Announcing the $200k EA Community Choice

Thank you for the Lightcone project shoutouts (Lighthaven, LessOnline)!

Also, for the avoidance of confusion, I don't think the characterisation of Lighthaven as a coworking space is right. Sometimes clients of Lighthaven run it as a coworking space (like MATS is currently running their program there, which uses space similarly to how a coworking space would). But it's not a (major) part of how Lightcone runs the space. (We do have about 5 people who work from Lighthaven regularly and maybe 5 more who work from there very intermittently).

How do I enter Lightcone as a project when we've already applied to Manifund here? Is the recommended action to apply again, or with a narrower project, or is there some way to add the existing Lightcone application to the EA-community-choice grants?

I'm sending my funds/votes to lighthaven. It's a very well run venue and afaik needs funding. It should eventually be profitable or break even but needs some help getting started. Really useful and important to support well executed projects.

Like Habryka I have questions about creating an additional project for EA-community choice, and how the two might intersect.

Note: In my case, I have technically finished the work I said I would do given my amount of funding, so marking the previous one as finished and creating a new one is possible.

I am thinking that maybe the EA-community choice description would be more about something with limited scope / requiring less funding, since the funds are capped at $200k total if I understand correctly.

It seems that the logical course of action is:

1. mark the old one as finished with an update
2. create an EA community choice project with a limited scope
3. whenever I'm done with the requirements from the EA community choice, create another general Manifund project

Though this would require creating two more projects down the road.

I have doubts that the claim about "theoretically optimal" apply to this case.

Now, you have not provided a precise notion of optimality, so the below example might not apply if you come up with another notion of optimality or assume that voters collude with each other, or use a certain decision theory, or make other assumptions... Also there are some complications because the optimal strategy for each player depends on the strategy of the other players. A typical choice in these cases is to look at Nash-equilibria.

Consider three charities A,B,C and two players X,Y who can donate $100 each. Player X has utilities $1$, $0.9$, $0$ for the charities A,B,C. Player Y has utilities $0$, $0.9$, $1$ for the charities A,B,C.

The optimal (as in most overall utility) outcome would be to give everything to charity B. This would require that both players donate everything to charity B. However, this is not a Nash-equilibrium, as player X has an incentive to defect by giving to A instead of B and getting more utility.

This specific issue is like the prisoners dilemma and could be solved with other assumptions/decision theories.

The difference between this scenario and the claims in the literature might be that public goods is not the same as charity, or that the players cannot decide to keep the funds for themselves. But I am not sure about the precise reasons.

Now, I do not have an alternative distribution mechanism ready, so please do not interpret this argument as serious criticism of the overall initiative.