@Jason I'm curious about "lead to". Each of those 70 views was an impact, and if we put out more of them, more people will see them. Is there an impact you would like them to have other than for their own sake? We don’t specify admirable goals in a mission statement, such as philanthropy, wisdom, healing, or justice. Those are all wonderful, and we want to support each other in pursuing them. We just won’t aim directly at them as a group, because organizations that do, tend to Goodhart lot. They lose track of purpose. Instead, we check whether we still have wonder, curiosity, humor, play, enjoyment, and creativity, and if we do, it's all good.

We have no plans to promote the video to get wider viewership. And I'm not sure how someone can determine who are the right people to watch videos-- right for what purpose and by what standard? I figure the potential viewers themselves can decide if they are the right people. If you would like that promotion to exist, that might cost money, and we could talk about you funding the promotion. But as for me, I'm quite satisfied without maximizing things.

We have a few "north stars" that guide us at Fluidity Forum, and one of them reads as follows: "Treat certainty, understanding, and control as imperfect; as things we can improve, but not achieve some maximized optimal state." So, it is important to us that we do not require of each other to maximize impact, cost-per-view metric, or anything else at Fluidity Forum. However, we do welcome effective altruists to join us, so long as they don't expect the rest of us to maximize impact.

The last session before our closing ceremonies was a presentation by an effective altruist. He surveyed us about how many days of the flu we would be willing to endure in order to attend Fluidity Forum. He used that to calculate, in dollar terms, how much we had benefited from attending. He showed us that the average attendee benefitted from attending Fluidity Forum equivalent to receiving (or was it spending?) between one and two thousand dollars each. Or something of that nature; I don't remember the precise details. I'm not sure how that translates to a person benefiting from videos, if at all. Would you like me to ask him?

@MattArnold Thanks for the response -- apologies for my low specificity, as I was trying to get all my questions out last night because a lot of proposals were closing in a few days (now extended). Should have said "lead to impact that the outfits that have committed to consider buying impact certificates would value" or "lead to impact that I would significantly value, as a micrograntor with $500, enough to put this proposal ahead of others -- including those whose target beneficiaries are extremely disadvantaged and/or vulnerable." I apologize for my wording suggesting that there would be zero impact for those who watched the videos.

I do tend to treat most direct positive impacts on a relatively small number of individuals who seem likely to be relatively privileged as if they were zero (although that does not actually make them zero). The reasons for that largely relate to my discomfort with certain excesses of EA meta spending and the desire to build a hedge around potentially self-serving funding rationales. Based on your comments I don't think those particular concerns would be present here.

@saulmunn Thanks for asking.

1. To clarify, Fluidity Forum 2024 will be in September of this year, and has not occurred yet. We're still assembling the schedule with the presenters. The full schedule for the inaugural Fluidity Forum (September 2023) is here: https://fluidityforum.org/presentations/

2. You asked about 2025, for which we are not currently requesting funds in this Manifund project. 2025 is not in the works yet, as we're working on 2024. One way in which we're likely to differ this year is that there's an academic-style auditorium which we are looking into renting for our Saturday talks this year. That venue would only for the eyes-front audience-style talks, whereas sessions such as workshops, discussion groups, guided meditation, yoga, etc, will be recorded in our largest AirBnB.

   I have no reason to expect the nature of our content to change very much. But it might do so unpredictably, which we welcome. All our attendees are presenters, and we don't tell them what to provide to each other. You are getting far better talks voluntarily than you would if they were given involuntarily. We don't wish to control that, and if we tried to, they would rightly refuse. Instead, we vet all attendees based on their application form to receive an invitation to attend. That process is worthy of trust.

3. Thanks for asking this, as it's important. This is "restricted receiving": there are expenses we decline to accept money for. This is not restricted giving, since that is when the donor restricts what their money may be spent on. That gives donors, who are not present in our community, influence over the decisions inside our community. Restricted receiving has the opposite effect. Donations to this project are intended to mostly benefit non-attendees. Fluidity Forum flourishes regardless.

   As I said in the project description, the in-person event depends on ongoing expenses for survival, and those must be paid for fully by attendees, not grants. We keep those costs low enough to not need grants for it. If we made the in-person event more expensive to run, and paid for that with donations, then we would become dependent on chasing donations from non-attendees for our in-person attendees to be able to experience Fluidity Forum in person.

   By contrast, this Manifund project provides value to those who are not attending Fluidity Forum in person. We can receive grants for that. In any given year that we don't receive that, then we will do our best to provide videos on a volunteer basis as we did in 2023. In such years, there will probably be fewer videos at a lower-quality than the years in which videos are fully-funded and done professionally.