Might Accumulate Over Decades If We're Lucky corner of altruism-space, but aren't thereby particularly popular with the longtermism fandom as far as I'm aware—but I nonetheless hope you get funded and would very plausibly have tossed money at you were there any final funders whose assessments-of-world-improvement-prospects I believed to line up more closely with my own.

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Alyssa Riceman

8 months ago

I myself am not a hugely-enthusiastic consumer of video content, so my intuitions about how well this will pay off tend pessimistic-by-default; but, trying to suppress those intuitions in favor of outside-view, many people do in fact seem to absorb material better via video than via other formats, and be more prone to sharing it with one another via video than via other formats; thus this seems in fact pretty promising, to me, as a way of trying to roll the dice on a jump in viral spread of information on the videos' respective topics, and that seems like an outcome worth grasping at. Not, in the end, an outcome I judged sufficiently worth-grasping-at for me to be willing to fund it at $2000-or-above valuation, and thus not one I chose to fund; but nonnegligibly valuable, nonetheless. (Had it been fundable at $1000 valuation, I would likely have gone for it.)

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Alyssa Riceman

8 months ago

I didn't fund this, because of the very high minimum valuation such that I don't expect funding it to pay off given the risk of the grantmakers passing it up, but this does strike me as high-value work worth a good amount of retrospective money, and perhaps others will be more optimistic than I regarding the grantmakers' likelihood of agreeing with me here.

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Alyssa Riceman

8 months ago

I'm not currently assigning huge probability that this will end up working—I anticipate a decent amount of risk of its running around either on the hurdle of "it's hard to pull together the necessary mix of knowledge-of-laws plus knowledge-of-land-parcels to put together useful outputs" or on the hurdle of "getting people to be aware of / pay attention to the software once it exists might be hard"—but, if it were to work, it seems like it could be pretty valuable as a step towards increasing abundance-of-cheap-housing in the areas it covers, with corresponding improvements to general quality-of-life for the new residents (and/or the old residents who end up paying less), and that does in fact seem like a pretty valuable target to aim at even given an only-moderate chance of success.

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Alyssa Riceman

8 months ago

This seems like a very promising enterprise! Success already under your belt, a clear plan for scaling up further from here, pretty high potential yields should it succeed; overall I'm pretty impressed with / optimistic about your prospects here.

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Alyssa Riceman

8 months ago

On the one hand, this is just a tiny step in what will need to be a much larger process before it potentially leads to mass improvement in food-security. (Needs to be published somewhere where people will care about it; if that publication is successful, needs to be given some bigger trial runs to confirm that it doesn't have secret nasty downsides; if confirmed to be in-fact-the-improvement-it-seems-to-be, needs to be popularized in a well-aimed manner, to make its potential beneficiaries actually take advantage of it. And all of this contingent on its being in fact as good as hoped; the failure of the second step, in particular, would sink the whole thing.) On the other hand, this is the sort of tiny step whose long-run returns are potentially really huge if they in fact pan out. That potential return seems worth tossing some money at to help it have better-rather-than-worse odds of passing the first hurdle.

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Alyssa Riceman

8 months ago

This is neat! I'm not hugely expecting it to move the needle of popular understanding of AI deceptiveness very much, but the possibility of its doing so strikes me as sufficiently non-negligible that it nonetheless seems worth tossing some money at just in case.

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Alyssa Riceman

8 months ago

This strikes me as a long shot, but as a long shot worth funding. The website does a good job of concisely displaying useful information; you've done a good job building an initial audience; and, if you did manage to continue scaling up into mainstream popularity, that'd likely be pretty good from an increased-popularization-of-prediction-markets standpoint, and thus appeal to the sorts of longtermist funders who are pushing for that. My main concern is a lack of clear understanding of how the process of growing-in-popularity works and thus of how the money will help; but I'm willing to put some money in, nonetheless, on the basis that it's presumably helpful somewhere, to fund your continued time-expenditure on the site if nothing else.

(And then, separately, a more pettily-selfish question mostly unrelated to my funding decision: is there any way you could add support for some manner of RSS-based or newsletter-based following of the site's numbers over time, e.g. weekly or monthly snapshots? Manual polling is awkward, as is following on social media platforms I'm not preexistingly in the habit of tracking things on, but the site's readouts are nice enough that I would like to follow it, which is a rare distinction among sites-about-mainstream-news-topics.)

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Alyssa Riceman

8 months ago

What sources will you be using to set the numbers on the cruelty score? And do you have any plans to support alternative user-set numbers in the event that users disagree with you on prioritization? For example, if users are more concerned than you are with the possibility of plant suffering, will you allow them to set numbers on plant suffering in such a way as to have those numbers then propagate through the app and be reflected in larger numbers for plant products, larger numbers for animals raised on a diet of plant products, et cetera?

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Alyssa Riceman

8 months ago

Assuming your study is successful and yields easily-actionable insights into more-effective communication methods, what are your plans for dissemination of the results? And, in particular: how do you plan to ensure that the results are disseminated in such a way as to be used primarily for good, as opposed to being adopted by everyone, including e.g. pro-factory-farming lobbyists?

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Alyssa Riceman

8 months ago

"Imagine if we can produce 2x the amount of Insulin through better codon optimization. This could lower drug prices and even improve time for production of vaccines in a future pandemic."

Do you have alternative examples of the sorts of drugs this would potentially cheapen production of? My understanding of the market for Insulin in particular is that it's already in fact very cheap to manufacture, and supply is constrained primarily, not by price-to-manufacture, but by regulatory limits on who's allowed to manufacture and sell it.

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Alyssa Riceman

8 months ago

Do you have an estimate of how much of your pilot program's impact was a result of the effects of your program, versus of ordinary regression-to-the-mean such as would have happened even to a control group of similarly-depressed people absent your program?

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Alyssa Riceman

8 months ago

What are the advantages of creating a whole new real-money prediction-market platform specifically for predicting study-replication (which seems difficult and failure-prone considering the general troubles faced by prediction-market platforms), as compared with the obvious alternative of creating markets on study-replication on some preexisting real-money prediction-market platform? Are the preexisting platforms unwilling to support such markets in some way? Are there particular features they're missing which your platform will have? Other factors I'm currently failing to think of?

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Alyssa Riceman

8 months ago

According to Wikipedia, "Many economists and other experts have argued for [the Jones act's] repeal". What have the analyses in those economists' arguments been like, historically, and what advantages are you expecting your analysis to have over them?

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ForDateTypeAmount
Scaling Legal Impact for Chickens to make factory-farm cruelty a liabilityabout 2 months agouser to user trade107
News through prediction markets8 months agouser to user trade18
Scaling Legal Impact for Chickens to make factory-farm cruelty a liability8 months agouser to user trade268
Manifund Bank8 months agodeposit+500