I've found the weekly Sentinel minutes to be very high-quality reporting about world events
You're pledging to donate if the project hits its minimum goal and gets approved. If not, your funds will be returned.
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.
Loppukilpailija
about 7 hours ago
I've found the weekly Sentinel minutes to be very high-quality reporting about world events
Rai Sur
13 days 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.
ampdot
16 days 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
13 days 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.
Luca Righetti
18 days ago
I enjoy the newsletter, especially on pandemics, and am excited to see where Sentinel goes
Pablo Villalobos
18 days 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!
Jaime Sevilla
19 days 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.