Consulting

This page presents my core competencies, my consulting rates, my description of my ideal client, two testimonials, and a few further thoughts. I can be reached out to at nuno.semperelh@protonmail.com.

Core competencies

Researching:

Some past research outputs that I am proud of are

See here for more past projects.

Red-teaming

Do you want my most disagreeable self to poke holes in your proposal or idea? I'm happy to do this.

Programming

Do you want me to build a website or tool? This is something I'd be excited to do more of. For a larger project, see metaforecast, for smaller projects see this EA forum frontend, shapleyvalue.com, this tool to fit a beta distribution to a confidence interval, or this tool to compute proportional approval voting results for cases with more than one candidate. You might also want to check out my Github.

Evaluation and estimation

Do you want me to evaluate a project, estimate its value, and suggest ways you could do better? I am very happy to do this. Some past examples are:

For a smaller example, in the past I've really enjoyed doing subjective estimates of the value of different career pathways (1, 2).

Forecasting

I am happy to host workshops, or advise on tournament or forecasting platform design. If you are looking for specific forecasts, you probably want to hire Samotsvety instead, which can be reached out at info@samotsvety.org.

Rates

I deeply value getting hired for more hours, because each engagement has some overhead cost. Therefore, I am deeply discounting buying a larger number of hours.

# of hours	Cost	Example
1 hour	~$200	Talk to me for an hour about a project you want my input on, organize a forecasting workshop
10 hours	~$1.5k	Research that draws on my topics of expertise, where I have already thought about the topic, and just have to write it down. For example, this Bayesian adjustment to Rethink Priorities
100 hours	~$10k	An evaluation of an organization, an early version of metaforecast, two editions of the forecasting newsletter
1000 hours	reach out	Large research project, an ambitious report on a novel topic, the current iteration of metaforecast

Description of client

My ideal client would be someone or some organization who is producing value in the world, and which wants me to identify ways they could do even better in an open-ended way. Because this context would be assumed to be highly collaborative, they would have a high tolerance for disagreeableness. A close second would be someone who is making an important decision commissioning me to estimate the value of the different options they are considering.

My anti-client on the other hand would be someone who has already made up their mind, and who wants me to rubber-stamp their decisions, like a grifty crypto project¹ asking for help writting up a grant to an EA grantmaker, or someone commissioning an evaluation that they will ignore, or a forecast that doesn't feed into any decisions.

Testimonials

I reached out to Nuño in mid-2021 because I was impressed by his "Shallow evaluation of longtermist organizations", and wanted him to conduct an evaluation of the EA Wiki, of which I was at the time the editor. I was very pleased with the rigour and thoroughness of the analysis he produced, and would recommend his services as a project evaluator and forecaster unreservedly. Indeed, I can think of very few other people in this area whom I would endorse as enthusiastically as I do Nuño.

—Pablo Stafforini

Nuño has depth of knowledge and a track record to prove it. His work spans AI, nuclear risk and a myriad other topics, which I have consistently found insightful. A generalist of the highest calibre. We hired Nuño to review a complex article about AI and forecasting. He delivered promptly, and we found his work insightful.

—Jaime Sevilla

Further details

I am very amenable to taking on projects that would require more than one person, because I am able to bring in collaborators. I would discuss this with the potential client beforehand.
Operationally, payouts may go either to the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute (a 503c charity in the US), or to myself directly, to be decided.

Note that I don't think all crypto projects are grifty, and I in fact view crypto as a pretty promising area of innovation. It's just that for the last couple years if you wanted to grift, crypto was a good place to do so. And in fact a crypto project that wanted to figure out how to produce more value in the world and capture some fraction of it could be a great client. ↩︎

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