EA Funds: Long-Term Future fund is open to applications until November 24th (this Saturday)

By Habryka @ 2018-11-21T03:41 (+21)

(Also posted to LessWrong. Feel free to ask questions on either post.)

I am one of the Fund Managers for the Long-Term Future fund and we are doing a very short round of applications to help donors get a sense of what projects we are likely to fund before giving season:

Have an x-risk or far-future focused project you’ve been thinking about, but don’t have funding for? The CEA Long-Term Future Fund is accepting applications until this Saturday (11/24) at this form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf46ZTOIlv6puMxkEGm6G1FADe5w5fCO3ro-RK6xFJWt7SfaQ/viewform

This round of applications has a much shorter deadline than usual, to give the Fund’s new management team a chance to make some grants to help donors get a sense of what kinds of projects we are likely to fund before the end of the giving season in December. Future rounds will have longer timelines, and the Fund may invite applicants from this round to re-submit in future rounds.

In other words: if you can’t hit this deadline, no need to worry - we know it’s very tight! Just keep an eye out for future rounds.

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments. I will be happy to answer any that I know the answer to (and will ping other fund managers if they seem better suited to answer a question).

Some more context from the form:

For this round and this form, we are particularly interested in small teams and individuals that are trying to get projects off the ground, or that need less money than existing grant-making institutions are likely to give out (i.e. less than ~$40k). Here are a few examples of project types that we're open to funding an individual or group for (note that this list is not exhaustive):

+ To spend a few months (perhaps during the summer) to research an open problem in AI alignment or AI strategy and produce a few blog posts or videos on their ideas
+ To spend a few months building a web app with the potential to solve an operations bottleneck at x-risk organisations
+ To spend a few months up-skilling in a field to prepare for future work (e.g. microeconomics, functional programming, etc).
+ To spend a year testing an idea that has the potential to be built into an org.

You can find more details on the kind of project we are likely to fund on the fund page: https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future