ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates

One- and three-year progress updates on the two ACX Grants cohorts (~73 grants), mostly grantee-written updates with Scott's commentary, closing with a substantive Lessons Learned / Overall Thoughts section. The meta-lessons are the real payoff: lobbying/advocacy orgs (Good Ancestors, the kidney bill, Georgism) and animal-welfare orgs were the standout successes; legibly-credentialed high-status people outperformed scrappy community startups (uncomfortably); speed-of-response is a strong predictor of success ('only someone who moves 10x faster than people expect can get things done'); science grants are hardest to evaluate; and grantee #15 coined 'Importance Hacking' (writing an unimportant result up so reviewers think it matters) as the next frontier after p-hacking. Values the ~$3M program at ~$50M in startup value plus documented deliverables (30M fish, 2B chicks, Rwandan jobs, a kidney bill).

Quality 65 · Strong. Strong (low): transparent, useful, and carrying genuine meta-insights (legible-beats-scrappy, speed-as-predictor, importance-hacking), but ~80% is curated grantee-update quotes with light commentary -- a status/reference document more than a crafted argument.

Claude’s paradigm shift 40 · Moderate. Moderate (low): a progress report; the Lessons Learned observations have some novelty but it is not a new frame.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. Minor: the grants program has real material impact (documented here), but the post itself is the accountability report, its own footprint indirect (driving the next round).