My hope is that if the spun-off Center for Applied Rationality takes off, we can all get out of the business of "Trying to explain to people why this an urgent

My hope is that if the spun-off Center for Applied Rationality takes off, we can all get out of the business of "Trying to explain to people why this an urgent problem that needs funding" and get back to "Actually researching the problem." It does take more than 2 people to actually research the problem (we know, we tried it with two people) and up until just recently there wasn't a very obvious path to how to find and fund 3 or more. Of course we've also produced various think-tank-ish analytic papers along that trajectory, whose value is not zero, but actual serious end-of-the-world basic-math research has always required more funding and more attention than we had. All I can say is - it's starting to look like it did work (the "spend years convincing people to fund it" path) and it's not at all obvious even in retrospect what else we could've done.