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Project summary

New definition of value.

Accounting for externalities, cobenefits, impact.

Full end-2-end accounting for cost of goods, products, services.

Universal evaluation engine.

What are this project's goals and how will you achieve them?

GOAL: Infrastructure towards post-capitalism.

Capitalism works but it works too well, obesity sickness addiction as a business model.

Fact: 17% of GDP in the US is healthcare (or rather "sickcare")

Fact: opioid epidemics, Purdue Pharma, Sackler family, 0.5m deaths

When we account for externalities it will become obvious that 0.5m deaths is definitely not OK.

Capitalism is here to stay, I cannot imagine those in power (with abundant resources) suddenly going away, relinquishing their position. I believe in the market forces and providing a new metric for value can meaningfully improve our chances of survival in the age of metacrisis, polycrisis, everything crisis.

Illustrative example, published by IMF (International Monetary Fund):

"If we then take the total value of the service provided by African forest elephants and divide it by their current population, we find that each elephant is responsible for service worth more than $1.75 million "

  • Living 🐘: $1.75m worth of ecosystem services

  • Dead 🐘: $40k on black market

(I see a massive mismatch here)

How will you achieve it?

Check our beta: https://beta.basex.com

This is beta. Blockchain UI / UX could be better and we are still working on fixes to make the onboarding smoother.

FYI: Flow of operations:

Step 1️⃣ Create organization (one off)

Step 2️⃣ Create impact report

Step 3️⃣ Create evaluation of your report

We rely on Kleros (and their community of jurors) to fact check the reports.

FYI: Concrete use cases:

1️⃣ Farmer in India doing regenerative practices, improving soil quality, capturing CO2 from the atmosphere: that adds value but it's not appreciated in the current economic system, that farmer is too small to participate in the current carbon markets. Now they can report their impact to BaseX and be rewarded. 


2️⃣ Shell doing fracking, injecting some stuff underground to extract oil. But that pollutes ground water, local people cannot drink water from the well. That is clearly a negative value, but it's legal and profitable. Someone can submit report and Shell will receive "negative value".

How will this funding be used?

Primary: Cover personal cost of living.

Secondary: If large enough: new hire for outreach, partnerships, biz dev, onboarding, community

Until now: completely self-funded, out of my pocket, bootstrapping, working towards developing demo / proof-of-concept / beta.

My personal financial situation is not ideal, slowly running out of funds, rather than looking for a job in the middle of a recession (downsizing, rightsizing, layoffs, very few organizations hiring), I genuinely believe that a much better ROI on my time is to look for grants / impact investment.

Hashtag: “burn the boats” 🔥🔥🔥


Who is on your team and what's your track record on similar projects?

Currently it is me + part time developer from Romania.

Myself: 10+ years career in IT, some startup experience

TOP 3% on Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/users/775359/mars-robertson

Greg from Romania: https://github.com/GregTrifan

We have experience with coding and building products. I’m currently actively participating in YC Co-founder matching platform: https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching mostly to boost our ability with go-to-market, partnerships, and scaling.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails? (premortem)

1. Me running out of personal funds, quitting in order to join some corporate wageslave job - hopefully you'll not allow me to do it.

2. Difficulty in explaining the product, blockchain, incentives, flow of operations. On the upside - people in the climate space understand the problem instantly, I do not need to do any explaining.

What other funding are you or your project getting?

No other funding.

Applied here: https://github.com/filecoin-project/devgrants/issues/1642

(awaiting feedback / decision)

Why Forecasting and EA community as categories?

They are the closest, the most aligned with what we do.

Forecasting

Not strictly BUT

Measuring. Evaluating. Related-ish.

EA community

Not strictly BUT

EA is all about measuring and data: "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis"

We provide tooling for EA to be more effective in evaluating impact.

•••••

Despite not fitting into any of the categories perfectly, we genuinely believe that the BaseX deserves a place on the Manifund.

Why do incentives matter?

  • We shape the tools, then the tools shape us.

  • We shape the laws, then the laws shape us.

  • We shape the incentives, then the incentives shape us.

Examples of bad incentives:

  • One cannot have health in a system that profits from sickness.

  • One cannot have peace in a system that profits from war.

  • One cannot have enlightenment in a system that profits from ignorance.

  • One cannot have educated, well-informed voters in a system that profits from fake news.

Incentives are the main driving force of humankind.

We are wired for survival, our instincts allow individual organisms to survive.

In order for humanity to survive, we need to change the incentives, change the system.

BaseX is one of the best chances for humanity to survive (maybe we should apply for “Global catastrophic risks” category as well) because it can evaluate for value, impact, externalities, cobenefits in a genuine, honest, transparent way.

Do you have anything else to add?

Please check our video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SAiiMqyTT0 (6m37s)

Google Slides

Contact

And of course I will be responsive in the comments in case you have any questions 🌱

joel_bkr avatar

Joel Becker

over 1 year ago

I read your description, watched your video, have a background in economics (including a predoctoral fellowship with Daniel Benjamin, one of the experts on welfare metrics beyond GDP, although I didn't work on this myself), and I still feel I have zero understanding about what your project is or what it does.

My guess is that this is a red flag about the project. The other possibility I would consider is that the project is valuable but not presented in a way that makes it straightforward for me to understand. If this latter possibility is the case, then I encourage you to rewrite the application for clarity about what BaseX is.

mars avatar

Mars Robertson

over 1 year ago

First, instinctive, off-the-cuff response. Copy-paste from an another grant application:

"Some people understand problem intuitively."

"Some people find it too vague / too abstract."

"Please ask questions so we can improve the messaging, we are anti-fragile, every concern is getting us closer to the goal 🙏"

I guess you are in the group 2 :)

Genuine observation - EA / GiveWell / OpenPhilanthopy / LessWrong / rationalist communities focuses heavily on the metrics and the most commonly (quotation needed) used metrics is DALY: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability-adjusted_life_year

There are many other possible metrics but they are not-so-obvious to quantify. We aim at that not-so-obvious metrics niche, that's why provided two illustrative examples (fresh air and 🐘)

I base my observation on personal experiences, I was to COP23 Bonn, COP24 Katowice, COP26 Glasgow, Davos May 2022 and I've realised that very few people have holistic understanding of interdependencies related to the climate system, food system, energy, economy, sustainable growth, education, governance, media and everything in between. BaseX is based on the principle that incentives are driving force of the universe therefore if we want to change the world, we need to change the incentives, that's why a new definition of value, new metric that accounts of externalities, cobenefits, impact.

We are constantly striving to improve the messaging. You comment matters. Your feedback matters. We will improve. If you can, if you care enough, maybe you can be more specific about the "I have zero understanding about what your project is or what it does". I truly appreciate your viewpoint and I will even more appreciate if you could be more specific which parts need clarification.

(the most valuable feedback is when someone disagress and cares enough to engage in a discussion)

Copy-paste from the existing description:

Project summary

New definition of value.

Accounting for externalities, cobenefits, impact.

Full end-2-end accounting for cost of goods, products, services.

Universal evaluation engine.

•••••

I personally like these headlines but obviously I'm biased. I'm wondering if the information provided in this comment make this summary more relatable.