This isn't to beg, but imagine all the others who have similar stories to the above, like in medicine or education, and don't have the freedom to actually do those things because they are instead pouring effort into adtech or something else that's not as important to the world (no ad trolls please, it's just an example). Instead, we have risk averse profit motivation as our major path to innovation, and that's quite bad, in my opinion.
Me and my coworkers have a running gag where we predict things years in advance, but we just don't have access to the capital to do it... so someone else who does have money eventually does it, and a lot worse than we would have. These things happen every day.
Think: Do you want some nontechnical banker making decisions about what startup gets funding or someone who actually understands the scientific and social impact of a technology?
On one hand, the latter would be cool.
On the other, I want decisions made by people committed to the cause. Understanding does not get you very far. “Some nontechnical bankers” often spend years of their life dedicated for a cause, dealing with all the non-scientific bureaucracy which is necessary to get this job done, and which constitute 90% of it (not to mention all the responsibility and risk).
How much time, risk and responsibility does your ‘running gag’ require now? Are you sure you would choose to be that banker, and actually spend your life on this?
As always, YMMV. Also been reading HN for a long time, and just made an account to respond to this. Times they are a-changin'
What is an ad troll.
Is it like someone who believes advertising revenue "makes our modern world spin".^1
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29186326
That is interesting because advertising spend is probably one of the least certain investments. It's causal effectiveness online is difficult if not impossible to measure. It is like suggesting casino receipts are what make the modern world spin.
Adtech is, IMO, not a "major path to innovation". Unless one adopts a very narrow view of what innovation looks like.
It is wonderful to hear someone claim "I want to do X, but I have to do Y to feed my family", where X is "something important to the world" and Y is not.
However, if doing Y is diverting attention away from X, or possibly even causing harm, then maybe "not doing Y" is also "something important to the world".
No doubt people working for companies who were selling massive quantities of opioids were feeding their families, and arguably they were not violating any laws. Unfortunately, these criteria were not by themselves enough to stop them from doing harm.
I think this kind of analysis discounts the importance of family. Maybe, "not doing Y" is less important than "keeping my family fed".
One thing is for sure: Some people inside the casino do make parts of our world actually spin.
I have an idea that will probably fail, but if I had that money I would quit my job work my ass off for six months to flesh it out.
But I have no credentials, no way to write a grant proposal, and even I wouldn't invest in myself.
....and yet if we did this sort of experiment 10000 times over, humanity might make some big breakthroughs because some of this people would be legitimately smart (unlike me).
of course 10000 x one billion dollars, so maybe we should just fund legit grant seeking PhDs.
I'll tell you right now... I feel like there is a way to model the 3n+1 system of equations (or really any such generalized system) using Godel numbering as a representation of each operation, as a prime number based programming language of nature, and then try to glean something from the output primes to see if there is something that predicts the single 4->2->1 outcome we always see. e.g. if it is a certain form of Fermat prime or something.
It would require me to put my computers to work because these numbers get very big, but the real limitation is my time because I have three kids and cannot afford to quit my job.
Also, this is the reason why VCs, after funding a startup, generallly prefer to be breathing down the CEO's neck (instead of a hands-off approach) - they know that the temptation do just burn through someone else's money while doing a half-assed attempt is too strong for many. In other words, people in general are took weak morally for your idea to produce good results.
> I have no credentials
Then why would you need $100k to work on mathematics?
it's to live off, and support dependents while doing something that would not bring in traditional forms of profit.
That's why it's usually called a grant, rather than an investment - because the granter isn't going to see a direct financial return (but would want to see a societal return such as knowledge or something cultural etc).
100k for six months would be a pay cut for me, but maybe you're right... Maybe I'm being greedy at the opportunity to make a real contribution.
At the end of the day I still need to feed/house a family of five so the 100k is still ballpark, but maybe I can set aside a few more than 6 months. 10?
Not that it matters because who would fund someone with no formal credentials in Math? Even I wouldn't fund me.
We already do, through the NSF, DARPA, DOJ, NSA, NASA, etc.
To be honest, it's a tough question. He's clearly a successful senior IT professional (assuming everything he said is true), and so he's probably intelligent. Even if we assume he's mature enough to stay well focused for that period and work hard, it's sort of a toss-up as to whether it's worth us funding it over another candidate.
Then again, there is no other platform like this, so if I had the option between contributing $50 to this person vs doing nothing - I'd rather give $50 to him on the off-chance that he solves (or materially advances) the Collatz Conjecture.
...but also, this speaks to a dysfunction in the Math community, in general. There should be a more constructive online forum for people like him to participate in.
I like the concept here in principle. But I would love to see it expand to also attracting tribes both in terms of time and money to build concepts. These days, I tell startups that want my money that it is off the table, but I offer my time and opinions in exchange for free dinners. It's up to them whether they consider that a good deal or not. Or it's easy to get money if you're willing to search for someone who's already pursuing something similar and you just need to express your concept as if it is their concept. What's hard is finding people who can execute all the way to production. Thank you for attending my TED Talk(tm).
I work on a game engine[1] and am slowly acquiring GitHub sponsors. When I think about these platforms, I think about them relative to the status quo: GitHub sponsors, Patreon, Kickstarter.
From what I can tell Moth Minds isn't an investment platform but rather a "generous donor creates a grant program, people apply and get an effective donation" program. I'm left wondering: am I missing anything? How does this differ from someone donating to individuals on GitHub sponsors, Patreon, Kickstarter, etc.? It seems the primary thing is that the donor doesn't need to find individuals to sponsor (which is great) but not the massive game changer I hope to see in our future.
That said, still very interesting work Molly-thank you for exploring this! I wish more people were thinking about this!
[0] https://devlog.hexops.com/2021/terrifying-parallels-between-...
[1] https://devlog.hexops.com/2021/mach-engine-the-future-of-gra...
It reminds me of Gittip from a decade ago, which morphed into Gratipay. That original idea of "distributed genius grants", which is reminiscent of MacArthur fellowships, was great.
Anyone digging into this space has to be willing to wade deep into fighting fraud. Any platform that allows people to funnel money their way is going to draw abusers and desperate people. I appreciate people who are willing to face this head on.
Postgraduate scholarships are closer to "funding people", since you can propose any project you like (in my experience, anyway). Academic performance is the credential - not a terrible predictor but of course far from perfect.
And in academia, there are a lot of "moths", who use their position to do their own thing, outside the entire academial-publishing complex. A personal skunkworks.
My concern is that this sponsorship model is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: You can't attract sponsorship at early stages, because all you have to show is 'hopes and dreams'. But once it's done, you don't really need sponsorship as much: it's done and I'll move onto the next project. And to get from the early stage to a viable project, a friend and I really need to spend i guess 6mo full-time. I fear part-time will take forever and likely lead to project abandonment due to lack of momentum.
So i'm not really sure what to do, I'd really like to see it succeed.
(the project is github.com/soniclang/sonic)
But it's instructive to look at communistic/socialistic states, which pretty much had this. Anecdotally, Joscha Bach talks about his father, being able to do his own thing in that environment, without needing it to be practical.
And perhaps that's the crucial thing: without incentives, ideas are not made practical, where they can make a difference. Did you ever notice that when some cool new mathematics is developed and applied to do something amazing, it turns out that the math had already been worked out by somebody else about two centuries ago - but that work had no effect on the breakthrough. It would have made no difference if it had never been done...
For me, who loves the idea of people being able to work on whatever inspires them, this is terrible news. I wonder if there's a way around it? Perhaps just better connecting previous work - "idea search", if you like (present academic "literature review" is evidently inadequate).
Perhaps a categorization system like Roget's or Dewey's, but for arbitrarily dimensional application of ideas, maybe somethig relational or like Hoogle for searching Haskell type signatures, which works surprisingly well, probably because types are general in terms of application. The semantic web doesn't seem to work well; too specific/concrete.
I get where you're coming from but UBI is not the same as funding individuals for the simple reason that funded individuals arrive at an amount greater than UBI funding -- economic firepower that's duly needed when competing for resources whose supply is far outstripped by demand (e.g. GPUs for academic compute competes with crypto miners).
The reason is that if you must use expensive equipmemt within the ongoing process of your trial-and-error, it is not just expensive, but exorbitantly expensive.
Though... I guess youe example of- GPUs aren't that expensive, and can facilitate the reaearch process. OTOH I'm not sure there are breakthroughs being made that way, more iterative progress - the enabling breakthrough, of Deep Learning by Hinton, didn't need GPUs.
I'm actually interested in your question, too, seeing how this is an original painting the artist is selling for $2600.
https://www.antlerpdx.com/collections/rebecca-luncan/product...
As far as I can find on the web, there are no digital copies available for sale. There is the small chance the person whom created the marketplace bought the original, but not likely.
Funding can move the needle and sustain them to some level. A greater need is yet not met like providing emotional support until they see light in their area. More tools to help them help us are unrealized wishes.
This reeks of the mantra of product managers everywhere... "There is no way a brilliant engineer would be able to create something great without management."
2. Cut expenses by 30% (how hard can it be? Avocado toast is tre expensive!)
3. Save for just one single year.
4. Hey there’s your salary replacement! Looking forward to awesome security tools (seriously, legit looking forward to it).
(Lest you fear obsolescence;
5. Get your new new job, 30% raise again).
Yes. Let's fund more moths.
-People who don't want to work for someone else, but lack vision and exist on social proof. These people will be attracted to the grant funding, but unable to use it to create something interesting.
-People who appear to have vision, and are either brilliant (and often very driven) or delusional (and often lazy). Most of this group is delusional, and will never succeed. The brilliant ones are so driven that they will often succeed without assistance.
Even venture capitalists are bad at finding brilliant, driven visionaries, so I'm not sure how this individual plans to sort the wheat from the chaff.
One problem we do have is that (in the States, especially), our culture is geared around individual careers.
Meaning we don't have a supportive culture for people creating stuff on their own - or really a strong culture of forming small supportive teams.
I do think the tech world (and, even if you really oppose it in general, the crypto world) has a lot of people forming teams to do cool stuff. So that's a culture which is a counterexample to what I just said.
Given such a generally atomized (or actively unhelpful) culture, you're more likely to have a few breakouts ("brilliant") and a lot of more normal folks who can't make it ("delusional").
Nevertheless, I think giving grants to free more people up to start figuring out how to do creative work on their own (or, better, form networks and groups to support them socially) is a very good start.
In other words, it's not about just sorting the wheat from the chaff - it's more about helping more people to start muddling their way to a happy and helpful place.
With that said, I'm glad you've surfaced this concern, as it is certainly a common one.
The answer really is if you expect a measurable outcome from small-scale investing in people then don't do it, you're in the wrong space. If you view your investment as a path to the outcome you have in mind for them then don't do it, you're in the wrong space.
If you believe that a person deserves opportunity that might otherwise be blocked from them by what the privileged of us would consider incredibly low bars (money) and are willing to possibly not ever know if it made a difference or where that took them then it might be for you.
If you approach it with the mindset of "let's free this person up for a while and see if this helps them do something cool" then you're more likely to be happy with the outcome.
This is not a job, after all, which would allow you to get a measurable or specific outcome - it's a grant!
There is so much real estate sitting essentially empty and the boomer generation is starting to downsize to smaller places because their homes feel empty and have become unrewarding to own.
After my parents died when I was young I would have killed for a middle class teen/twenties life.
1) the categories of 'brilliant' and 'delusional' aren't mutually exclusive, especially since both are spectra rather than binary. They aren't entirely orthogonal, however.
2) 'brilliant' and 'delusional' are each qualities that are very hard to evaluate except in hindsight.
3) Finally, it is possible for someone who is brilliant and non-delusional to still fail (or be 'insufficiently driven' and give up rather than dying in poverty), or to succeed with no-one noticing (because they lack resources or skills for self-promotion).
There is no way to reliably sort the wheat from the chaff, except to give them space and time to succeed or fail.
That might be true, but the level of success might change dramatically based on assistance. Founders know this, and may choose that path despite being capable of success regardless.
but brilliance for truly novel things is usually only revealed in retrospect. Might as well say "the ones who succeeded are driven and brilliant because they succeeded"
also, you are implying lazyness is a vice (because work is virtue?) however lazyness is also whence the value of comfort (i.e. of making things eaiser) comes. I'm saying there's a positive side to lazyness. (similar to "drive" or ambition, there's pros and cons to it).
I agree, but I’m trying to point out that this plan has an adverse selection problem coupled with some other issues.
The thesis behind Moth Minds seems to be that there is a lot of interesting/valuable* work that could be done that doesn't fit any of the typical funding models (VC, small business loan, burn through personal savings, Patreon, tips, etc.). Like Xerox PARC type projects or PhD research without the gatekeeping. This kind of work doesn't exactly require a singular brilliant visionary, but it helps to provide a financial incentive to lure someone with a unique vision from a comfortable tech salary.
*for flexible interpretations of value
There was a prominent recognition in major companies that for positions where a visionary ability was needed, they offered a considerable amount of compensation intentionally as "temptation" to keep the moths drawn to the flame rather than spreading out in an unforseen direction to do their own thing.
Whether that was starting a new business or going to a place like Bell Labs where you would be more likely to pursue your own strongest interests, this was all balanced out based on the need by the biggest payers for the most visible and persuadable high-performers.
This was actually a limiting factor.
Now the remaining less visible & persuadable high-performers of the same caliber are way harder to come by precisely because of the visibility issue, even though there are many more of them.
This is a vast resource that could potentially be leveraged to overwhelming benefit by an alternative paying force that has been absent from the landscape for all practical purposes.
Come get involved and we can scale this up! gitcoindao.com
How is this different from individuals donating to people e.g. developing software via GitHub sponsors, or donating to artists they like on Patreon, or funding development of physical products on Kickstarter?
The best answer I can come up with is that gitcoindao tries to ride the "DAO", "Web3", "decentralized" buzz words.
Unless the goal is really to have investments to people on gitcoindao give real-world returns, using a DAO to skirt SEC securities regulations?
How do you plan to resolve the issue of basically just crypto stuff being sponsored with this? seems like another missed opportunity if it only applies to the crypto community, but not surprising
It includes grants for climate change and grants for longevity.
To answer your question, the difference from kickstarter is that grants for public goods don't produce products - they produce public goods.
It is possible to have many cynical takes, but if you scratch the surface, you'll see that funding public goods really is what this is all about.
Where is it? More like will be.
As other commenters said, I'd absolutely love to break my back working on improving the status quo [through free open source] but I am not paid for it. Like damn, I couldn't even convince some colleagues to use `just` as opposed to `make` and the migration path is trivial for most normal development cases (not talking about old Linux libraries or the kernel, of course). Takes literally 15 minutes, once, to rewrite your task file and you're done and you can write much less and have your stuff done predictably. But no, "I don't want to learn a new tool". Coming from a 25-year old. <facepalm>
If I can't even do the above, while clearly demonstrating the benefits to productivity and less mistakes due to the hundreds of footguns of the legacy technology... then what hope do we even have to, say, finally start working on a completely new shell without the limitations of the current ones? What hope do we have to finally fix the entire X.org / Wayland mess on Linux and have a unified ecosystem?
Practically zero. Because apparently there are people who would defend any idiosyncratic technology with their fists, it turns out.
I'd go on a limb and say that 95% of the best of the best programmers out there are trapped in lucrative jobs where they have almost zero creative freedom. I hate it as well but we have to ensure our own survival first, and that's a constant grind in this civilization. Hence you can spend your ENTIRE career dreaming of doing something else and never actually do it. Hold that thought for a moment, it's a very good reality check.
Initiatives like in the OP give me hope that at least some generous people would take a look and say "hey, that makes it easier for me to donate / fund efforts"... but I am not holding my breath. Our current society does not optimize for any of this.
Finally, the biggest problem is discoverability. I and many others (to be clear, I am not putting myself in the group of "the best of the best of the programmers" but I am a guy who gets crap done nonetheless) simply are too tired and jaded to go participate in weekend hackathons or any R&D events (if such even exist?) so they end up being full of young inexperienced people whose net worth to the R&D arena is close to zero. :(
Is there even a solution? IMO not until the incentives change, dramatically so. Or you become a millionaire somehow and then all your burnout magically disappears and you ambitiously became a benevolent dictator of several such efforts until you're satisfied the entire thing is a less shaky house of cards. But that doesn't sound like a probable scenario: most people, when they eventually make it, are way too psychologically tired to then actually start doing everything else they wanted in the profession before. They prefer to lie on beaches and boy, do I understand them perfectly.
<saddened rant ends here>
I've recently discovered first hand that there are people who will give money away for little to nothing in return. Two examples:
1. I have a friend who makes over $300K/year as a ship's captain. She has way more money than she needs. One this she does with all her disposable income is fund kickstarters.
2. Last year, a random stranger spent $200 to buy gifts for my 3 kids just because my wife replied to a facebook thread on the topic of "what does everyone's kids want for Christmas". The woman wasn't even the OP on the tread. I'm not sure why she picked my family, I guess she just was charmed that my kids wanted sleeping bags.
> Finally, the biggest problem is discoverability.
This is true. Especially, when the concept of software development cost is so difficult to explain to a layperson. One can easily grasp the creative value of funding a Kickstarter for a graphic novel. How do you get non-technical person excited about software?
