More journalistic articles about EA projects.

I don't necessarily mean "written by journalists", though there's been a lot of good journalistic coverage of EA.

I mean "in the style of long-form journalism": Telling an interesting story about the work of a person/organization, while mixing in the origin story, interesting details about the people involved, photos, etc.

Examples of projects I think could get the journalistic treatment:

• Charity Entrepreneurship (the story of an entire incubation program class)
• Wave
• The EAF Zurich ballot initiative
• The Center for Election Science (covering their Fargo approval voting campaign and their work in St. Louis)
• The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Future Generations

I'd be really interested in reading an updated post that makes the case for there being an especially high (e.g. >10%) probability that AI alignment problems will lead to existentially bad outcomes.

There still isn't a lot of writing explaining case for existential misalignment risk. And a significant fraction of what's been produced since Superintelligence is either: (a) roughly summarizing arguments in Superintelligence, (b) pretty cursory, or (c) written by people who are relative optimists and are in large part trying to explain their relative optimism.

Since I have the (possibly mistaken) impression that a decent number of people in the EA community are quite pessimistic regarding existential misalignment risk, on the basis of reasoning that goes significantly beyond what's in Superintelligence, I'd really like to understand this position a lot better and be in a position to evaluate the arguments for it.

(My ideal version of this post would probably assume some degree of familiarity with contemporary machine learning, and contemporary safety/robustness issues, but no previous familiarity with arguments that AI poses an existential risk.)

A post making the case for donating now rather than later.

Patient philanthropy (donating later) has been gaining ground within the EA community. While there's been some critical discussion, there hasn't been a post making the positive case for why to donate now since the very early days of EA.

At the suggestion of this question post, I'll offer that I'll pay $200 for a good post in this direction. Caveated with the fact that I think most of the value comes from a very good post in this direction, so my bar will be pretty high.

I want a post on how to be a good donor.

Context: I work with a small foundation that asks a lot of questions when we investigate charities. We sometimes worry that we're annoying the charities we work with without providing much value for them or for ourselves, especially since we don't make grants on the same scale as larger foundations. Even when they tell us our questions are helpful/reasonable, they obviously have a strong incentive to make us feel happy and valued. 

Ideal version of this post: Someone goes to a lot of EA orgs, asks them questions related to the above dilemma, and reports the results. 

Other general questions about "what donors should know" would also be neat: How should someone with no special preferences time their donations? How much more valuable is unrestricted than restricted funding? And so on.

As someone dubiously planning a career affiliated with the U.S. Department of Defense, I would really appreciate an analysis of working inside and outside of The System. Historically, have altruists been able to do good from within harmful governments (fascist dictatorships, military juntas, genocidal governments, etc.)? How? Which qualities do altruism-friendly systems have?

In-depth stories of people who had a lot of impact, and the rules of thumb they used / how they navigated key decision points, with the intention of drawing lessons from them.

E.g. Interview Holden or Bostrom about each key moment in their career, challenges & decisions they faced, and how they navigated them.

They wouldn't need to be within EA. It would also be great to have more examples of people like Norman Borlaug, Viktor Zhdanov and Petrov, but ideally focusing on (i) new examples (ii) people who were deliberately trying to have a big impact, and then also with (iii) more interrogation of the strategies they used and how things might have gone differently.

You could write it up as a case study, podcast interview, or journalist-style story.

It would be like Open Phil's history of philanthropy project, but focused on individual actors.

Governance innovation as a cause area

Many people are working on new governance mechanisms from an altruistic perspective. There are many sub-categories such as Charter cities, space governance, decentralized governance,  RadicalXChange agenda..

I'm uncertain as to the marginal value in such projects, and I'd like to see a broad analysis that can serve as a good prior and analysis framework for specific projects.

A case study of the Scientific Revolution in Britain as intervention by a small group. This bears on one of the most surprising facts: the huge distance, 1.5 centuries, between the scientific and industrial revs. Could also shed light on the old marginal vs systemic argument: a synthesis is "do politics - to promote nonpolitical processes!"

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RfKPzmtAwzSw49X9S/open-thread-46?commentId=rWn7HTvZaNHCedXNi

An analysis of how knowledge is constructed in the EA community, and how much weight we should assign to ideas "supported by EA". 

The recent question on reviews by non-EA researchers  is an example of that. There might be great opportunities to improve EA intellectual progress.

An AMA from someone who works at a really big foundation that leans EA but isn't quite "EA-aligned" in the same way as Open Philanthropy (e.g. Gates, Rockefeller, Chan/Zuckerberg, Skoll).

I'm interested to hear how those organizations compare different causes, distribute resources between areas/divisions, evaluate the impact of their grantmaking, etc.

I think it would be cool if someone wrote a post about Bob Purifoy. He's mentioned several times in Command and Control; briefly, he was an engineer and then manager at Sandia National laboratory, who was influential in nuclear security basically by just being extremely stubborn and motivated by safety. He gave a huge number of briefings (I want to say the number was in the thousands, but I can't find the reference right now) to policymakers, and occasionally stretched the rules to make nuclear weapons technology more secure.

I think it might provide a helpful model for how people can promote safety within large bureaucracies, even if they are not a top executive.

(I thought at one point I had found a eulogy which gave more information about his work, but I can't find it now. Possibly someone could reach out to Eric Schlosser, the author of command and control, to see if he has more information.)

A post re-examining the suffering impact of veganism in countries with good average livestock welfare in many product categories. New Zealand, for instance, has grass-fed cows as a norm, egg hens are usually required to have decent amounts of space and won't appear to be especially stressed, and the main supermarket chain Countdown just switched to providing mostly "free farmed" pork (birthing sows seem entirely free, but pigs destined for market are moved to barns that are only limitedly free) (excludes non store brand of pork-based products, but the store brand bacon looks pretty good quality so it might be popular enough).

I get the impression that we're unlikely to receive this kind of analysis through most channels promoting animal welfare. They might not want to tell you about the good parts. I tend to encounter a lot of copenhagen ethics and consent arguments (which can't be addressed by improving conditions no matter how much you improve them, which is a bit of a reduction to absurdity of consent arguments).

It may help to draw attention to good policies, focus attention on the worst offenders, and occasionally improve EA nutrition? Promoting animal welfare within the industry is likely to accelerate incremental change from within. Stockpeople who are doing especially well in limiting animal suffering will tend to be proud of their way of doing things and to want to promote it to legislators for both moral and economic reasons.

Having resources like this may also help for being able to come across as balanced and informed when discussing local animal welfare.

Defining "management constraints" better.

Anecdotally, many EA organizations seem to think that they are somehow constrained by management capacity. My experience is that this term is used in different ways (for example, some places use it to mean that they need senior researchers who can mentor junior researchers; others use it to mean that they need people who can do HR really well).

It would be cool for someone to interview different organizations and get a better sense of what is actually needed here

A detailed study of hyper-competent ops people. 

What makes these people so competent? What tools and processes do they use to manage information and set priorities? What does the flow of their workday look like; mostly flitting around between tasks, or mostly focused blocks of time? (And so on.)

More accessible summaries of technical work. Some things I would like summarized:

1. Existential risk and economic growth
2. Utilitarianism with and without expected utility

(You can see my own attempt to summarize something similar to #2 here , as one example.)

"American UBI: for and against"

"A brief history of Rosicrucianism & the Invisible College"

"Were almost all the signers of the Declaration of Independence high-degree Freemasons?"

"Have malaria case rates gone down in areas where AMF did big bednet distributions?"

"What is the relationship between economic development and mental health? Is there a margin at which further development decreases mental health?"

"Literature review: Dunbar's number"

"Why is Rwanda outperforming other African nations?"

"The longtermist case for animal welfare"

"Philosopher-Kings: why wise governance is important for the longterm future"

"Case studies: when has democracy outperform technocracy? (and vice versa)"

"Examining the tradeoff between coordination and coercion"

"Spiritual practice as an EA cause area"

"Tools for thought as an EA cause area"

"Is strong, ubiquitous encryption a net positive?"

"How important are coral reefs to ocean health? How can they be protected?"

"What role does the Amazon rainforest play in regulating the North American biosphere?"

"What can the US do to protect the Amazon from Bolsonaro?"

"Can the Singaporean governance model scale?"

"Is EA complacent?"

"Flow-through effects of widespread addiction"

I'd be interested in a post by a historian (or very serious amateur historian) on what EAs can learn from the rise and fall of Mohism, the earliest proto-consequentialist school of philosophy/social movement that I'm aware of*.

*I'd also be interested in a  more general summarization post  detailing other proto-consequentialist schools of philosophy and social movements.
 

"Type errors in the middle of arguments explain many philosophical gotchas: 10 examples"

"CNS imaging: a review and research agenda" (high decision relevance for moral uncertainty about suffering in humans and non humans)

"Matching problems: a literature review"

"Entropy for intentional content: a formal model" (AI related)

"Graph traversal using negative and positive information, proof of divergent outcomes" (neuroscience relevant potentially)

"One weird trick that made my note taking 10x more useful"

Investigations into promising new cause areas:

For instance, take one of the issues listed here.

Then interview 2-3 people in the area about (i) what the best interventions are (ii) who's currently working on it. Write up a summary, and add any of your own thoughts on how promising more work on the area seems.

You could use Open Phil's shallow cause reports as a starting template: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/cause-reports

I'd appreciate a forum post or workshop about how to interpret empirical evidence. Jennifer Doleac gives a lot of good pointers in the recent 80,000 Hours podcast, but I think the EA and public policy communities would benefit from a more thorough treatment.

Should Covid-19 be a priority for EAs?

A scale-neglectedness-tractability assessment, or even a full cost-effectiveness analysis, of Covid as a cause area (compared to other EA causes) could be useful. I'm starting to look into this now – please let me know if it's already been done.

1. What an overdetermined EA is, what the evidence is for them existing, and what it implies for community building strategy.
2. Evidence that the next ~10 years might be especially influential in terms of community building

Negative income taxes > UBI ?

A short mathematical demonstration of how negative income taxes compares to UBI in terms of economics 101.

Here's a thread in an EA group about the topics

Collating predictions made by particularly big pundits and getting calibration curves for them. Bill Gates is getting a lot of attention now for warning of pandemic in 2015; what is his average though? (This is a bad example though, since I expect his advisors to be world-class and to totally suppress his variance.)

If this could be hosted somewhere with a lot of traffic, it could reinforce good epistemics.

A post about when we should and should not use "lives saved" language in describing EA work.

I find that telling people they can save a life for $5000 often leads to a lot of confusion: Whose life is being saved? What if they die of something else a few months later?Explaining QALYs isn't too hard if you have a couple of minutes, but you often have a lot less time than that.

Is there some shorthand we can use for "giving 50 healthy years, in expectation, across a population" that makes it sound anywhere nearly as good as simply "saving a life"? How important is it to be accurate in this dimension, vs. simply allowing people to conflate QALY/VSL with "saving a specific person"?

Credible qualitative and/or quantitative evidence on the effectiveness of habits, tools, and techniques for knowledge work.

I think it would be really interesting for someone to write about the intellectual history of environmental ethics and animal ethics, and probably environmentalism more broadly. The rift between them dates back at least to the 1980s, and I think it's important for EAs interested in environmentalism or (wild) animal welfare to understand how they're building on/situated in this discourse.

(Inspired by the recent 80K episode on the intellectual history of x-risk.)

The implications of Brexit for the potential to do good when located in the UK.

Plausibly lessened if the UK has less influence on the world stage. I appreciate this may be seen as a somewhat political post, but I think it may be possible to write it without actually passing judgement on whether Brexit was a good or bad thing on the whole.

An interesting post (although perhaps skewing too negative in premise) would be an article on how best to reach/what options can be advertised or made available to the ‘Reluctant Effective Altruists’ (REA’s) of society… other than giving what they can which is an obvious starting point.

For the purposes of the post the REA’s would be those who agree with EA in principle, but are any of the following, and likely fall into more categories besides:

• agree in principle but are not skilled/believe themselves to be unable or are simply not motivated enough to gain the relevant skills for the worlds most pressing problems
• agree in principle and may even have the necessary skills but are reluctant to change their focus.
• those who have the skills/motivation but have dissolve-able barriers, be those personal, or societal.
• perhaps even those who agree in principle but have been somehow ‘burned’ previously by altruistic endeavours gone awry.

Of course, time and attention are very precious. Perhaps reaching REA’s is best done simply by expounding the logic of Effective Altruism/associated concepts as far and wide as possible… naturally some REA’s will shift to become EA’s and thats the simplest route.

However, an assessment of the different categories of REA, and how to speak directly to them/matching options suited for each, may create a marginal gain that compounds over time… and wouldn’t otherwise be realised.

I want people to write posts about their jobs, and how they got those jobs. I think this will help a lot of people, both with object-level information about getting particular jobs, and by making a meta-level statement that it's not impossible or unrealistic to get a job in EA.

Posts on how people came to their values, how much individuals find themselves optimizing for certain values, and how EA analysis is/isn't relevant. Bonus for points for resources for talking about this with other people.

I'd like to have more "Intro to EA" convos that start with, "When I'm prioritizing values like [X, Y, Z], I've found EA really helpful. It'd be less relevant if I valued [ABC ] instead, and it seems less relevant in those times when I prioritize other things. What do you value? How/When do you want to prioritize that? How would you explore that?"

I think personal stories here would be illustrative.

I care about a lot of different U.S. policy issues and would like to get a sense of their neglectedness and tractability. So I'd love it if someone could do a survey to find out how many people in the U.S. work full time on various issues and how hard it is to get bills passed on them.

When to use quantitative vs qualitative research

Without a framework for thinking about this, I'm often unsure what I should be learning from qualitative studies, and I don't always know when it makes sense to conduct them. (This seems related to the debate between cleometricians and counterfactual narrative historians; some discussion here, page 18)

Write about the replication crisis in the 80k hours Problem profile style. Basically, write about the problem, apply the SNT framework to it, mention orgs currently working on it, mention potential career options for someone who wants to address this problem etc..

This suggestion came after reading this post.

Posts investigating/discussing any of the questions listed here. These are questions which would be "valuable for someone to research, or at least theorise about, that the current pandemic in some way 'opens up' or will provide new evidence about, and that could inform EAs’ future efforts and priorities".

If anyone has thought of such questions, please add them as answers to to that post.

An example of such a question which I added: "What lessons can be drawn from [events related to COVID-19] for how much to trust governments, mainstream experts, news sources, EAs, rationalists, mathematical modelling by people without domain-specific expertise, etc.? What lessons can be drawn for debates about inside vs outside views, epistemic modesty, etc.?"