15 ms·

Moth Minds: Fund individuals doing work you believe in

249 points by DanteVertigo 5y ago

jdonaldson 5y ago
cries in bitcoin
mkaic 5y ago
This looks really interesting. Very curious to see how it will end up working.
nickff 5y ago
This is an interesting premise, but I'm not sure that the pool of potential grant recipients will be a very good one. The problem that I foresee is that people working on these sorts of projects seem to fall into two broad categories: -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.
- sombremesa 5y ago
  > The brilliant ones are so driven that they will often succeed without assistance. 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.
  - nickff 5y ago
    I completely agree, the problem is that the adverse selection problem makes finding these people difficult, and often uneconomical (not just unprofitable).
- mistrial9 5y ago
  change your definitions of success & take off the pre-judgement blinders?
- weego 5y ago
  I 'run' my own micro arts fund providing support for people in MH communities that would like supplies or tools to help as part of their ongoing rehab or change of career as a way of getting back into a life that means something. 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.
  - nickff 5y ago
    What you’re describing seems clearer and much more likely to succeed than the plan in the post. It sounds like you’re talking about enabling others to self-actualize, which is definitely a worthy goal (but not what the post seemed to be trying to achieve).
  - coyotespike 5y ago
    Yes, this sounds right! 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!
  - fellowniusmonk 5y ago
    I put this together as a concept. There are so many tiers of "low bar", I think a lot of people just need a very basic safety net. 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. https://www.middleclasspaas.com/ https://www.middleclasspaas.com/
    - Nemrod67 5y ago
- 13415 5y ago
  That is some pretty strong armchair folk psychology. I'd rather put the run-off-the-mill social Darwinist economics talk aside and focus on ways to evaluate a grant recipient's progress, with a positive attitude and helping them along the way. Startups also often fail, individual grants will not be different from that, and not everyone needs to be a brilliant genius to achieve something.
  - nickff 5y ago
    >”Startups also often fail, individual grants will not be different from that, and not everyone needs to be a brilliant genius to achieve something.” I agree, but I’m trying to point out that this plan has an adverse selection problem coupled with some other issues.
    - 13415 5y ago
      Maybe you're right, it's difficult to judge from that web page. It depends a lot on how they intend to carry out the funding process and the web page doesn't say much about it. I assumed it's something like Patreon, which works well for some people, I've heard.
- bsedlm 5y ago
  > The brilliant ones are so driven that they will often succeed without assistance. 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).
- webmaven 5y ago
  Even if I accept your model of reality, there are some pretty big problems that a grant could address: 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.
  - nickff 5y ago
    I agree with you on all three points; I was trying to point out that there's an adverse selection problem that the post doesn't seem to take into account. Even most VCs have a very difficult time making money by finding brilliant visionaries, and they have a number of factors working in their favor.
    - webmaven 5y ago
      Right. Most attempts to select winners end up filtering out the high-risk candidates that also represent the highest potential impact should they succeed (which also makes applicants fudge their proposals to seem lower risk high reward). So, you need to consciously allow the selection of some candidates randomly from a pool that only filters out the obviously deranged or fraudulent (in other words, quality of proposal counts, perceived odds of success does not). There are a number of research funding agencies that are starting to use just this sort of grant funding lottery, the OP seems to be groping toward something similar.
- coyotespike 5y ago
  The world is full of smart, curious, active people who are neither brilliant nor delusional. 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.
  - nickff 5y ago
    I think that you're suggesting something like weego did in another comment, which seems like a worthy goal, but is a bit different from what the proposal seemed to outline (at least in my reading).
- ssalazar 5y ago
  VCs aren't primarily looking for brilliant visionaries, even if its a popular narrative--the (high) risk/reward profile of a business venture is at least as important to them as the character of its founding team. 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
  - fuzzfactor 5y ago
    Way back before the digital age when software was still an insignificant component of an overall technology spectrum, this was so long ago that it was a completely different economic landscape too. 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.
benfarahmand 5y ago
If the goal is developing grantee self-efficacy, the funding should require pairing with a mentor. Finding a mentor that is willing to guide a grantee to bring an idea to fruition is also validation of that individual's ability to accomplish the task.
- Weryj 5y ago
  I think that follows the mentality of VC, the idea here seems to support agency and unique views on the world, for diverging from the path is when a new path is found. I think enforcing a mentor program would harm that goal.
- mike_d 5y ago
  I'd love to take a year and just build free security tools for people to use. I don't need a mentor to do that, I just need a salary replacement for that time period. 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."
  - x0xrx 5y ago
    1. Apply for new job, get 30% raise (apparently everyone is doing it). 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).
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      Probably easier to just work part time. I do 32 hour work weeks. I'm still well paid by non-IT standards, and it allows me to put at least some time toward not-for-profit R&D-type stuff. I do appreciate not everyone is in a situation where that's viable. Would I like to just get money to build cool stuff, sure. But since I'm not an actual Ferengi, I like to build cool stuff more than I like hoarding money. So this is my compromise, I make enough to make due but not so much I don't have time to do good things.
moffkalast 5y ago
> Moth Minds is a platform that makes it extremely easy for anyone to start their own grants program. Where is it? More like will be.
koheripbal 5y ago
I would like $100k to work on the Collatz conjecture for 6 months. 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.
- bsedlm 5y ago
  sounds a lot like what VCs are already doing, except they're interested in business, not big breakthroughs
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - varelse 5y ago
    As someone just barely past past the affluence event horizon, VCs are now actively courting me to lead startups to develop their ideas or to invest in their funds. Previously, they just dismissed me as hella smart but clearly not leadership material (apparently net worth is an equivalent virtue signal to academic pedigree, who knew?). I am instead investing in myself and building skills orthogonal to what got me here so as to push senility off into the far off future. 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).
    - _jal 5y ago
bravogamma 5y ago
Tangential question. The painting at the top of the post is gorgeous. How did go about licensing it for use?
- codingdave 5y ago
  Gotta love image search --> https://rebeccaluncan.com/polyphemus-over-nashi/ https://rebeccaluncan.com/polyphemus-over-nashi/ I'm actually interested in your question, too, seeing how this is an original painting the artist is selling for $2600.
- somenewaccount1 5y ago
  Looks like the copied the image directly from shopify cdn. Go here, click on the image for the popup, then open image in new tab. It's the exact same dimensions as the background image in op's post. https://www.antlerpdx.com/collections/rebecca-luncan/products/rebecca-luncan-polyphemus-over-nashi 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.
threshold 5y ago
Great idea, not the best choice of name. I think some of the criticism is valid. There are delusional lazy people that will sink your investment, and then there are driven brilliant types that will succeed with or without it on sheer perseverance. However - there are people between these states that would be wildly successful if they had a relaxation of resource constraints in addition to accountability, mentoring and social support. If you can deliver the package then there may be something excellent here. I hope it succeeds.
japhyr 5y ago
This is a wonderful idea, and I will be quite curious to see where it goes. I really, really like the idea of funding individuals we believe in, rather than specific projects. 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.
- hyperpallium2 5y ago
  The article (and title) is about funding work, not people. 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.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
I think this is a lovely idea. Just as everyone has a novel inside them, there are two or three "drop everything if I had the cash" ideas inside every head. All of them unique and some even useful to society :-) Yes. Let's fund more moths.
ok_dad 5y ago
I would love to work on open source, well designed, free software to control distributed energy resources and building load. Currently I've worked for several companies doing this, but I think that closed source, non free software will never allow us to truly reach the full electrification and decarbonization we need, and the power grid, both generation and transmission, is only getting more complex to manage with the old school tech approaches I've seen. I want to build the free and open OS for the distributed grid, but I need to support my family first. 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.
- prox 5y ago
  I love the idea of mothminds, and I would also love to support projects like these even if it is just little money each month. We need a Twitch like sub model, or maybe this moth minds could help.
- orzig 5y ago
  To give a sense of scale, how much would it cost to get you to do it? I'd love to help fund it, but definitely don't make fully 2x "Support a family", so it would be intersting to know how many people I'd need to round up.
  - nefitty 5y ago
    I would personally forego 60-70% of my salary to work on impactful things I want to work on. Rent paid, dog fed, wife happy. Not much else to ask for.
    - ok_dad 5y ago
      Exactly, I would do it for just enough to pay rent, food, medical, etc. for my family for at least a few years. I think these days that could be anywhere from 25k to 75k (just a guess) depending on an individual's location.
tarkin2 5y ago
I like the idea. I wonder how much "return" financial contributors would want. I'd suggest allowing financial contributors to split a set sum between recipients. I've often liked the idea "I'll contribute x amount to whatever, this is how I'll split it per month" and being able to do that easily.
- 5rest 5y ago
  Not all contributors look for returns. There are people who are willing to contribute to a cause instead of say buying a TV. We see such contributions on gofundme to help out people in need.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    Of course everyone wants a return! But it might be a return in satisfaction or something else that's hard to quantify, not necessarily money.
hyperpallium2 5y ago
UBI will do this. Lots of freeloaders, but at pretty much the same cost as at present. 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.
- challenger-derp 5y ago
  > UBI will do this. 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).
  - hyperpallium2 5y ago
    True, though I think the most ground-breaking stuff is done by people without expensive equipment. e.g. Crypto algorithms themselces weren't prpven using expensive equipment. Tycho had the expensive telescope, but Kepler used his observations to make the breakthrough. 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.
5rest 5y ago
Nice project!! Artists, traditional medicine practitioners, philosophers, social service volunteers, natural farmers, conservationists, and researchers in many obscure areas are people who come to mind while reading about Mothminds. A huge human social good potential remains untapped in these silent people. I hope Mothminds will be a catalyst in this effort. 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.
maydup-nem 5y ago
I don't believe in work.
ryanmentor 5y ago
This is spiritually and practically compatible with the grants work we're doing at Gitcoin :) Come get involved and we can scale this up! gitcoindao.com
- slimsag 5y ago
  I don't fully understand your approach here, but I would like to. 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
  - imagineerschool 5y ago
    It's not just crypto, and it's not just software. The grants round that opened today can be seen here: https://gitcoin.co/grants/#match-pools https://gitcoin.co/grants/#match-pools 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.
    - webmaven 5y ago
      > To answer your question, the difference from kickstarter is that grants for public goods don't produce products - they produce public goods. There are Patreons that work like that, where the work being funded gets released publicly (for example, Evil Hat Games was releasing Fate RPG books as "pay what you want" downloads on RPGDriveThrough. Patrons just got early access and similar privileges). Reminiscent of the Street Performer Protocol: https://www.schneier.com/academic/archives/1998/11/the_street_performer.html https://www.schneier.com/academic/archives/1998/11/the_stree...
porkbrain 5y ago
A searchable index of multidisciplinary projects and motivated people working on them is something I'd support financially. I was recently searching for such a community outside of academia to network withim my area of interest but failed to connect. This would be a good place to start.
david-cako 5y ago
nice, can't wait to be owned by strangers
HKH2 5y ago
Is that ethnocentrism?
dnautics 5y ago
Curious what the structure of this is. Is this supposed to be many->one? Where many people with small amounts of $ get together and give one person a grant? One->many, where many people get small amounts of $ from one relatively wealthy person? Or many->many?
slimsag 5y ago
I've written and thought a lot about the need for a platform that enables investment in individuals and projects[0], so I'm REALLY happy for any initiatives that look into this. 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-tech-and-aerospace https://devlog.hexops.com/2021/terrifying-parallels-between-... [1] https://devlog.hexops.com/2021/mach-engine-the-future-of-graphics-with-zig https://devlog.hexops.com/2021/mach-engine-the-future-of-gra...
chubs 5y ago
I'm working on an open-source project that I think should show some value if we can get it off the ground. 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)
- jowdones 5y ago
  Get a job.
Sophistifunk 5y ago
Not sure how this could really work compared to what we have already? Most people with jobs and currently at max capacity can't take a sliver of time off every day for a 5% decrease in wage (and how would you use it well?), or an extra 2 weeks of unpaid leave a year even if they had money to replace it. There's a reason it's only news when some OSS dev finally has enough money coming in that they can afford to quit their job altogether or take a 6 month sabbatical to work on their true calling.
abyssin 5y ago
This is a visually beautiful page. The first image, the font, the color scheme. Nothing is too original, but it has character and it serves the meaning carried by the text.
pdimitar 5y ago
That's commendable, I love it. 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>

249 points by DanteVertigo 5y ago

jdonaldson 5y ago

cries in bitcoin

mkaic 5y ago

This looks really interesting. Very curious to see how it will end up working.

nickff 5y ago

This is an interesting premise, but I'm not sure that the pool of potential grant recipients will be a very good one. The problem that I foresee is that people working on these sorts of projects seem to fall into two broad categories: -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.

sombremesa 5y ago
> The brilliant ones are so driven that they will often succeed without assistance. 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.
- nickff 5y ago
  I completely agree, the problem is that the adverse selection problem makes finding these people difficult, and often uneconomical (not just unprofitable).
mistrial9 5y ago
change your definitions of success & take off the pre-judgement blinders?
weego 5y ago
I 'run' my own micro arts fund providing support for people in MH communities that would like supplies or tools to help as part of their ongoing rehab or change of career as a way of getting back into a life that means something. 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.
- nickff 5y ago
  What you’re describing seems clearer and much more likely to succeed than the plan in the post. It sounds like you’re talking about enabling others to self-actualize, which is definitely a worthy goal (but not what the post seemed to be trying to achieve).
- coyotespike 5y ago
  Yes, this sounds right! 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!
- fellowniusmonk 5y ago
  I put this together as a concept. There are so many tiers of "low bar", I think a lot of people just need a very basic safety net. 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. https://www.middleclasspaas.com/ https://www.middleclasspaas.com/
  - Nemrod67 5y ago
13415 5y ago
That is some pretty strong armchair folk psychology. I'd rather put the run-off-the-mill social Darwinist economics talk aside and focus on ways to evaluate a grant recipient's progress, with a positive attitude and helping them along the way. Startups also often fail, individual grants will not be different from that, and not everyone needs to be a brilliant genius to achieve something.
- nickff 5y ago
  >”Startups also often fail, individual grants will not be different from that, and not everyone needs to be a brilliant genius to achieve something.” I agree, but I’m trying to point out that this plan has an adverse selection problem coupled with some other issues.
  - 13415 5y ago
    Maybe you're right, it's difficult to judge from that web page. It depends a lot on how they intend to carry out the funding process and the web page doesn't say much about it. I assumed it's something like Patreon, which works well for some people, I've heard.
bsedlm 5y ago
> The brilliant ones are so driven that they will often succeed without assistance. 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).
webmaven 5y ago
Even if I accept your model of reality, there are some pretty big problems that a grant could address: 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.
- nickff 5y ago
  I agree with you on all three points; I was trying to point out that there's an adverse selection problem that the post doesn't seem to take into account. Even most VCs have a very difficult time making money by finding brilliant visionaries, and they have a number of factors working in their favor.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    Right. Most attempts to select winners end up filtering out the high-risk candidates that also represent the highest potential impact should they succeed (which also makes applicants fudge their proposals to seem lower risk high reward). So, you need to consciously allow the selection of some candidates randomly from a pool that only filters out the obviously deranged or fraudulent (in other words, quality of proposal counts, perceived odds of success does not). There are a number of research funding agencies that are starting to use just this sort of grant funding lottery, the OP seems to be groping toward something similar.
coyotespike 5y ago
The world is full of smart, curious, active people who are neither brilliant nor delusional. 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.
- nickff 5y ago
  I think that you're suggesting something like weego did in another comment, which seems like a worthy goal, but is a bit different from what the proposal seemed to outline (at least in my reading).
ssalazar 5y ago
VCs aren't primarily looking for brilliant visionaries, even if its a popular narrative--the (high) risk/reward profile of a business venture is at least as important to them as the character of its founding team. 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
- fuzzfactor 5y ago
  Way back before the digital age when software was still an insignificant component of an overall technology spectrum, this was so long ago that it was a completely different economic landscape too. 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.

benfarahmand 5y ago

If the goal is developing grantee self-efficacy, the funding should require pairing with a mentor. Finding a mentor that is willing to guide a grantee to bring an idea to fruition is also validation of that individual's ability to accomplish the task.

Weryj 5y ago
I think that follows the mentality of VC, the idea here seems to support agency and unique views on the world, for diverging from the path is when a new path is found. I think enforcing a mentor program would harm that goal.
mike_d 5y ago
I'd love to take a year and just build free security tools for people to use. I don't need a mentor to do that, I just need a salary replacement for that time period. 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."
- x0xrx 5y ago
  1. Apply for new job, get 30% raise (apparently everyone is doing it). 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).
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Probably easier to just work part time. I do 32 hour work weeks. I'm still well paid by non-IT standards, and it allows me to put at least some time toward not-for-profit R&D-type stuff. I do appreciate not everyone is in a situation where that's viable. Would I like to just get money to build cool stuff, sure. But since I'm not an actual Ferengi, I like to build cool stuff more than I like hoarding money. So this is my compromise, I make enough to make due but not so much I don't have time to do good things.

moffkalast 5y ago

> Moth Minds is a platform that makes it extremely easy for anyone to start their own grants program. Where is it? More like will be.

koheripbal 5y ago

I would like $100k to work on the Collatz conjecture for 6 months. 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.

bsedlm 5y ago
sounds a lot like what VCs are already doing, except they're interested in business, not big breakthroughs
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- varelse 5y ago
  As someone just barely past past the affluence event horizon, VCs are now actively courting me to lead startups to develop their ideas or to invest in their funds. Previously, they just dismissed me as hella smart but clearly not leadership material (apparently net worth is an equivalent virtue signal to academic pedigree, who knew?). I am instead investing in myself and building skills orthogonal to what got me here so as to push senility off into the far off future. 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).
  - _jal 5y ago

bravogamma 5y ago

Tangential question. The painting at the top of the post is gorgeous. How did go about licensing it for use?

codingdave 5y ago
Gotta love image search --> https://rebeccaluncan.com/polyphemus-over-nashi/ https://rebeccaluncan.com/polyphemus-over-nashi/ I'm actually interested in your question, too, seeing how this is an original painting the artist is selling for $2600.
somenewaccount1 5y ago
Looks like the copied the image directly from shopify cdn. Go here, click on the image for the popup, then open image in new tab. It's the exact same dimensions as the background image in op's post. https://www.antlerpdx.com/collections/rebecca-luncan/products/rebecca-luncan-polyphemus-over-nashi 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.

threshold 5y ago

Great idea, not the best choice of name. I think some of the criticism is valid. There are delusional lazy people that will sink your investment, and then there are driven brilliant types that will succeed with or without it on sheer perseverance. However - there are people between these states that would be wildly successful if they had a relaxation of resource constraints in addition to accountability, mentoring and social support. If you can deliver the package then there may be something excellent here. I hope it succeeds.

japhyr 5y ago

This is a wonderful idea, and I will be quite curious to see where it goes. I really, really like the idea of funding individuals we believe in, rather than specific projects. 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.

hyperpallium2 5y ago
The article (and title) is about funding work, not people. 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.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

I think this is a lovely idea. Just as everyone has a novel inside them, there are two or three "drop everything if I had the cash" ideas inside every head. All of them unique and some even useful to society :-) Yes. Let's fund more moths.

ok_dad 5y ago

I would love to work on open source, well designed, free software to control distributed energy resources and building load. Currently I've worked for several companies doing this, but I think that closed source, non free software will never allow us to truly reach the full electrification and decarbonization we need, and the power grid, both generation and transmission, is only getting more complex to manage with the old school tech approaches I've seen. I want to build the free and open OS for the distributed grid, but I need to support my family first. 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.

prox 5y ago
I love the idea of mothminds, and I would also love to support projects like these even if it is just little money each month. We need a Twitch like sub model, or maybe this moth minds could help.
orzig 5y ago
To give a sense of scale, how much would it cost to get you to do it? I'd love to help fund it, but definitely don't make fully 2x "Support a family", so it would be intersting to know how many people I'd need to round up.
- nefitty 5y ago
  I would personally forego 60-70% of my salary to work on impactful things I want to work on. Rent paid, dog fed, wife happy. Not much else to ask for.
  - ok_dad 5y ago
    Exactly, I would do it for just enough to pay rent, food, medical, etc. for my family for at least a few years. I think these days that could be anywhere from 25k to 75k (just a guess) depending on an individual's location.

tarkin2 5y ago

I like the idea. I wonder how much "return" financial contributors would want. I'd suggest allowing financial contributors to split a set sum between recipients. I've often liked the idea "I'll contribute x amount to whatever, this is how I'll split it per month" and being able to do that easily.

5rest 5y ago
Not all contributors look for returns. There are people who are willing to contribute to a cause instead of say buying a TV. We see such contributions on gofundme to help out people in need.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  Of course everyone wants a return! But it might be a return in satisfaction or something else that's hard to quantify, not necessarily money.

hyperpallium2 5y ago

UBI will do this. Lots of freeloaders, but at pretty much the same cost as at present. 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.

challenger-derp 5y ago
> UBI will do this. 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).
- hyperpallium2 5y ago
  True, though I think the most ground-breaking stuff is done by people without expensive equipment. e.g. Crypto algorithms themselces weren't prpven using expensive equipment. Tycho had the expensive telescope, but Kepler used his observations to make the breakthrough. 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.

5rest 5y ago

Nice project!! Artists, traditional medicine practitioners, philosophers, social service volunteers, natural farmers, conservationists, and researchers in many obscure areas are people who come to mind while reading about Mothminds. A huge human social good potential remains untapped in these silent people. I hope Mothminds will be a catalyst in this effort. 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.

maydup-nem 5y ago

I don't believe in work.

ryanmentor 5y ago

This is spiritually and practically compatible with the grants work we're doing at Gitcoin :) Come get involved and we can scale this up! gitcoindao.com

slimsag 5y ago
I don't fully understand your approach here, but I would like to. 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
- imagineerschool 5y ago
  It's not just crypto, and it's not just software. The grants round that opened today can be seen here: https://gitcoin.co/grants/#match-pools https://gitcoin.co/grants/#match-pools 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.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > To answer your question, the difference from kickstarter is that grants for public goods don't produce products - they produce public goods. There are Patreons that work like that, where the work being funded gets released publicly (for example, Evil Hat Games was releasing Fate RPG books as "pay what you want" downloads on RPGDriveThrough. Patrons just got early access and similar privileges). Reminiscent of the Street Performer Protocol: https://www.schneier.com/academic/archives/1998/11/the_street_performer.html https://www.schneier.com/academic/archives/1998/11/the_stree...

porkbrain 5y ago

A searchable index of multidisciplinary projects and motivated people working on them is something I'd support financially. I was recently searching for such a community outside of academia to network withim my area of interest but failed to connect. This would be a good place to start.

david-cako 5y ago

nice, can't wait to be owned by strangers

HKH2 5y ago

Is that ethnocentrism?

dnautics 5y ago

Curious what the structure of this is. Is this supposed to be many->one? Where many people with small amounts of $ get together and give one person a grant? One->many, where many people get small amounts of $ from one relatively wealthy person? Or many->many?

slimsag 5y ago

I've written and thought a lot about the need for a platform that enables investment in individuals and projects[0], so I'm REALLY happy for any initiatives that look into this. 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-tech-and-aerospace https://devlog.hexops.com/2021/terrifying-parallels-between-... [1] https://devlog.hexops.com/2021/mach-engine-the-future-of-graphics-with-zig https://devlog.hexops.com/2021/mach-engine-the-future-of-gra...

chubs 5y ago

I'm working on an open-source project that I think should show some value if we can get it off the ground. 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)

jowdones 5y ago
Get a job.

Sophistifunk 5y ago

Not sure how this could really work compared to what we have already? Most people with jobs and currently at max capacity can't take a sliver of time off every day for a 5% decrease in wage (and how would you use it well?), or an extra 2 weeks of unpaid leave a year even if they had money to replace it. There's a reason it's only news when some OSS dev finally has enough money coming in that they can afford to quit their job altogether or take a 6 month sabbatical to work on their true calling.

abyssin 5y ago

This is a visually beautiful page. The first image, the font, the color scheme. Nothing is too original, but it has character and it serves the meaning carried by the text.

pdimitar 5y ago

That's commendable, I love it. 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>