I’m a little surprised an academic study can be funded for $30k. This seems like a twenty dollar bill lying on the sidewalk. Why aren’t more people funding research into their areas of interest?
Any thoughts on open sourcing the data and code involved in these studies? Naively, it seems like that should be best research practice in general given the number of issues with errors and reproducibility we typically see.
Those are surprisingly modest prices, although I guess I didn't have an existing prior for how much Authentic Studies(tm) cost besides "a lot". Makes me wish itemizing was worthwhile for lower-income earners.
Wonder how much it'd cost to tap into Matt Yglesias' DC connections. He's sympathetic to jonesing for Jones Act reform, and other "abundance agenda" pie-growing stuff generally...
Paying a post-doc is relatively cheap. Paying for the kind of equipment needed by a physicist, or paying for studies on humans (eg. medicine, psychology), is much less cheap
I'm considering giving a modest amount to Balsa as part of my year-end charitable giving and appreciate the update. One suggestion: from an organizational perspective, I think it would be better to drop the AI policy work from your mandate and instead focus on regulatory reform in areas long known to be dysfunctional.
Right now, giving to Balsa lumps together activity on 1.) classic regulatory inefficiencies that are widely agreed to be counterproductive by the relevant experts and 2.) wildly controversial frontier policy on existential risk in AI. AFAICT, all actual work to-date is of the first flavor and for potential donors there are good options for addressing the second with pure-play orgs like MIRI.
That said, I understand Balsa to on some level be a way to go long on Zvi's good judgement and I cannot imagine that becoming beholden to funder takes sounds like his idea of a good time.
Full disclosure: Balsa has not done any AI policy work and does not have concrete plans to do so. All my AI-related activity has been on my own time.
However, I don't want to pretend that we might not end up pivoting there if circumstances pull me into it, I want people like you considering a donation to have their eyes open to that!
But yes, my intention is to keep Balsa on abundance agenda items.
(Shockingly short) Podcast episode for this post, majority voiced by a different voice for Jennifer Chen:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/balsa-research-2024-update
Oh nice! I was wondering when we'd get an update on Balsa. Cheers, Zvi.
Keep up the great work!
I’m a little surprised an academic study can be funded for $30k. This seems like a twenty dollar bill lying on the sidewalk. Why aren’t more people funding research into their areas of interest?
Any thoughts on open sourcing the data and code involved in these studies? Naively, it seems like that should be best research practice in general given the number of issues with errors and reproducibility we typically see.
Prices vary greatly - you can pay a ton more especially if you want to secure big names.
We didn't discuss the open sourcing of information as much as we probably should have - I'm certainly all for it.
I would love a FAQ or some sort of adversarial collaboration with people who seem to think:
A. The Jones Act should be tweaked instead of repealed
B. The Jones Act is fine actually
C. Generally disagree with some of your methodology stuff
Just think I tend to get a lot out of those types of posts.
Those are surprisingly modest prices, although I guess I didn't have an existing prior for how much Authentic Studies(tm) cost besides "a lot". Makes me wish itemizing was worthwhile for lower-income earners.
Wonder how much it'd cost to tap into Matt Yglesias' DC connections. He's sympathetic to jonesing for Jones Act reform, and other "abundance agenda" pie-growing stuff generally...
Paying a post-doc is relatively cheap. Paying for the kind of equipment needed by a physicist, or paying for studies on humans (eg. medicine, psychology), is much less cheap
I'm considering giving a modest amount to Balsa as part of my year-end charitable giving and appreciate the update. One suggestion: from an organizational perspective, I think it would be better to drop the AI policy work from your mandate and instead focus on regulatory reform in areas long known to be dysfunctional.
Right now, giving to Balsa lumps together activity on 1.) classic regulatory inefficiencies that are widely agreed to be counterproductive by the relevant experts and 2.) wildly controversial frontier policy on existential risk in AI. AFAICT, all actual work to-date is of the first flavor and for potential donors there are good options for addressing the second with pure-play orgs like MIRI.
That said, I understand Balsa to on some level be a way to go long on Zvi's good judgement and I cannot imagine that becoming beholden to funder takes sounds like his idea of a good time.
Full disclosure: Balsa has not done any AI policy work and does not have concrete plans to do so. All my AI-related activity has been on my own time.
However, I don't want to pretend that we might not end up pivoting there if circumstances pull me into it, I want people like you considering a donation to have their eyes open to that!
But yes, my intention is to keep Balsa on abundance agenda items.