World class team with an important mission that I wouldn't trust anyone else with more.
10
Fund Sentinel for Q1-2025
Sentinel is a foresight and emergency response team seeking to react fast to calamities. After some initial success, we are looking for funding to expand.
We have an excellent foresight team, with members from Samotsvety. It has been producing a steady weekly cadence minutes looking at possible precursors for calamities at blog.sentinel-team.org. Some readers report that these minutes completely substitute all other news consumption. As an example of our current foresight capabilities, we correctly anticipated the WHO's decision to rate monkeypox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), and gave thorough details on monkeypox early on. Other specific threats we are currently keeping track of are: H5N1, solar flares; rising militant terrorism in the Middle East, India and Pakistan; AI incidents and governance developments, Putin’s nuclear bluffing, and indications of Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
We think that AI will be “a big deal”, but we are particularly worried about risks and interactions that are hard to conceptualize long beforehand ("black swans", "unknown unknowns"). This is the biggest philosophical difference with projects in the EA cluster, which generally tend to have more top-down, hedgehog-style threat models in mind. We instead deploy forecasting where it works best: on shorter time horizons.
And we are pairing our foresight team with an emergency response team, with the intention of being able to react fast, much faster than governments or sclerotic institutions. We’ve recruited competent operators for the team and plan to flesh this out further with more diverse skill sets. The attached emergency response team isn’t set in stone, but we think there’s a lot of value in a closer relationship between foresight and action. Some inspirations of individuals competently reacting to—admittedly smaller-scale catastrophes—are VaccinateCA, the Lübeck vaccine, or the World Central Kitchen.
If you've been following this project since the original Manifund proposal, one important development has been getting a cofounder, Rai Sur, to complement my (Nuño's) skills; he's been working out great.
We will use the funding we raise to go full time, incorporate Sentinel as a US nonprofit, increase the size and scope of the foresight and reserve teams, buy more ops capacity, and have an emergency fund to deploy in case of an emergency.
Per our own BOTEC, we compare favorably against various impact benchmarks for existential risk. We also compare favorably against the benchmark of (total funding / total risk)—if every project beat that benchmark and all existential risk funding is spent, existential risk would reach zero. However, note that estimates about one’s own projects tend to be too optimistic.
You can read our much longer & detailed funding memo here.
donated $100
Saul Munn
18 days ago
[epistemic status: i've spent about 5-20 hours thinking by myself and talking with rai about my thoughts below. however, i spent fairly little time actually writing this, so the literal text below might not map to my views as well as other comments of mine.]
IMO, Sentinel is one of the most impactful uses of marginal forecasting money.
some specific things i like about the team & the org thus far:
nuno's blog is absolutely fantastic — deeply excellent, there are few that i'd recommend higher
rai is responsive (both in terms of time and in terms of feedback) and extremely well-calibrated across a variety of interpersonal domains
samotsvety is, far and away, the best forecasting team in the world
sentinel's weekly newsletter is my ~only news source
why would i seek anything but takes from the best forecasters in the world?
i think i'd be willing to pay at least $5/week for this, though i expect many folks in the EA community would be happy to pay 5x-10x that. their blog is currently free (!!)
i'd recommend skimming whatever their latest newsletter was to get a sense of the content/scope/etc
linch's piece sums up my thoughts around strategy pretty well
i have the highest crux-uncertainty and -elasticity around the following, in (extremely rough) order of impact on my thought process:
do i have higher-order philosophical commitments that swamp whatever Sentinel does? (for ex: short timelines, animal suffering, etc)
will Sentinel be able to successfully scale up?
conditional on Sentinel successfully forecasting a relevant GCR, will Sentinel successfully prevent or mitigate the GCR?
will Sentinel be able to successfully forecast a relevant GCR?
how likely are the category of GCRs that sentinel might mitigate to actually come about? (vs no GCRS or GCRS that are totally unpredictable/unmitigateable)
🍒
Usually funding is not the highest leverage input to an org succeeding or not -- it is some combination of having a committed and high-skill team in place, product vision / theory of change, targeting the right problem, speed of execution, etc.
In this case, I believe that Sentinel has many of these ingredients in place for generating significant social value in expectation (their memo goes into more detail on the argument for this, and this analysis should hold some weight given the team's forecasting track record), but they are currently a non-consensus bet among philanthropic donors. In startup terms, I believe that makes this org 'undervalued', i.e. impact alpha is available for early investors, even for relatively small dollar amounts.
donated $350
🦁
Luis Costigan
24 days ago
AFAICT VaccinateCA was tremendously impactful, and I suspect that's one of many instances an agile, independent team would be able to do the work a calcified institution would struggle with.
donated $1,500
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Loppukilpailija
about 1 month ago
I've found the weekly Sentinel minutes to be very high-quality reporting about world events
donated $50
Rai Sur
about 2 months ago
Hey all! I'm the cofounder Nuño mentioned. If anyone's perusing this and is curious about
funding us
helping in any other way, like joining the reserve team
You can email hello@sentinel-team.org or book a call directly with me here.
donated $200
ampdot
about 2 months ago
I've had acquaintances suggest that I be on standby for an emergency response team before, but I tend to be skeptical because my own rapid response capability requires lots of infrastructure and protocol to set up and importantly, maintain. What infrastructure and (communication, operating) protocols have you set up to allow for rapid response? I'm interested in reading any operational documents you have.
Rai Sur
about 2 months ago
hey @ampdot ! We don't have any operational documents right now as the emergency response operations are being fleshed out. We have the barebones right now of the foresight minutes and the slack which allows us to alert, inform, and coordinate.
Can you tell me more about your response capabilities/infra needs so I can see how they could fit in? You can email hello@sentinel-team.org or book a call here.
donated $500
🐯
Luca Righetti
about 2 months ago
I enjoy the newsletter, especially on pandemics, and am excited to see where Sentinel goes
donated $100
🍋
Pablo Villalobos
about 2 months ago
I think just the Twitter minutes are already quite valuable: once-per-week news that focus on topics that are most likely to be relevant. If you are willing to pay for a subscription to something like The Economist, consider supporting this!
donated $1,000
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Jaime Sevilla
about 2 months ago
TL;DR: I am excited about Nuño and about this project.
This project already had a head start and is going strong. Their minutes on Twitter have become my primary source of news for topics outside of AI.
I am more cautious about the rapid response angle, but I am willing to bet on Nuño's vision and see what they can achieve in the next few months.