See context here, from Tyler Cowen: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/an-effective-altruism-mutual-fund.html.
This market resolves NO at the end of 2023 if there isn't anything plausibly claiming to be an "EA mutual fund" by that date.
I'm open to suggestions about detailed resolution rules, but I guess if prominent EAers signal-boost the fund, it'll count.
I won't be betting in this market, since I'm worried that it could be ambiguous and I'd like to be able to remain impartial.
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@CarsonGale See the context in the TC post. AFAICT, EA funds does not perform investment. (And so cannot be seen as indicating "predictive superiority".) If so, at least for the purposes of this question, it is definitely not a "mutual fund".
@ScottLawrence My bad - I thought I had read this post & knew what it referred to but I thought wrong ;)
Btw, this isn't really related to what Tyler Cowen was suggesting, and in some ways kind of the opposite, but I think the closest thing that exists to an "EA portfolio" today is several articles by EAers about how to invest funds for EA purposes, such as this one which I think is good general EA investing advice: https://80000hours.org/2015/10/common-investing-mistakes-in-the-effective-altruism-community/.
To summarize:
It recommends essentially using the global market portfolio, and near the bottom there is a simple suggested portfolio for it. This is the most important key idea.
Calculating target exposure and using leverage if appropriate
Optionally, some tilts based on well-researched factors.
(This is quite close to what I do personally. At some point I'll write a post about it.)
It's interesting to note that this approach does believe that one can beat the market, but in a completely different way than betting on beliefs about AI progress, AI risk, etc.
There are some other interesting ideas in other EA articles, such as the point that since an extremely large chunk of EA-aligned money is in tech and crypto, it is beneficial for EA as a whole if other EA investors deliberately diversify away from those.
I occasionally see EAs just making posts about how they can beat the market citing evidence that their views were correct over the last 5 years, which is always extremely subject to selection biases (mutual fund managers do this type of thing all the time). I would love it if they actually created a portfolio of stocks/ETFs/funds that reflected their future outlook and they and others could actually bet on it.
Would something as simple as a prominent group within EA posting a portfolio that they believed was driven by EA insights/beliefs count? I think it should, there's no need to go through the highly costly process of creating an actual mutual fund when one can easily copy-paste portfolios either automatically (e.g. M1 finance) or by hand.
@jack I think as long as its explicitly phrased, by the creators and by signal-boosters, as "this is effectively a mutual fund", I'll resolve YES.
@ScottLawrence Hmm, I don't think such a portfolio would likely be phrased like that. And I really don't expect someone to actually make a mutual fund.
After a few minutes of searching, the closest thing I found was this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/F2wLArj9YtZR3dpPr/construct-a-portfolio-to-profit-from-ai-progress (see the first comment for the actual portfolio)
Kudos to @SapphireStar for putting that together. Curious whether you have any updates on how you're thinking, especially with the current tech crash.