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Ok, so this doubles as an open thread?
I would like some light from the EA hivemind. For a while now I have been mostly undecided about what to do with my 2016-2017 period.
Roxanne and I even created a spreadsheet so I could evaluate my potential projects and drop most of them, mid-2015. My goals are basically an oscillating mixture of
1)Making the world better by the most effective means possible.
2)Continuing to live in Berkeley
3)Receive more funding
4)Not stop PHD
5)Use my knowledge and background to do (1).
This has proven an extremely hard decision to make. Here are the things I dropped because they were incompatible with time, or goals other than 1, but still think other EAs, who share goal 1, should carry on:
(1) Moral Economics: From when it started, Moral Econ is an attempt to install a different mindset in individuals, my goal has always been to have other people pick it up and take it forwards. I currently expect this to be done, and will go back to it only if it seems like it will fall apart.
(2) Effective Giving Pledge: This is a simple idea I applied to EA ventures with, though I actually want someone else to do it. The idea is simply to copy the Gates giving pledge website for an Effective Giving Pledge, which says that the wealthy benefactors will donate according to impact, tractability and neglectedness. If 3 or 4 signatories of the original pledge signed it, it would be the biggest shift in resource allocation from the non EA-money pool to the EA-money pool in history.
(3) Stuart Russell AI-safety course: I was going to spend some time helping Stuart to make an official Berkeley AI-safety course. His book is used in 1500+ Universities, so the if the trend caught, this would be a substantial win for the AI safety community. There was a non-credit course offered last semester in which some MIRI researchers, Katja, Paul, me and others were going to present. However it was very poorly attended and was not official, and it seems to me that the relevant metric is probability that this would become a trend.
(4) X-risk dominant paper: What are the things that would dominate our priority space on top of X-risk if they were true? Me and Daniel Kokotajlo began examining that question, but considered it to be too socially costly to publish anything about it, since many scenarios are too weird and could put off non-philosophers.
These are the things I dropped for reasons other than the EA goal 1. If you are interested in carrying on any of them, let me know and I'll help you if I can.
In the comment below, by contrast are the things between which I am still undecided the ones I want help in deciding:
link to it next to your username when you comment or post.
(Does anyone see open threads this late? Say if so!)
I just found out that the Open Philanthropy Project funded http://waitlistzero.org/ which was a small charity started by two EAs who I worked with in its early days. OPP gave $200k, presumably covering Waitlist Zero's whole budget (way more than it used to be).
This suggests more people creating charities could get fully funded by OPP. Does anyone have any insight into this? Claire Zabel of GiveWell/OPP said:
nice!