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Emergent Ventures prize winners for coronavirus work
I am happy to announce the first cohort of Emergent Ventures prize winners for their work fighting the coronavirus. Here is a repeat of the original prize announcement, and one week or so later I am delighted there are four strong winners, with likely some others on the way. Again, this part of Emergent Ventures comes to you courtesy of the Mercatus Center and George Mason University. Here is the list of winners:
Social leadership prize: Helen Chu and her team at the University of Washington. Here is a NYT article about Helen Chu’s work, excerpt:
Dr. Helen Y. Chu, an infectious disease expert in Seattle, knew that the United States did not have much time…
As luck would have it, Dr. Chu had a way to monitor the region. For months, as part of a research project into the flu, she and a team of researchers had been collecting nasal swabs from residents experiencing symptoms throughout the Puget Sound region.
To repurpose the tests for monitoring the coronavirus, they would need the support of state and federal officials. But nearly everywhere Dr. Chu turned, officials repeatedly rejected the idea, interviews and emails show, even as weeks crawled by and outbreaks emerged in countries outside of China, where the infection began.
By Feb. 25, Dr. Chu and her colleagues could not bear to wait any longer. They began performing coronavirus tests, without government approval.
What came back confirmed their worst fear. They quickly had a positive test from a local teenager with no recent travel history. The coronavirus had already established itself on American soil without anybody realizing it.
And to think Helen is only an assistant professor.
Data gathering and presentation prize: Avi Schiffmann
Here is a good write-up on Avi Schiffmann, excerpt:
A self-taught computer maven from Seattle, Avi Schiffmann uses web scraping technology to accurately report on developing pandemic, while fighting misinformation and panic.
Avi started doing this work in December, remarkable prescience, and he is only 17 years old. Here is a good interview with him:
I’d like to be the next Avi Schiffmann and make the next really big thing that will change everything.
Here is Avi’s website, ncov2019.live/data.
Prize for good policy thinking: The Imperial College researchers, led by Neil Ferguson, epidemiologist.
Neil and his team calculated numerically what the basic options and policy trade-offs were in the coronavirus space. Even those who disagree with parts of their model are using it as a basic framework for discussion. Here is their core paper.
The Financial Times referred to it as “The shocking coronavirus study that rocked the UK and US…Five charts highlight why Imperial College’s research radically changed government policy.”
The New York Times reported “White House Takes New Line After Dire Report on Death Toll.” Again, referring to the Imperial study.
Note that Neil is working on despite having coronavirus symptoms. His earlier actions were heroic too:
Ferguson has taken a lead, advising ministers and explaining his predictions in newspapers and on TV and radio, because he is that valuable thing, a good scientist who is also a good communicator.
Furthermore:
He is a workaholic, according to his colleague Christl Donnelly, a professor of statistical epidemiology based at Oxford University most of the time, as well as at Imperial. “He works harder than anyone I have ever met,” she said. “He is simultaneously attending very large numbers of meetings while running the group from an organisational point of view and doing programming himself. Any one of those things could take somebody their full time.
“One of his friends said he should slow down – this is a marathon not a sprint. He said he is going to do the marathon at sprint speed. It is not just work ethic – it is also energy. He seems to be able to keep going. He must sleep a bit, but I think not much.”
Prize for rapid speedy response: Curative, Inc. (legal name Snap Genomics, based in Silicon Valley)
Originally a sepsis diagnostics company, they very rapidly repositioned their staff and laboratories to scale up COVID-19 testing. They also acted rapidly, early, and pro-actively to round up the necessary materials for such testing, and they are currently churning out a high number of usable test kits each day, with that number rising rapidly. The company is also working on identifying which are the individuals most like to spread the disease and getting them tested first. here is some of their progress from yesterday.
Testing and data are so important in this area.
General remarks and thanks: I wish to thank both the founding donor and all of you who have subsequently made very generous donations to this venture. If you are a person of means and in a position to make a donation to enable this work to go further, with more prizes and better funded prizes, please do email me.
Apply for Emergent Ventures
The application form is here, lists of previous cohorts of winners are here. And please note there are two special tranches:
Progress Studies tranche, and a tranche for:
“advancing humane solutions to those facing adversity – based on tolerance, universality, and cooperative processes”
And might anyone be interested in working on the issue of why production speeds for infrastructure and so many other projects have slowed down so much?
There has been a very impressive group of winners to date.
The philosophy and practicality of Emergent Ventures
Let’s start with some possible institutional failures in mainstream philanthropy. Many foundations have large staffs, and so a proposal must go through several layers of approval before it can receive support or even reach the desk of the final decision-maker. Too many vetoes are possible, which means relatively conservative, consensus-oriented proposals emerge at the end of the process. Furthermore, each layer of approval is enmeshed in an agency game, further cementing the conservatism. It is not usually career-enhancing to advance a risky or controversial proposal to one’s superiors.
There is yet another bias: the high fixed costs of processing any request discriminate against very small proposals, which either are not worthwhile to approve or they are never submitted in the first place.
Finally, foundations often become captured by their staffs. The leaders become fond of their staffs, try to keep them in the jobs, regard the staff members as a big part of their audience, and adopt the perspectives of their staffs, more so as time passes. That encourages conservatism all the more, because the foundation leaders do not want their staffs to go away, and so they act to preserve financial and reputational capital.
To restate those biases:
- Too much conservatism
- Too few very small grants
- Too much influence for staff
So how might those biases be remedied?
Why not experiment with only a single layer of no?
Have a single individual say yes or no on each proposal — final word, voila! Of course that individual can use referees and conferees as he or she sees fit.
The single judge could be an expert in some of the relevant subject areas of the proposals (that is sometimes the case in foundations, but even then the expertise of the foundation evaluators can decay).
This arrangement also can promise donors 100% transmission of their money to recipients, or close to that. If someone gives $1 million to the fund, the award winners receive the full $1 million. This is rare in non-profits. (In the case of Emergent Ventures there are unbudgeted time costs for me and my assistant, who prints out the proposals, and the paper costs of the printing get charged to general operating expenses at Mercatus. Still, a $1 million grant at the margin leads to $1 million in actual awards. I am not paid to do this.)
The solo evaluator — if he or she has the right skills of temperament and judgment — can take risks with the proposals, unencumbered by the need to cover fixed costs and keep “the foundation” up and running. Think of it as a “pop-up foundation,” akin to a pop-up restaurant, and you know who is the chef in the kitchen. It is analogous to a Singaporean food stall, namely with low fixed costs, small staff, and the chef’s ability to impose his or her own vision on the food.
Once a fixed sum of money is given away, and the mission of the project (beneficial social change) has been furthered, “the foundation” goes away. No one is laid off. Rather than crying over a vanquished institutional empire and laid off friends/co-workers, the solo evaluator in fact has a chance to get back to personally profitable work. It was “lean and mean” all along, except it wasn’t mean.
The risk-taking in grant decisions is consistent with the incentives of the evaluator, consistent with the level of staffing (zero), and consistent with the means of the evaluator. A solo evaluator, no matter how talented, does not have the resources to make and tie down multiple demands for complex deliverables. Rather, a solo evaluator is likely to think (or not) — “hmm…there is some potential in this one.” The wise solo evaluator is likely to look for projects that have real upside through realizing the autonomous visions of their self-starting creators, rather than projects that appear bureaucratically perfect.
And how about the incentives of the solo evaluator? Well, a fixed amount of time is being given up, so what is the point in making safe, consensus selections with the awards? The solo evaluator, in addition to pursuing the mission of the fund, will tend to seek out grants that will boost his or her reputation as a finder of talent. You might worry that an evaluator, even if fully honest will self-deceive somewhat, and use some of these grants to promote his or her own interests. I would say donate your money to an evaluator who you are happy to see rise in status.
In other words, the basic vision of Emergent Ventures, the incentives, and its means are all pretty consistent.
The solo evaluator also has the power to make very small grants, simply by issuing a decision in their favor at very low fixed cost. Alchian and Allen theorem! That helps remedy the bias against small grants in the broader foundation world.
The single evaluator of course is going to make some mistakes, but so do foundations. And the costs of these evaluator mistakes have to be weighed against the other upsides of this method.
In my view, at least two percent of philanthropy should be run this way, and right now in the foundation world it is about zero percent. So I am trying to change this at the margin.
How does this idea scale? What if it worked really well? How would we do more of it?
Well, it is not practical for this solo evaluator to handle a larger and larger portfolio of grant requests. Even if he or she were so inclined, that would bring us back to the problems of institutionalized foundations. The ideal scaling is that other, competing “chefs” set up their own pop-up foundations. Imagine a philanthropic world where, next year, you could give a million dollars to the Steven Pinker pop-up, to the Jhumpa Lahiri pop-up, to the Jordan Peterson intellectual venture fund, and so on. Three years later, you would have an entirely different choice, say intellectual venture funds from Ezra Klein, David Brooks, and Skip Gates, among others. The evaluators either could donate some of their time, as I am doing, or charge a fee for performing this service. You also could imagine a major foundation carving off a separate section of their activities, and running this experiment on their own, with an evaluator of their choosing.
In a subsequent post, I will discuss how this model relates to the classical age of patronage running through the Renaissance, into the 18th century, and often into the 20th century as well, often through the medium of individual giving. I also will consider how this relates to classic venture capital and the relevant economics behind “deal flow.”
In the meantime, I am repeating the list of the first cohort of Emergent Ventures winners. That link also directs you to relevant background if Emergent Ventures is new to you.
Conditional Approval for Human Drugs
Recently a new drug to extend lifespan was granted conditional approval by the FDA–the first drug ever formally approved to extend lifespan! (By the way, the entrepreneur behind this breakthrough, Celine Halioua, is an emergent ventures winner for her earlier work rapidly expanding COVID testing. Tyler knows how to spot Talent!)
Great news, right? Yes, but there are two catches. First catch: the drug is for extending the lifespan of dogs. Second catch: Conditional approval is only available for animal drugs. Conditional approval was permitted for animal drugs beginning in 2004 for minor uses and/or minor species (fish, ferrets etc.) and then expanded in 2018 to include major uses in major species. What does conditional approval allow?
Conditional Approval (CA) allows potential applicants (referred to from this point as “sponsors”) to make a new animal drug product commercially available after demonstrating the drug is safe and properly manufactured in accordance with the FDA approval standards for safety and manufacturing, but before they have demonstrated substantial evidence of effectiveness (SEE) of the conditionally approved product. Under conditional approval, the sponsor needs to demonstrate reasonable expectation of effectiveness (RXE). A drug sponsor can then market a conditionally approved product for up to five years, through annual renewals, while collecting substantial evidence of effectiveness data required to support an approval.
Here is where it gets even more interesting. Why does the FDA say that conditional approval is a good idea?
First, it’s very expensive for a drug company to develop a drug and get it approved by FDA. Second, the market for a MUMS [Minor Use, Minor Species, AT] drug is too small to generate an adequate financial return for the company. The combination of the expensive drug approval process and the small market often makes drug companies hesitant to spend a lot of resources to develop MUMS drugs when there is so little return on their investment.
By allowing a drug company to legally market a MUMS drug early (before it is fully approved), conditional approval makes the drug available sooner to be used in animals that may benefit from it. This early marketing also helps the company recoup some of the investment costs while completing the full approval.
…Similar to conditional approval for MUMS drugs, the goal of expanded conditional approval is to encourage drug companies to develop drugs for major species for serious or life-threatening conditions and to fill treatment gaps where no therapies currently exist or the available therapies are inadequate.
Sound familiar? These are exactly some of the points that I have been raising about the FDA approval process for years. In particular, by bringing forward marketing approval by up to 5 years, conditional approval makes it profitable to research and develop many more new drugs.
Conditional approval is very similar to Bart Madden’s excellent idea of a Free to Choose Medicine track, with the exception that Madden makes the creation of a public tradeoff evaluation drug database (TEDD) a condition of moving to the FTCM track. Thus, FTCM combines conditional approval with the requirement to collect and make public real-world prescribing information over time.
But why is conditional approval available only for animal drugs? Conditional approval is good for animals. People are animals. Therefore, conditional approval is good for people. QED.
Ok, perhaps it’s not that simple. One might argue that allowing animals to use drugs for which there is a reasonable expectation of effectiveness but not yet substantial evidence of effectiveness is a good idea but this is just too risky to allow for humans. But that cuts both ways. We care more about humans and so don’t want to impose risks on them that we are willing to impose on animals but for the same reasons we care more about improving the health of humans and should be willing to risk more to save them (Entering a burning building to save a child is heroic; for a ferret, it’s foolish.)
I think that the FDA’s excellent arguments for conditional approval apply to human drugs as well as to (other) animal drugs and even more so when we recognize that human beings have rights and interests in making their own choices. The Promising Pathways Act would create something like conditional approval (the act calls it provisional approval) for drugs treating human diseases that are life-threatening so there is some hope that conditional approval for human drugs becomes a reality.
Dare I say it, but could the FDA be lumbering in the right direction?
Announcing the Future Fund
We’re thrilled to announce the FTX Future Fund: a philanthropic fund making grants and investments to ambitious projects in order to improve humanity’s long-term prospects. We plan to distribute at least $100M this year, and potentially a lot more, depending on how many outstanding opportunities we find. In principle, we’d be able to deploy up to $1B this year.
We have a longlist of project ideas that we’d love to fund, but it’s not exhaustive—we’re open to a broad range of ideas. We’re particularly keen to launch massively scalable projects: projects that could grow to productively spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Our areas of interest include the safe development of artificial intelligence, reducing catastrophic biorisk, improving institutions, economic growth, great power relations, effective altruism, and more.
If you’d like to launch one of our proposed projects, or have another idea for a project in our areas of interest—please apply!Please submit your applications by March 21 to be considered in our first open funding round.
And the team is:
Nick Beckstead (CEO), Leopold Aschenbrenner, Will MacAskill, and Ketan Ramakrishnan.
Here is much more information, including for applying, and the links on top of the page have further detail yet. Emergent Ventures winner Leopold Aschenbrenner has been a driving force behind this, congratulations to Leopold! Also notable is this:
- Our Regranting Program. We’re offering discretionary budgets to independent grantmakers. Our hope is that regrantors will fund great people and projects that weren’t on our radar! We’ve already invited the first cohort, and we’re also opening up a public process to be considered as a regrantor.
Recommended.
Threadhelper, a new method for improving Twitter
Vasco Queirós, from the 7th cohort of Emergent Venture grant winners, has, with Francisco Carvalho, launched ThreadHelper – “A serendipity engine on the Twitter sidebar”. You can get it here.
ThreadHelper is a browser extension that finds you the tweets you need. It shows as a sidebar on the right hand side of your Twitter timeline and instantly and automatically searches bookmarks, retweets, and your past tweets for tweets that are semantically relevant to the tweet being composed. It can be used as a specific search that’s faster than Twitter’s or as a fuzzy search tool.
What should you read during the crisis?
Agnes Callard writes (NYT):
Like many others, I have been finding my taste in books and movies turning in an apocalyptic direction. I also find myself much less able than usual to hold these made-up stories at a safe distance from myself…
If I have something to feel guilty about, I want to feel guilty. If something frightening is happening, I want to be afraid of it. Which is to say: When things are bad, I want to suffer and would choose to suffer and even seek out suffering.
Having just rewatched Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, and then The Virgin Spring, I agree at the margin, but not altogether. I would raise the following points:
1. In times of turmoil, we may have a stronger craving for art that “feels real.” But such art is in fact often especially phony. The “special effects” have to be all the better, so to speak. None of what we are consuming is a realistic experience in the first place, so perhaps we are seeking out greater artifice and fooling ourselves about its realism even more than usual.
2. Should we be watching videos of bad events in hospitals? (originally Chinese hospitals, now NYC). Some people are indeed doing this, but as a substitute for Jane Austen? How about videos of people dying from Covid-19? Videos of other respiratory diseases as the next best fill-in?
3. What about the art vs. non-art margin as a larger choice? Don’t many people with terminal diseases (more terminal than usual that is) want to go for long walks in nature? Doesn’t fiction exercise much less of a hold on elderly minds and matter most for teenagers and people in their early 20s and perhaps also women in their 40s-50s? Perhaps the implication is, during a pandemic, to move away from art and literary fiction altogether.
4. The Guardian reports that sales of long, classic novels have gone up. What do those novels have in common? Are they a kind of comfort food? Do we value their length? That they are high status? That we read them already in earlier and perhaps happier periods of life? Are they long projects we can absorb ourselves in? Those seem like illusion-laden motives for reading them, “not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
5. Perhaps we like to read especially pessimistic dystopian novels as a kind of talisman. “Tell me the worst, let’s get dealing with the fear over with, then I will feel protected that reality will not disappoint my expectations because things won’t in fact be that bad.” That is again another kind of illusion. The aforementioned Guardian link suggests that sales of dystopian novels are up in general, even if they are not about plagues and pandemics.
6. Yiyun Li said: ““I have found that the more uncertain life is, the more solidity and structure Tolstoy’s novels provide. In these times, one does want to read an author who is so deeply moved by the world that he could appear unmoved in his writing,” she wrote.”
7. If people are bored, should they then wish to experience further boredom through their choice of fiction? Or would a diversion from boredom be acceptable and indeed preferred?
Somehow I think in terms of a portfolio approach to aesthetics. In harder times you need more tugs, pulls, distractions, and offsets than usual, but they should not all run in the same direction, or they will become predictable and cease to move you.
So when it comes to fiction, take some chances in your reading and toss in some of the older classics and horror and dystopia as well, and lots of fun and warmth and those walks in nature too.
So yes make a (marginal) turn in the apocalyptic direction, but in part it is to shore up your own sappiness.
From the comments, on Amish health and health care
I was just at two Amish weddings and would add a few observations:
– I wonder what they’d find for a later cohort. Amish folks born between 1890 and 1921 were almost all farmers. Today, fewer than 10% are. Most have far more sedentary jobs–though not as sedentary as mine. But they still eat as if they were out in the fields all day. Obesity is rampant and growing. Also, the diet has changed. The Amish eat a lot of processed, brand name food. They do have their own kitchen gardens, but salads are covered in dressing and cheese. In many homes, every meal (even breakfast!) comes with pie as desert.
– Nobody is left alone in old age. I had a long talk with an older Amish woman who couldn’t believe that, in NYC, some people live alone, interact with no close relatives or friends, have no one to watch over them. Her husband told a story of a very ornery old man with no children or wife who nobody likes but, still, people visit regularly to make sure he’s OK and to give him comfort.
– They absolutely use hospitals for urgent and emergent care. There are big fundraising auctions all the time to help those with big bills. And the church district will also help.
Yes, that is the Adam Davidson.