Quite wonderfully, there has been a proliferation of research questions EAs have identified as potentially worth pursuing, and now even a proliferation of collections of such questions. So like a good little EA, I’ve gone meta: this post is a collection of all such collections I’m aware of. I hope this can serve as a central directory to all of those other useful resources, and thereby help interested EAs find questions they can investigate to help inform our whole community’s efforts to do good better.

Some things to note:

• It may be best to just engage with one set of questions that are relevant to your skills, interests, or plans, and ignore the rest of this post.
• It’s possible that some of these questions are no longer “open”.
• I’ve included some

tl;dr: I am much more interested in making the future good, as opposed to long or big, as I neither think the world is great now nor am convinced it will be in the future. I am uncertain whether there are any scenarios which lock us into a world at least as bad as now that we can avoid or shape in the near future. If there are none, I think it is better to focus on “traditional neartermist” ways to improve the world.

I thought it might be interesting to other EAs why I do not feel very on board with longtermism, as longtermism is important to a lot of people in the community.

This post is about the worldview called longtermism. It does not describe a position on...

tldr: I'm looking for undergraduate research assistants / collaborators to work on research questions at the intersection of social science and long-term risks from AI. I've collected some research questions here. If you’re interested in working on these or related questions, and would like advice or mentorship, please contact Vael Gates at vlgates@stanford.edu!

Broader Vision

I'm a social scientist, and I want to contribute to reducing long-term risks from AI. I'm excited about growing the community of fellow researchers (at all levels) who are interested in the intersection of AI existential risk and social science. 

To that end, I'm hoping to:

1. collect and grow a list of research questions that would be interesting for social scientists of various subfields and valuable to AI safety
2. work with undergraduate students / collaborators on these

In many ways, at the moment cryptocurrencies are mostly used for speculation and maybe that's the reason that it doesn't get much attention  within the EA community (apart from being relatively more accepted as as source of donations compared to other communities).
I think that might be an oversight.

So far I would say cryptocurrency was mainly transformative in three ways:

1) Allowing (pseudo-)anonymous transactions world-wide, which allows for more safety when conducting transactions in a context that could lead to persecution (buying high-quality drugs online seems to be the most widespread one)
2) Smart individuals (or lucky early-adopters) can become, or have become quite rich by utilizing the enormous growth of the crypto market which certainly is transformative for the individuals in question
3) It has created a new eco-system in...

I am an EA from Pōneke/Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. I know that some of my EA friends here struggle to motivate themselves enough. The bloke from replacing guilt says this isn't a big deal, but I haven't gotten far enough through to let go of my intuition yet that you just need better guilt. Today, I want to offer you a way to supercharge the guilt you feel about even the smallest behaviours in your life.

The idea behind the Playpumps Productivity System is that even your most micro level struggles can become issues of life or death. Users purchase milli-lives, representing one thousandth of the high end of the expected cost to save a life via the Givewell Maximum Impact Fund. If the user succeeds in their goal,...