Newspeak House Tuition for Sasha Putilin

My name is Sasha Putilin. I am a resident fellow at Newspeak House. At Newspeak House I run meetups on consciousness, rationality and prediction markets. I want to run more of them and that's why I am fundraising £2400 for my Newspeak House tuition that I have to pay until my term ends in September 2024.

Here are the meetups I ran since joining Newspeak House in September 2023 gathering 30-80 people each:

— 6× Qualia Research Institute Community meetups. I run these every 5-7 weeks.

— 1× Postrationalism meetup

— 1× Psocial meetup — a meetup for people working in psychedelic medicine

— 2× Manifold.love prediction market dating shows

I also supported organisers of other meetups in navigating running meetups at Newspeak House. For example:

— ACX meetup in April 2024

— "Future of Coding" meetup in February 2024

— "AI, animals and digital minds" retreat (coming in June 2024)

— several others

My Newspeak House residency ends in September 2024 and by that time I need to pay £2400. I'm currently working on a neurotech project for which I received an ACX grant from Scott Alexander and in the Summer I'll be working on another grant project (about which I can't talk publicly yet). Since the projects are paid with grant money, I don't have free income.

Of course I could take a couple of extra freelance projects and pay my Newspeak House tuition. But this would mean me running less meetups — running a typical meetup takes 12-16 hours of work (approximately 1.5-2 days of full-time work).

Some of the meetups I'd like to run:

1. More meetups for the community around Qualia Research Institute that discuss consciousness, psychedelics, meditation among many other things.

2. Meetups on Cognitive Security — how to prevent mind manipulation and resist psyops by various bad actors: biased media, hostile egregores, future AIs.

3. More postrationalism and TPoT meetups, like this one

4. Several prediction market events, some of which involving live betting.