Comments
This list should have karma hidden and entries randomised. I guess most poeple do not read and vote all the way to the bottom. I certainly didn't the first time I read it.
The FTX Foundation's Future Fund is a philanthropic fund making grants and investments to ambitious projects in order to improve humanity's long-term prospects.
We have a longlist of project ideas that we’d be excited to help launch.
We’re now announcing a prize for new project ideas to add to this longlist. If you submit an idea, and we like it enough to add to the website, we’ll pay you a prize of $5,000 (or more in exceptional cases). We’ll also attribute the idea to you on the website (unless you prefer to be anonymous).
All submissions must be received in the next week, i.e. by Monday, March 7, 2022.
We are excited about this prize for two main reasons:
To participate, you can either
Please write your project idea in the same format as the project ideas on our website. Here’s an example:
Early detection center
Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophes
By the time we find out about novel pathogens, they’ve already spread far and wide, as we saw with Covid-19. Earlier detection would increase the amount of time we have to respond to biothreats. Moreover, existing systems are almost exclusively focused on known pathogens—we could do a lot better by creating pathogen-agnostic systems that can detect unknown pathogens. We’d like to see a system that collects samples from wastewater or travelers, for example, and then performs a full metagenomic scan for anything that could be dangerous
You can also provide further explanation, if you think the case for including your project idea will not be obvious to us on its face.
Some rules and fine print:
We’re happy to answer questions, though it might take us a few days to respond due to other programs and content we're launching right now.
We’re excited to see what you come up with!
(Thanks to Owen Cotton-Barratt for helpful discussion and feedback.)
This list should have karma hidden and entries randomised. I guess most poeple do not read and vote all the way to the bottom. I certainly didn't the first time I read it.
I agree; something like Reddit's contest mode would be useful here. I've sorted the list by "newest first" to avoid mostly seeing the most upvoted entries.
I'm (pleasantly) surprised by the number of entries! But as a result the Forum seems pretty far from optimal as a platform for this discussion. Would be helpful to have a way to filter by focus area, for example.
Yeah I suggest it should be done like this, with search and filters as you suggest.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KigFfo4TN7jZTcqNH/the-future-fund-s-project-ideas-competition?commentId=G7aLWq4zypE77Fn6f
To prove the point: ATM the most upvoted comment is also the oldest one - Pablo's Retrospective grant evaluations.
The winners have been announced. It's interesting to note the low correlation between comment karma and awards. Of the (3 out of 6) public submissions, the winners had a mean of 20 karma [as of posting this comment], minimum 18, and the (9 out of 15) honourable mentions a mean of 39 (suggesting perhaps these were somewhat weighted "by popular demand"), minimum 16. None of the winners were in the top 75 highest rated comments; 8/9 of the publicly posted honourable mentions were (including 4 in the top 11).
There are 6 winners and 15 honourable mentions listed in OP (21 total); the top 21 public submissions had a mean karma of 52, minimum 38; the top 50 a mean of 40, minimum 28; and the top 100 a mean of 31, minimum 18. And there are 86 public submissions not amongst the awardees with higher karma than the lowest karma award winner. See spreadsheet for details.
Given that half of the winners were private entries (2/3 if accounting for the fact that one was only posted publicly 2 weeks after the deadline), and 40% of the honourable mentions, one explanation could be that private entries were generally higher quality.
Note karma is an imperfect measure (so in addition to the factor Nathan mentions, maybe the discrepancy isn't that surprising).
Alternatively, there could be an alternate ranking mode where you get two comments shown at once and you choose if one is better if they are about the same. Even a few people doing that would start to get a sense of if they agree with the overall ranking.
Starting EA community offices
Effective altruism
Some cities, such as Boston and New York, are home to many EAs and some EA organizations, but lack dedicated EA spaces. Small offices in these cities could greatly facilitate local EA operations. Possible uses of such offices include: serving as an EA community center, hosting talks or reading groups, providing working space for small EA organizations, reducing overhead for event hosting, etc.
(Note: I believe someone actually is looking into starting such an office in Boston. I think (?) that might already be funded, but many other cities could plausibly benefit from offices of their own.)
Here is a more ambitious version:
EA Coworking Spaces at Scale
Effective Altruism
The EA community has created several great coworking spaces, but mostly in an ad hoc way, with large overheads. Instead, a standard EA office could be created in upto 100 towns and cities. Companies, community organisers, and individuals working full-time on EA projects would be awarded a membership that allows them to use these offices in any city. Members gain from being able to work more flexibly, in collaboration with people with similar interests (this especially helps independent researchers with motivation). EA organisations benefit from decreased need to do office management (which can be done centrally without special EA expertise). EA community organisers gain easier access to an event space and standard resources, such as a library, and hotdesking space, and some access to the expertise of others using the office.
Here is an even more ambitious one:
Found an EA charter city
Effective Altruism
A place where EAs could live, work, and research for long periods, with an EA school for their children, an EA restaurant, and so on. Houses and a city UBI could be interesting incentives.
What would be the value add of an EA city, over and above that of an EA school and coworking space? For example, I don't see why you need to eat at an EA restaurant, rather than just a regular restaurant with tasty and ethical food.
Note also that the libertarian "Free State Project" seems to have failed, despite there being many more libertarians than effective altruists.
Lower cost of living, meaning you can have more people working on less profitable stuff.
I'm not sure 5000 free staters (out of 20k signatories) should be considered failure.
Right, but it sounds like it didn't go well afterwards? https://www.google.com/amp/s/newrepublic.com/amp/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project
Mere libertarians may have failed, as anarchists did in similar attempts. But I believe that EAs can do better. An EA city would be a perfect place to apply many of the ideas and polices we are currently advocating for.
Could you elaborate on the policies? And what, roughly, are you picturing - an EA-sympathising municipal government, or a more of a Honduran special economic zone type situation?
I don't think I will elaborate on policies, given that they are the last thing to worry about. Even RP negative report counts new policies among the benefits of charter cities. Now we are supposed to have effective ways to improve welfare, why wouldn't we build a new city, start from scratch, do it better than everybody else, and show it to the world? While I agree that this can't be done without putting a lot of thinking into it, I believe it must be done sooner or later. From a longtermist point of view: how could we ever expect to carry out a rational colonization of other planets when nobody on earth has ever been able to successfully found at least one rational city?
Note, VR is going to get really good in the next three years, so I wouldn't personally recommend getting too invested in any physical offices, but I guess as long as we're renting it won't be our problem.
I think it is pretty unlikely that VR improvements on the scale of 3y make people stop caring about being actually in person. This is a really hard problem that people have been working on for decades, and while we have definitely made a lot of progress if we were 3y from "who needs offices?" I would expect to already see many early adopters pushing VR as a comfortable environment for general work (VR desktop) or meetings.
This is a really hard problem that people have been working on for decades
What problem are you referring to. Face tracking and remote presence didn't have a hardware platform at all until 2016, and wasn't a desirable product until maybe this year (mostly due to covid), and wont be a strongly desirable product until hardware starts to improve dramatically next year. And due to the perversity of social software economics, it wont be profitable in proportion to its impact, so it'll come late.
There are currently zero non-blurry face tracking headsets with that are light enough to wear throughout a workday, so you should expect to not see anyone using VR for work. But we know that next year there will be at least one of those (apple's headset). It will appear suddenly and without any viable intermediaries. This could be a miracle of apple, but from what I can tell, it's not. Competitors will be capable of similar feats a few years later.
(I expect to see limited initial impact from applevr (limited availability and reluctance from apple to open the gates), the VR office wont come all at once, even though the technical requirements will.)
(You can get headsets with adequate visual acuity (60ppd) right now, but they're heavy, which makes them less convenient to use than 4k screens. They're expensive, and they require a bigger, heavier, and possibly even more expensive computer to drive them (though this was arguably partly a software problem), which also means they wont have the portability benefits that 2025's VR headsets will have, which means they're not going to be practical for much at all, and afaik the software for face tracking isn't available for them, and even if it were, it wouldn't have a sufficiently large user network in professional realms.)
You think they'll get past the dizziness problem?
I think everyone will adapt. I vaguely remember hearing that there might be a relatively large contingent of people who never do adapt, I was unable to confirm this with 15 minutes of looking just now, though. Every accessibility complaint I came across seemed to be a solvable software problem rather than anything fundamental.
I heard that New York was starting a coworking space as well
I think Berlin has something like this
Indeed, the space was organized by Effektiv Spenden: teamwork-berlin.org
I think EA Israel would have more people working remotely in international organizations if we had community offices.
[We recently got an office which I'm going to check out tomorrow; Not an ideal location for me but will try!]
Investment strategies for longtermist funders
Research That Can Help Us Improve, Epistemic Institutions, Economic growth
Because of their non-standard goals, longtermist funders should arguably follow investment strategies that differ from standard best practices in investing. Longtermists place unusual value on certain scenarios and may have different views of how the future is likely to play out.
We'd be excited to see projects that make a contribution towards producing a pipeline of actionable recommendations in this regard. We think this is mostly a matter of combining a knowledge of finance with detailed views of the future for our areas of interest (i.e. forecasts for different scenarios with a focus on how giving opportunities may change and the associated financial winners/losers). There is a huge amount of room for research on these topics. Useful contributions could be made by research that develops these views of the future in a financially-relevant way, practical analysis of existing or potential financial instruments, and work to improve coordination on these topics.
Some of the ways the strategies of altruistic funders may differ include:
Note: This builds on an idea from a recent post by Holden Karnofsky. However, I don't see it in your current project ideas list nor in the other comments here.
I have had a similar idea, which I didn't submit, relating to trying to create investor access to tax-deductible longtermist/patient philanthropy funds across all major EA hubs. Ideally these would be scaled up/modelled on the existing EA long term future fund (which I recall reading about but can't find now, sorry)
Edit - found it and some ideas - see this and top level post.
Just going to note that SBF/FTX/Alameda are already setting a very high benchmark when it comes to investing!
A systemic change investment strategy for your review.
You may be interested in the following project I'm working for: https://deeptransitions.net/news/the-deep-transition-futures-project-investing-in-transformation/ . The project goal is developing a new investment philosophy & strategy (complete with new outcome metrics) aimed at achieving transformational systems change. The project leverages the Deep Transitions theoretical framework as developed within the field of Sustainability Transitions and Science, Technology and Innovation Studies to create a theory of change and subsequently enact it with a group of public and private investors. Would recommend diving into this if you're interested in the nexus of investment and transformation of current systems/shaping future trajectories.
I can't say too much about future plans at this stage, except that following the completion of the current phase (developing the philosophy, strategies and metrics), there will be an extended experimentation phase in which these are applied, tested and continuously redeveloped.
Highly effective enhancement of productivity, health, and wellbeing for people in high-impact roles
Effective Altruism
When it comes to enhancement of productivity, health, and wellbeing, the EA community does not sufficiently utilise division of labour. Currently, community members need to obtain the relevant knowledge themselves and do related research, e.g. on health issues, themselves. We would like to see dedicated experts on these issues that offer optimal productivity, health, and wellbeing, as a service. As a vision, a person working in a high-impact role could book calls with highly trained nutrition specialists, exercise specialists, sleep specialists, personal coaches, mental trainers, GPs with sufficient time, and so on, increasing their work output by 50% while costing little time. This could involve innovative methods such as ML-enabled optimal experiment design to figure out which interventions work for each individual.
Note: Inspired by conversations with various people. I won't name them here because I don't want to ask for permission first, but will share the prize money with them if I win something.
I was going to write a similar comment for researching and promoting well-being and well-doing improvements for EAs as well as the general public! Since this already exists in similar form as a comment, strong upvoting instead.
Relevant articles include Ben Williamson’s project (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/i2Q3DTsQq9THhFEgR/introducing-effective-self-help) and Dynomight’s article on “Effective Selfishness” (https://dynomight.net/effective-selfishness/). I also have a forthcoming article on this.
Multiple project ideas that have been submitted also echo this general sentiment. For example “ Improving ventilation,” “Reducing amount of time productive people spend doing paperwork,” and “ Studying stimulants' and anti-depressants' long-term effects on productivity and health in healthy people (e.g. Modafinil, Adderall, and Wellbutrin).”
Edit: I am launching this as a project called Better! Please get in touch if you're interested in funding, collaborating on, or using this!
Reducing gain-of-function research on potentially pandemic pathogens
Biorisk
Lab outbreaks and other lab accidents with infectious pathogens happen regularly. When such accidents happen in labs that work on gain-of-function research (on potentially pandemic pathogens), the outcome could be catastrophic. At the same time, the usefulness of gain-of-function research seems limited; for example, none of the major technological innovations that helped us fight COVID-19 (vaccines, testing, better treatment, infectious disease modelling) was enabled by gain-of-function research. We'd like to see projects that reduce the amount of gain-of-function research done in the world, for example by targeting coordination between journals or funding bodies, or developing safer alternatives to gain-of-function research.
Additional notes:
(*) Super roughly:
Tier 1: Science, Nature
Tier 2: Nature Medicine, Cell, (maybe some other Nature family journals)
Tier 3: Some more Nature family journals, Science Advances, PNAS, several others
-> If three publishers (Science, Nature Gropu, Cell Press) coordinated, this would cover all tier 1 and tier 2 journals, and a large part of tier 3 journals.
Putting Books in Libraries
Effective Altruism
The idea of this project is to come up with a menu of ~30 books and a list of ~10000 libraries, and to offer to buy for each library, any number of books from the menu. This would ensure that folks interested in EA-related topics, who browse a library, discover these ideas. The books would be ones that teach people to use an effective altruist mindset, similar to those on this list. The libraries could be ones that are large, or that that serve top universities or cities with large English-speaking populations.
The case for the project is that if you assume that the value of discovering one new EA contributor is $200k, and that each book is read once per year (which seems plausible based on at least one random library) then the project will deliver far greater than the financial costs, of about $20 per book. The time costs would be minimised by doing much of the correspondence with libraries over the space over a short period of weeks to months. It also can serve as a useful experiment for even larger-scale book distributions, and could be replicated in other languages.
I like this idea, but I wonder - how many people / students actually use physical libraries still? I don't think I've used one in over 15 years. My impression is that most are in chronic decline (and many have closed over the last decade).
A way around this could be to provide e-books and audio books instead of physical copies. Would also make the distribution easier.
(In the UK at least, it's possible to borrow e & audio from your local library using the Libby app)
I imagine that e-book systems (text and audio) work via access to large libraries, rather than needing people to request books be added individually? So maybe there is no action needed on this front (although someone should probably check that most EA books are available in such collections).
My understanding is that individual libraries license an ebook for a number of uses or a set period of time (say, two years).
I think print books are still preferred by more readers compared to e-books. You might as well donate the books in both the physical and digital formats and probably also as an audiobook.
It looks like libraries don't generally have an official way for you to donate print books virtually or to donate e-books, so I think you would have to inquire with them about whether you can make a donation and ask them to use that to buy specific books. Note that the cost of e-book licenses to libraries is many times the consumer sale price.
I really like this project idea! It's ambitious and yet approachable, and it seems that a lot of this work could be delegated to virtual personal assistants. Before starting the project, it seems that it would be valuable to quickly get a sense of how often EA books in libraries are read. For example, you could see how many copies of Doing Good Better are currently checked out, or perhaps you could nicely ask a library if they could tell you how many times a given book has been checked out.
In terms of the cost estimates, how would targeted social media advertising compare? Say targeting people who are already interested in charity and volunteering, or technology, or veg*anism, and offering to send them a free book.
Not sure, but targeted social media advertising would also be a great project.
Never Again: A Blue-Ribbon Panel on COVID Failures
Biorisk, Epistemic Institutions
Since effective altruism came to exist as a movement, COVID was the first big test of a negative event that was clearly within our areas of concern and expertise. Despite many high-profile warnings, the world was clearly not prepared to meet the moment and did not successfully contain COVID and prevent excess deaths to the extent that should've been theoretically possible if these warnings had been properly heeded. What went wrong?
We'd like to see a project that goes into extensive detail about the global COVID response - from governments, non-profits, for-profit companies, various high-profile individuals, and the effective altruism movement - and understands what the possibilities were for policy action given what we knew at the time and where things fell apart. What could've gone better and - more importantly - how might we be better prepared for the next disaster? And rather than try to re-fight the last war, what needs to be done now for us to better handle a future disaster that may not be bio-risk at all?
Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion and not the opinion of Rethink Priorities. This project idea was not seen by anyone else at Rethink Priorities prior to posting.
Minor note about the name: "Never Again" is a slogan often associated with the Holocaust. I think that people using it for COVID might be taken as appropriation or similar. I might suggest a different name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_again
Sorry - I was not aware of this
No worries! I assumed as such.
Are you thinking of EAs running this themselves? We already have an informal sense of what some top priorities are for action in biosafety/pandemic-preparedness going forwards (ramp up investment in vaccines and sterilizing technology, improve PPE, try to ban Gain of Function research, etc), even if this has never been tied together into a unified and rigorously prioritized framework.
I think the idea of a blue-ribbon panel on Covid failures could have huge impact if it had (in the best-case) official buy-in from government agencies like the CDC, or (failing that) at least something like "support from a couple prestigious universities" or "participation from a pair of senators that care about the issue" or "we don't get the USA or UK but we do get a small European country like Portugal to do a Blue Ribbon Covid Panel". In short, I think this idea might ideally look more like "lobby for the creation of an official Blue Ribbon Panel, and also try to contribute to it and influence it with EA research" rather than just running it entirely as an internal EA research project. But maybe I am wrong and a really good, comprehensive EA report could change a lot of minds.
This is a great point. Also worth noting that there have been some retrospectives already, e.g. this one by the WHO: https://theindependentpanel.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/COVID-19-Make-it-the-Last-Pandemic_final.pdf
It would be worth considering the right balance between putting resources toward conducting an original analysis vs. mustering the political will for implementing recommendations from retrospectives like those above.
Note that CSER is running a project roughly in this direction.
An early output from this project: Research Agenda (pre-review)
Lessons from COVID-19 for GCR governance: a research agenda
The Lessons from Covid-19 Research Agenda offers a structure to study the COVID-19 pandemic and the pandemic response from a Global Catastrophic Risk (GCR) perspective. The agenda sets out the aims of our study, which is to investigate the key decisions and actions (or failures to decide or to act) that significantly altered the course of the pandemic, with the aim of improving disaster preparedness and response in the future. It also asks how we can transfer these lessons to other areas of (potential) global catastrophic risk management such as extreme climate change, radical loss of biodiversity and the governance of extreme risks posed by new technologies.
Our study aims to identify key moments- ‘inflection points’- that significantly shaped the catastrophic trajectory of COVID-19. To that end this Research Agenda has identified four broad clusters where such inflection points are likely to exist: pandemic preparedness, early action, vaccines and non-pharmaceutical interventions. The aim is to drill down into each of these clusters to ascertain whether and how the course of the pandemic might have gone differently, both at the national and the global level, using counterfactual analysis. Four aspects are used to assess candidate inflection points within each cluster: 1. the information available at the time; 2. the decision-making processes used; 3. the capacity and ability to implement different courses of action, and 4. the communication of information and decisions to different publics. The Research Agenda identifies crucial questions in each cluster for all four aspects that should enable the identification of the key lessons from COVID-19 and the pandemic response.
Cognitive enhancement research and development (nootropics, devices, ...)
Values and Reflective Processes, Economic Growth
Improving people's ability to think has many positive effects on innovation, reflection, and potentially individual happiness. We'd like to see more rigorous research on nootropics, devices that improve cognitive performance, and similar fields. This could target any aspect of thinking ability---such as long/short term memory, abstract reasoning, creativity---and any stage of the research and development pipeline---from wet lab research or engineering over testing in humans to product development.
Additional notes on cognitive enhancement research:
I think this is an underrated idea, and should be considered a good refinement/addition to the FTX theme #2 of "AI-based cognitive aids". If it's worth kickstarting AI-based research assistant tools in order to make AI safety work go better, then doesn't the same logic apply towards:
The idea of AI-based cognitive aids only deserves special consideration insofar as:
Create and distribute civilizational restart manuals
A number of "existential risks" we are worried about may not directly kill off everybody, but would still cause enough deaths and chaos to make rebuilding extremely difficult. Thus, we propose that people design and distribute "civilizational restart manuals" to places that are likely to survive biological or nuclear catastrophes, giving humanity more backup options in case of extreme diasters.
The first version can be really cheap, perhaps involving storing paper copies of parts of Wikipedia plus 10 most important books sent to 100 safe and relatively uncorrelated locations -- somewhere in New Zealand, the Antarctica research base, a couple of nuclear bunkers, nuclear submarines, etc.
We are perhaps even more concerned about great moral values like concern for all sentient beings surviving and re-emerging than preserving civilization itself, so we would love for people to do further research and work into considering how to preserve cosmopolitan values as well.
My comment from another thread applies here too:
Agreed, very important in my view! I’ve been meaning to post a very similar proposal with one important addition:
Anthropogenic causes of civilizational collapse are (arguably) much more likely than natural ones. These anthropogenic causes are enabled by technology. If we preserve an unbiased sample of today’s knowledge or even if it’s the knowledge that we consider to have been most important, it may just steer the next cycle of our civilization right into the same kind of catastrophe again. If we make the information particularly durable, maybe we’ll even steer all future cycles of our civilization into the same kind of catastrophe.
The selection of the information needs to be very carefully thought out. Maybe only information on thorium reactors rather than uranium ones; only information on clear energy sources; only information on proof of stake; only information on farming low-suffering food; no prose or poetry that glorifies natural death or war; etc.
I think that is also something that none of the existing projects take into account.
Relatedly, see this post about continuing AI Alignment research after a GCR.
Very good!
Building on the above idea...
Research the technology required to restart modern civilization and ensure the technology is understood and accessible in safe havens throughout the world
A project could ensure that not only the know-how but also the technology exists dispersed in various parts of the world to enable a restart. For instance, New Zealand is often considered a relatively safe haven, but New Zealand’s economy is highly specialized and for many technologies, relies on importing technology rather than producing it indigenously. Kick-starting civilization from wikipedia could prove very slow. Physical equipment and training enabling strategic technologies important for restart could be planted in locations like New Zealand and other social contexts which are relatively safe. At an extreme, industries could be subsidized which localize technology required for a restart. This would not necessarily mean the most advanced technology; rather, it means technologies that have been important to develop to the point we are at now.
I didn’t write this up as a separate proposal as it seemed a bit self-serving, but creating underground cities for EAs with all the ALLFED technology and whatnot and all these backups could enable us to afterwards build a utopia with all the best voting methods and academic journals that require Bayesian analyses and publish negative results and Singer on the elementary school curriculum and universal basic income etc.
All of wikipedia is just 20GB.
Maybe there could be an way to share backups via Bittorrent or an 'offline version' of it... it would fit comfortably on most modern smartphones.
Digital solutions are not great because ideally you want something that can survive centuries or at least decades.
But offline USBs in prominent + safe locations might still be a good first step anyway.
I've got a full version of the English Wikipedia, complete with images, on my phone (86GB). It's very easy to get using the Kiwix app.
I note there isn't much on Kiwix in terms of survival/post-apocalype collections (just a few TED talks and YouTube videos): a low-hanging fruit ripe for the picking.
Maybe someone should make an EA related collection and upload it to Kiwix? (Best books, EA Forum, AI Alignment Forum, LessWrong, SSC/ACX etc). This might be a good way of 80/20-ing preserving valuable information. As a bonus, people can easily and cheaply bury old phones with the info on, along with solar/hand-crank chargers.
The group who discovers this restart manual could gain a huge advantage over the other groups in the world population -- they might reach the industrial age within a few decades while everyone else is still in the stone age.
This discoverer group will therefore have a huge influence over the world civilization they create.
I wonder if there were a way to ensure that this group has good values, even better values than our current world.
For example, imagine there were a series of value tests within the restart manual that the discoverers were required to pass in order to unlock the next stage of the manual. Either multiple groups rediscover the manual and fail until one group succeeds, or some subgroup unlocks the next step and is able to leap technologically above the others in the group fast enough to ensure that their values flourish.
If those value tests somehow ensure that a high score means the test-takers care deeply about the values we want them to have, then only those who've adopted these values will rule the earth.
As a side note, this would be a really cool short story or movie :)
SEP for every subject
Epistemic institutions
Create free online encyclopedias for every academic subject (or those most relevant to longtermism) written by experts and regularly updated. Despite the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy being widely-known and well-loved there are few examples from other subjects. Often academic encyclopedias are both behind institutional paywalls and not accessible on sci-hub (e.g. https://oxfordre.com/). This would provide decisionmakers and the public with better access to academic views on a variety of topics.
Can editing efforts be directed to Wikipedia? Or would this not suffice because everyone can edit it?
Preventing factory farming from spreading beyond the earth
Space governance, moral circle expansion (yes I am also proposing a new area of interest.)
Early space advocates such as Gerard O’Neill and Thomas Heppenheimer had both included animal husbandry in their designs of space colonies. In our time, the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency, the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and NASA, have all expressed interests or announced projects to employ fish or insect farming in space.
This, if successful, might multiply the suffering of farmed animals by many times of the numbers of farmed animals on earth currently, spanned across the long-term future. Research is needed in areas like:
(note: I am actually writing a blogpost on factory farming in space/in the long-term future, stay tuned or write a message to me if you are interested)
(update: I posted it: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bfdc3MpsYEfDdvgtP/why-the-expected-numbers-of-farmed-animals-in-the-far-future)
Purchase a top journal
Metascience
Journals give bad incentives to academics - they require new knowledge to be written in hard to understand language, without pre-registration at great cost and sometimes focused on unimportant topics. Taking over a top journal and ensuring it incentivised high quality work on the most important topics would begin to turn the scientific system around.
We could, of course, simply get the future fund to pay for this. There is, however, an alternative that might be worth thinking about.
This seems like the kind of thing that dominant assurance contracts are designed to solve. We could run a Kickstarter, and use the future fund to pay the early backers if we fail to reach the target amount. This should incentivise all those who want the journals bought to chip in.
Here is one way we could do this:
Update: I emailed Alex Tabarrok to get his thoughts on this. He originally proposed using dominant assurance contracts to solve public good problems, and he has experience testing it empirically.
He makes the following points about my suggestion:
He also suggested other ways to solve the same problem:
My current (and weakly held) position is that flipping editorial boards to create new open access journals is the best way to improve publishing standards. Small steps towards a much better world. Would it be possible to for the Future Fund to entice 80% of the big journals to do this? The top journal in every field? Maybe.
This is a reputational loss risk of an actor in the broader EA community seeking to influence the scientific discourse by economic/peer unreviewed means? There are repositories, such as of the Legal Priorities Project, of papers, that are cool and the EA community pays attention to aggregate narratives to keep some of its terms rather exclusive and convincing. If you mean coordinating research, to learn from the scientific community, then it can make sense to read papers and corresponding with academics. Maybe on the EA Forum or so. No need to buy a journal.
Agree, was thinking of submitting a proposal like this. A few ways to easily improve most journals:
-Require data and code to be shared
-Open access, but without the huge author fees most open access journals charge
-If you do charge any fees, use them to pay reviewers for fast reviews
Shouldn't reviewers be paid, regardless of fees? It is a tough job, and there should strong incentives to do it properly.
A Longtermist Nobel Prize
All Areas
The idea is to upgrade the Future of Life Award to be more desirable. The prizemoney would be increased from $50k to$10M SEK (roughly $1.1M) per individual to match the Nobel Prizes. Both for prestige, and to make sure ideal candidates are selected, the selection procedure would be reviewed, adding extra judges or governance mechanisms as needed. This would not immediately mean that longtermism has something to match the prestige of a Nobel, but it would give a substantial reward and offer top longtermists something to strive for.
(A variation on a suggestion by DavidMoss)
How much of the prestige is the money value, how much just the age of the prize, and how much the association with a fancy institution like the Swedish monarchy?
I seem to remember that Heisenberg etc were more excited by the money than the prize, back in the day.
The money isn't necessary - see the Fields Medal. Nor is the Swedish Monarchy - see the Nobel Memorial Prize in Econ. Age obviously helps. And there's some self-reinforcement - people want the prize that others want. My guess is that money does help, but this could be further investigated.
The Jacobs Foundation awards $1m prizes to scientist as a grant - I think this might be one of the biggest - one could award $5-10m to make it the most prestigious prize in the world.
I think Templeton Prize has become prestigious because they give more money than the Nobel on purpose.
Megastar salaries for AI alignment work
Artificial Intelligence
Aligning future superhuman AI systems is arguably the most difficult problem currently facing humanity; and the most important. In order to solve it, we need all the help we can get from the very best and brightest. To the extent that we can identify the absolute most intelligent, most capable, and most qualified people on the planet – think Fields Medalists, Nobel Prize winners, foremost champions of intellectual competition, the most sought-after engineers – we aim to offer them salaries competitive with top sportspeople, actors and music artists to work on the problem. This is complementary to our AI alignment prizes, in that getting paid is not dependent on results. The pay is for devoting a significant amount of full time work (say a year), and maximum brainpower, to the problem; with the hope that highly promising directions in the pursuit of a full solution will be forthcoming. We will aim to provide access to top AI alignment researchers for guidance, affiliation with top-tier universities, and an exclusive retreat house and office for fellows of this program to use, if so desired.
Here's a more fleshed out version, FAQ style. Comments welcome.
Longtermist Policy Lobbying Group
Biorisk, Recovery from Catastrophe, Epistemic Institutions, Values and Reflective Processes
Many social movements find a lot of opportunity by attempting to influence policy to achieve their goals . While longtermism can and should remain bi-partisan, there may be many opportunities to pull the rope sideways on policy areas of concern.
We'd like to see a project that attempts to carefully understand the lobbying process and explores garnering support for identified tractable policies. We think while such a project could scale to be very large once successful, anyone working on this project should really aim to start small and tred carefully, aiming to avoid issues around the unilateralist curse and ensuring to not make longtermism into an overly partisan issue. It's likely that longtermist lobbying might also be best done as lobbying for other clear areas related to longtermism but as a distinct idea, such as lobbying for climate change mitigation or lobbying for pandemic preparedness.
Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion and not the opinion of Rethink Priorities. This project idea was not seen by anyone else at Rethink Priorities prior to posting.
I think some form of lobbying for longtermist-friendly policies would be quite valuable. However, I'm skeptical that running lobbying work through a single centralized "shop" is going to be the most efficient use of funds. Lobbying groups tend to specialize in a specific target audience, e.g., particular divisions of the US federal government or stakeholders in a particular industry, because the relationships are really important to success of initiatives and those take time to develop and maintain. My guess is that effective strategies to get desired policies implemented will depend a lot on the intersection of the target audience + substance of the policy + the existing landscape of influences on the relevant decision-makers. In practice, this would probably mean at the very least developing a lot of partnerships with colleague organizations to help get things done or perhaps more likely setting up a regranting fund of some kind to support those partners.
Happy to chat about this further since we're actively working on setting something like this up at EIP.
I agree with you on the value of not overly centralizing this and of having different groups specialize in different policy areas and/or approaches.
Landscape Analysis: Longtermist Policy
Biorisk, Recovery from Catastrophe, Epistemic Institutions, Values and Reflective Processes
Many social movements find a lot of opportunity by attempting to influence policy to achieve their goals - what ought we do for longtermist policy? Longtermism can and should remain bi-partisan but there may be many opportunities to pull the rope sideways on policy areas of concern.
We'd like to see a project that attempts to collect a large number of possible longtermist policies that are tractable, explore strategies for pushing these policies, and also use public opinion polling on representative samples to understand which policies are popular. Based on this information, we could then suggest initiatives to try to push for.
Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion and not the opinion of Rethink Priorities. This project idea was not seen by anyone else at Rethink Priorities prior to posting.
I really like this idea and think that having a global policy network could be valuable over the long term. Particularly if coordinated with other domains of EA work. For instance, I can imagine RT and various other researcher orgs and researchers providing evidence on demand to EAs who are directly embedded within policy production.
Hi Peter (if I may!),
I love this and your other Longtermism suggestions, thanks for submitting them! Not sure if you saw my below suggestion of a Longtermism Policy Lab - but maybe this is exactly the kind of activity that could fall under such an organisation/programme (within Rethink even)? Likewise for your suggestion of a Lobbying group - by working directly with societal partners (e.g. National Ministries across the world) you could begin implementation directly through experimentation.
I've been involved in a similar (successful) project called the 'Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC)', which works with, for example, the Colombian governement to shape innovation policy towards sustainable and just transformation (as opposed to systems optimisation).
Would love to talk to you about these your ideas for this space if you're interested. I'm working with the Institutions for Longtermism research platform at Utrecht University & we're still trying to shape our focus, so there may be some scope for piloting ideas.
JBPDavies, it sounds like you and I should connect as well -- I run the Effective Institutions Project and I'd love to learn more about your Institutions for Longtermism research and provide input/ideas as appropriate.
Sounds fantastic - drop me an email at [email protected] and I would love to set up a meeting. In the meantime I'll dive into EIP's work!
Sure! Email me at [email protected] and I will set up a meeting.
If it shows that policies that safeguard the long-term objectives of the top lobbyists in the nation while disregarding others' preferences are the most popular, do you recommend them as attention-captivating conversation starters so that impartial consideration can be explained one-on-one to support its internalization by regulators by implementing measures to prevent the enactment of these, possible catastrophically risky (codified dystopia for some actors) popular policies, if I understand it correctly?
Experiments to scale mentorship and upskill people
Empowering Exceptional People, Effective Altruism
For many very important and pressing problems, especially those focused on improving the far future, there are very few experts working full-time on these problems. What's more, these fields are nascent, and there are few well-defined paths for young or early-career people to follow, it can be hard to enter the field. Experts in the field are often ideal mentors - they can vet newcomers, help them navigate the field, provide career advice, collaborate on projects and gain access to new opportunities, but there are currently very few people qualified to be mentors. We'd love to see projects that experiment with ways to improve the mentorship pipeline so that more individuals can work on pressing problems. The kinds of possible solutions possible are very broad - from developing expertise in some subset of mentorship tasks (such as vetting) in a scalable way, increasing the pool of mentors, improving existing mentors' ability to provide advice by training them, experimenting with better mentor-mentee matchmaking, running structured mentorship programs, and more.
Proportional prizes for prescient philanthropists
Effective Altruism, Economic Growth, Empowering Excetional People
A low-tech alternative to my proposal for impact markets is to offer regular, reliable prizes for early supporters of exceptionally impactful charities. These can be founders, advisors, or donors. The prizes would not only go to the top supporters but proportionally to almost anyone who can prove that they’ve contributed (or where the charity has proof of the contribution), capped only at a level where the prize money is close to the cost of the administrative overhead.
Donors may be rewarded in proportion to the aggregate size of their donations, advisors may be rewarded in proportion to their time investment valued at market rates, founders may be rewarded in proportion to the sum of both.
If these prizes are awarded reliably, maybe by several entities, they may have some of the same benefits as impact markets. Smart and altruistic donors, advisors, and charity serial entrepreneurs can accumulate more capital that they can use to support their next equally prescient project.
Reading this again, I want to register that I am much more excited about the idea of rewarding donors for early investment than I am about the other elements of the plan. As someone who has founded multiple organizations, the task of attaching precise retrospective monetary values to different people's contributions of time, connections, talent, etc. in a way that will satisfy everyone as fair sounds pretty infeasible.
Early donations, by contrast, are an objective and verifiable measure of value that is much easier to reward in practice. You could just say that the first, say $500k that the org raises is eligible for retroactive reward/matching/whatever, with maybe the first $100k or something weighted more heavily.
It's also worth thinking through the incentives that a system like this would set up, especially at scale. It would result in more seed funding and more small charities being founded and sustained for the first couple of years. I personally think that's a good thing at the present time, but I also know people who argue that we should be taking better advantage of economies of scale in existing organizations. There is probably a point at which there is too much entrepreneurship, and it's worth figuring out what that point is before investing heavily in this idea.
Owen Cotton-Barrett and I have thought about this for a while and have mostly arrived at the solution that beneficiaries who collaborated on a project need to hash this out with each other. So make a contract, like in a for-profit startup, who owns how much of the impact of the project. I think that capable charity entrepreneurs are a scarce resource as well, so that we should try hard to foster them. So that’s probably where a large chunk of the impact is.
When it comes to the incentive structures: We – mostly Matt Brooks and I but the rest of the team will be around – will hold a talk on the risks from perverse incentives in our system at the Funding the Commons II conference tomorrow. Afterwards I can also link the video recording here. My big write-up, which is more comprehensive than the presentation but unfinished, is linked from the other proposal proposal.
That said …
I personally think that's a good thing at the present time, but I also know people who argue that we should be taking better advantage of economies of scale in existing organizations. There is probably a point at which there is too much entrepreneurship, and it's worth figuring out what that point is before investing heavily in this idea.
I don’t quite understand… More funding for donors -> more donors -> more money to charities -> higher scale, right? So this system would enable charities to hire more so people can specialize etc., not the opposite?
Thanks!
This is really interesting. Setting up individual projects as DAOs could be an effective way to manage this. The DAO issues tokens to founders, advisors, and donors. If retrospectively it turns out that this was a particularly impactful project the funder can buy and burn the DAO tokens, which will drive up the price, thereby rewarding all of the holders.
Yep! There’s this other proposal for impact markets linked above. That’s basically that with slight tweaks. It’s all written in a technology-agnostic way, but one of the implementations that we’re currently looking into is on the blockchain. There’s even a bit of a prototype already. :-D
I really like this idea, and FWIW find it much more intuitive to grasp than your impact markets proposal.
Sweet, thanks! :-D
Then it’ll also help me explain impact markets to people.
High quality, EA Audio Library (HEAAL)
all/meta, though I think the main value add is in AI
(Nonlinear has made a great rough/low quality version of this, so at least some credit/prize should go to them.)
Audio has several advantages over text when it comes to consuming long-form content, with one significant example being that people can consume it while doing some other task (commuting, chores, exercising) meaning the time cost of consumption is almost 0. If we think that broad, sustained engagement with key ideas is important, making the cost of engagement much lower is a clear win. Quoting Holden's recent post:
I think a highly talented, dedicated generalist could become one of the world’s 25 most broadly knowledgeable people on the subject (in the sense of understanding a number of different agendas and arguments that are out there, rather than focusing on one particular line of research), from a standing start (no background in AI, AI alignment or computer science), within a year
What does high quality mean here, and what content might get covered?
High quality means read by humans (I'm imagining paying maths/compsci students who'll be able to handle mathematical notation), with good descriptions of diagrams. If posts involve conversations (e.g. the MIRI logs), different voices are used for different people. Holden's cold takes read throughs are a good example.
High quality also means paying for or otherwise dealing with copyright, curating pieces into much more searchable/navigable collections than the current podcast feeds.
What sort of things?
alignment forum posts, with sequences collated into playlists.
The MIRI conversations
Key technical reports e.g. Carlsmith on power seeking AI, Cotra on Bioanchors
New books (The Long View)
everything on key reading lists, again organised into playable feeds. e.g. Tessa's biosec list, jtm's longtermism list, the AGI safety and governance fundamentals curricula, the introductory and in-depth fellowship reading materials.
Frankly, I'd like the ability to send a written feed to somewhere and have it turned into audio, maybe crowdfunded. Clearly non-linear can do it, so why can't I have it for, say, Bryan Caplan's writing.
High-quality human performance is much more engaging than autogenerated audio, fwiw.
Hence the original pitch!
Non-Linear could be paid to repost the most upvoted posts but with voice actors.
Our World in Base Rates
Epistemic Institutions
Our World In Data are excellent; they provide world-class data and analysis on a bunch of subjects. Their COVID coverage made it obvious that this is a very great public good.
So far, they haven't included data on base rates; but from Tetlock we know that base rates are the king of judgmental forecasting (EAs generally agree). Making them easily available can thus help people think better about the future. Here's a cool corporate example.
e.g.
“85% of big data projects fail”;
“10% of people refuse to be vaccinated because of fearing needles (pre-COVID so you can compare to the COVID hesitancy)”;
"11% of ballot initiatives pass"
“7% of Emergent Ventures applications are granted”;
“50% of applicants get 80k advice”;
“x% of applicants get to the 3rd round of OpenPhil hiring”, "which takes y months";
“x% of graduates from country [y] start a business”.
MVP:
Later, QURI-style innovations: add methods to combine multiple estimates and do proper Bayesian inference on them. If we go the crowdsourcing route, we could use the infrastructure used for graphclasses (voting on edits). Prominently mark the age of the estimate.
PS: We already sympathise with the many people who critique base rates for personal probability.
I think this is neat.
Perhaps-minor note: if you'd do it at scale, I imagine you'd want something more sophisticated than coarse base rates. More like, "For a project that has these parameters, our model estimates that you have a 85% chance of failure."
I of course see this as basically a bunch of estimation functions, but you get the idea.
Adversarial collaborations on important topics
Epistemic Institutions
There are many important topics, such as the level of risk from advanced artificial intelligence and how to reduce it, among which there are reasonable people with very different views. We are interested in experimenting with various types of adversarial collaborations, which we define as people with opposing views working to clarify their disagreement and either resolve the disagreement or identify an experiment/observation that would resolve it. We are especially excited about combining adversarial collaborations with forecasting on any double cruxes identified from them. Some ideas for experimentation might be varying the number of participants, varying the level of moderation and strictness of enforced structure, and introducing AI-based aids.
Existing and past work relevant to this space include the Adversarial Collaboration Project, SlateStarCodex's adversarial collaboration contests, and the Late 2021 MIRI Conversations.
What topics? Which are not yet covered? (E. g. militaries already talk about peace) What adversaries? Are they rather collaborators (such as considering mergers and acquisitions and industry interest benefits for private actors and trade and alliance advantages for public actors)? Do you mean decisionmaker-nondecisionmaker collaborations - the issue is that systems are internalized, so you can get from the nondecisionmakers I want to be as powerful over others as the decisionmakers or also an inability to express or know their preferences (a chicken is in the cage so what can it say or a cricket is on the farm what do they know about their preferences) - probably, adversaries would prefer to talk about 'how can we get the other to give us profit' rather than 'how can we make impact' since the agreement is 'not impact, profit?'
Foundational research on the value of the long-term future
Research That Can Help Us Improve
If we successfully avoid existential catastrophe in the next century, what are the best pathways to reaching existential security, and how likely is it? How optimistic should we be about the trajectory of the long-term future? What are the worst-case scenarios, and how do we avoid them? How can we make sure the future is robustly positive and build a world where as many people are flourishing?
To elaborate on what I have in mind with this proposal, it seems important to conduct research beyond reducing existential risk over the next century – we should make sure that the future we have afterwards is good as well. I'd be interested in research following up on subjects like those of the posts:
Focus Groups Exploring Longtermism / Deliberative Democracy for Longtermism
Epistemic Institutions, Values and Reflective Processes
Right now longtermism is being developed within a relatively narrow set of stakeholders and participants relative to the broad set of people (and nonhumans) that would be affected by the decisions we make. We'd like to see focus groups that attempt to engage a more diverse group of people (diversity across many axes including but not limited to race, gender, age, geography, and socioeconomic status) and attempt to explain longtermism to them and explore what visions they have for the future of humanity (and nonhumans). Hopefully through many iterations we can find a way to go across what is likely rather large initial inferential distance to explore how a broader and more diverse group of people would think about longtermism once ideally informed. This can be related to and informed by engaging in deliberative democracy. This also could be helping to initiate what longtermists call "the long reflection".
Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion and not the opinion of Rethink Priorities. This project idea was not seen by anyone else at Rethink Priorities prior to posting.
I absolutely love this idea and really hope it gets funded! It reminds me in spirit of the stakeholder research that IDinsight did to help inform the moral weights GiveWell uses in its cost-effectiveness analysis. At scale, it could parallel aspects of the process used to come up with the Sustainable Development Goals.
Teaching buy-out fund
Allocate EA Researchers from Teaching Activities to Research
Problem: Professors spend a lot of their time teaching instead of researching. Many don’t know that many universities offer “teaching buy-outs”, where if you pay a certain amount of money, you don’t have to teach. Many also don’t know that a lot of EA funding would be interested in paying that.
Solution: Make a fund that's explicitly for this, to make it so more EAs know. This is the 80/20 of promoting the idea. Alternatively, funders can just advertise this offering in other ways.
Incubator for Independent Researchers
Training People to Work Independently on AI Safety
Problem: AI safety is bottlenecked by management and jobs. There are <10 orgs you can do AI safety full time at, and they are limited by the number of people they can manage and their research interests.
Solution: Make an “independent researcher incubator”. Train up people to work independently on AI safety. Match them with problems the top AI safety researchers are excited about. Connect them with advisors and teammates. Provide light-touch coaching/accountability. Provide enough funding so they can work full time or provide seed funding to establish themselves, after which they fundraise individually. Help them set up co-working or co-habitation with other researchers.
This could also be structured as a research organization instead of an incubator.
EA Marketing Agency
Improve Marketing in EA Domains at Scale
Problem: EAs aren’t good at marketing, and marketing is important.
Solution: Fund an experienced marketer who is an EA or EA-adjacent to start an EA marketing agency to help EA orgs.
Expected value calculations in practice
Invest in creating the tools to approximate expected value calculations for speculative projects, even if hard.
Currently, we can’t compare the impact of speculative interventions in a principled way. When making a decision about where to work or donate, longtermists or risk-neutral neartermists may have to choose an organization based on status, network effects, or expert opinion. This is, obviously, not ideal.
We could instead push towards having expected value calculations for more things. In the same way that GiveWell did something similar for global health and development, we could try to do something similar for longtermism/speculative projects. Longer writeup here.
(Per Nick's note, reposting)
Political fellowships
Values and Reflective Processes, Empowering Exceptional People
We’re like to fund ways to pull people who don’t run for political office to run for political office. It's like a MacArthur. You get a call one day. You've been selected. You'd make a great public servant, even if you don't know it. You'd get some training, like DCCC and NRCC, and when you run, you get two million spent by the super-PAC run by the best. They've done the analysis. They'll provide funding. They've lined up endorsers. You've never thought about politics, but they've got your back. Say what you want to say, make a difference in the world: run the campaign you don't mind losing. And if you win, make it real.
Great idea, at TFG we have similar thoughts and are currently researching if we should run it and the best way to run a program like this. Would love to get input from people on this.
AGI Early Warning System
Anonymous Fire Alarm for Spotting Red Flags in AI Safety
Problem: In a fast takeoff scenario, individuals at places like DeepMind or OpenAI may see alarming red flags but not share them because of myriad institutional/political reasons.
Solution: create an anonymous form - a “fire alarm” (like an whistleblowing Andon Cord of sorts) where these employees can report what they’re seeing. We could restrict the audience to a small council of AI safety leaders, who then can determine next steps. This could, in theory, provide days to months of additional response time.
Alignment Forum Writers
Pay Top Alignment Forum Contributors to Work Full Time on AI Safety
Problem: Some of AF’s top contributors don’t actually work full-time on AI safety because they have a day job to pay the bills.
Solution: Offer them enough money to quit their job and work on AI safety full time.
The Billionaire Nice List
Philanthropy
A regularly updated list of how much impact we estimate billionaires have created. Billionaires care about their public image, people like checking lists. Let's attempt to create a list which can be sorted by different moral weights and incentivises billionaires to do more good.
I really like this. I had a similar idea focused on trying to change the incentive landscape for billionaires to make it as high status as possible to be as high impact as possible. I think that lists and awards could be a good start. Would be especially good to have the involvement of some aligned ultrawealthy people who might have a good understanding of what will be effective.
Yeah, I would love those of us who know or are billionaires to give a sense of what motivates them.
Pro-immigration advocacy outside the United States
Economic Growth
Increasing migration to rich countries could dramatically reduce poverty and grow the world economy by up to 150%. Open Philanthropy has long had pro-immigration reform in the U.S. as a focus area, but the American political climate has been very hostile to and/or polarized on immigration, making it harder to make progress in the U.S. However, other high-income countries might be more receptive to increasing immigration, and would thus be easier places to make progress. For example, according to a 2018 Pew survey, 81% of Japanese citizens support increasing or keeping immigration levels about the same. It would be worth exploring which developed countries are most promising for pro-immigration advocacy, and then advocating for immigration there.
What this project could look like:
Related posts:
Japan is coming from a very low base - 2% of population is foreign-born - vs. 15% in the US. A lot of room for more immigrants before "saturation" is reached I guess. Although I imagine that xenophobia and racism is anti-correlated with immigration, at least at low levels [citation needed].
Top countries by refugees per capita
The world's most neglected displacement crises
Should these countries be supported in their efforts (I read I think $0.1/person/day for food) and the crises prevented such as by supporting the source area parties to make and abide by legal agreements over resources, prevent drug trade by higher-yield farming practices and education or urban career growth prospects, improve curricula to add skills development in care for others (teaching preventive healthcare and others' preferences-based interactions), etc - as a possibly cost-effective alternative to pro-immigration advocacy - then, either privileged persons will be able to escape the poor situation, which will not be solved or unskilled persons with poor norms will be present at places which may not improve their subjective wellbeing, which is given by the norms' internalization?
Your question is very long and hard to understand. Can you please reword it in plain English?
Displacement crises are large and neglected. For example, for one of the top 10 crises, 6,000 additional persons are displaced per day. Displaced persons can be supported by very low amounts, which make large differences. For example, $0.1/day for food and low amount for healthcare. In some cases, this would have otherwise not been provided. So, supporting persons in crises in emerging economies, without solving the issues, can be cost-effective compared to spending comparable effort on immigration reform.
Second, supporting countries that already host refugees of neglected crises to better accommodate these persons (so that they do not need to stay in refugee camps reliant on food aid and healthcare aid), for example, by special economic zones, if these allow for savings accumulation, and education, so that refugees can better integrate and the public welcomes it due to economic benefits, can be also competitive in cost-effectiveness compared to immigration reform in countries with high public attention and political controversy and much smaller refugee populations, such as the US. The intervention is more affordable, makes larger difference for the intended beneficiaries, has higher chance of political support, and can be institutionalized while solving the problem.
Third, allocating comparable skills to neglected crises rather than to immigration reform in industrialized nations where unit decisionmaker's attention can be much more costly, such as the US, can resolve the causes of these crises, which can include limited ability to draft and enforce legal agreements around natural resources or mitigate violence related to limited alternative prospects of drug farmers by sharing economic alternatives, such as higher-yield commodity farming practices, agricultural value addition skills, or upskilling systems related to work in urban areas. So, the cost-effectiveness of solving neglected crises by legal, political, and humanitarian assistance can be much higher than lobbying for immigration reform in the US.
Improving ventilation
Biorisk
Ventilation emerged as a potential intervention to reduce the risk of COVID and other pathogens. Additionally, poor air quality is a health concern in its own right, negatively affecting cognition and cognitive development. Despite this, there still does not seem to be commonly accepted wisdom about what kind of ventilation interventions ought to be pursued in offices, bedrooms, and other locations.
We'd like to see a project that does rigorous research to establish strong ventilation strategies in a variety of contexts and explores their effectiveness on various ventilation issues. Once successful ventilation strategies are developed, assuming it would be cost-effective to do so, this project could then aim to roll out ventilation and campaign/market for ventilation interventions either as a for-profit, non-profit, or hybrid.
Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion and not the opinion of Rethink Priorities. This project idea was not seen by anyone else at Rethink Priorities prior to posting.
Advocacy organization for unduly unpopular technologies
Public opinion on key technologies.
Some technologies have enormous benefits, but they are not deployed very much because they are unpopular. Nuclear energy could be a powerful tool for enhancing access to clean energy and combating climate change, but it faces public opposition in Western countries. Similarly, GMOs could help solve the puzzle of feeding the global population with fewer resources, but public opinion is largely against them. Cellular agriculture may soon face similar challenges. Public opinion on these technologies must urgently be shifted. We’d like to see NGOs that create the necessary support via institutions and the media, without falling into the trap of partisan warfare with traditional environmentalists.
Probably want to avoid unifying all of these under one "we advocate for things that most people hate" advocacy group! Although that would be pretty hilarious. But funding lots of little different groups in some of these key areas is great, such as trying to make it easier to build clean energy projects of all kinds as I mention here.
Right, it sounds absurd and maybe hilarious, but it's actually what I had in mind. The advantage is internal coherence. The idea is basically to let "ecomodernism" go mainstream, having a Greenpeace-like org that has ideas more similar to the Breakthrough Institute. It's far from clear that this can work, but it's worth a try, in my view. About your suggestion: I love it and voted for it.
Maybe so... like an economics version of the ACLU that builds a reputation of sticking up for things that are good even though they're unpopular. Might work especially well if oriented around the legal system (where ACLU operates and where groups like Greenpeace and the ever-controversial NRA have had lots of success), rather than purely advocacy? Having a unified brand might help convince people that our side has a point. For instance, a group that litigates to fight against nimbyism by complaining about the overuse of environmental laws or zoning regulations... the nimbys would naturally see themselves as the heroes of the story and assume that lawyers on the pro-construction side were probably villains funded by big greedy developers. Seeing that their opposition was a semi-respected ACLU-like brand that fought for a variety of causes might help change people's minds on an issue. (On the other hand, I feel like the legal system is fundamentally friendlier terrain for stopping projects than encouraging them, so the legal angle might not work well for GMOs and power plants. But maybe there are areas like trying to ban Gain-of-Function research where this could be a helpful strategy.)
We'd still probably want the brand of this group to be pretty far disconnected from EA -- groups like Greenpeace, the NRA, etc naturally attract a lot of controversy and demonization.
Since Lifecycle Analysis show that it most likely is the best option, I fully agree on the nuclear Part.
I also agree on the GMO part, since huge Meta Analysis show no adverse effects on the environment (compared as yield/area & Biodiversity/dollar & Yield/dollar labor/ yield), in comparison with other agriculture.
I have no Assessment on Cellular Agriculture, but I do think, that it is fair to support such schemes ( at least until we have solid data regarding this, and then decide again).
Note: Wanted to share an example. I think that while nuclear fission reactors are unpopular and this unpopularity is sticky, it is possible that efforts to preemptively decouple the reputation of nuclear fusion reactors with those of nuclear fission reactors can succeed (and that nuclear fusion's hypothetical positive reputation can be sticky over time). But it is also possible that the unpopularity of nuclear fission will stick to nuclear fusion.
Which of these two possibilities occurs, and how proactive action can change this, is mysterious at the moment. This is because our causal/theoretical understanding of the science of human behavior is incomplete. (see my submission, "Causal microfoundations for behavioral science") Preemptive action regarding historically unprecendented settings like emergent technologies---for which much of the relevant data may not yet exist---can be substantially informed by externally valid predictions of people's situation-specific behavior in such settings.
Interesting thought. FWIW, I think it's more realistic that we can turn around public opinion on fission first, reap more of the benefits of fission, and then have a better public public landscape for fusion, then that we accept the unpopularity of fission as a given but will have somehow popular fusion. But I may well be wrong.
Building the grantmaker pipeline
Empowering Exceptional People, Effective Altruism
The amount of funding committed to Effective Altruism has grown dramatically in the past few years, with an estimated $46 billion dollars currently earmarked for EA. With this significant increase in available funding, there is now a greatly increased need for talented and thoughtful grantmakers, who can effectively deploy this money. It's plausible that yearly EA grantmaking could increase by a factor of 5-10x over the coming decade, and this requires finding and training new grantmakers on best practices, as well as developing sound judgement. We'd love to see projects that build the grantmaker pipeline, whether that's grantmaking fellowships, grantmaker mentoring, more frequent donor lotteries, more EA funds-style organisations with rotating fund managers, and more.
NB: This might be a refinement of fellowships, but I think it's particularly important.
This is such a good idea that I think FTX is already piloting a regranting scheme as a major prong of their Future Fund program!
But it would be cool to build up the pipeline in other more general/systematic ways -- maybe with mentorship/fellowships, maybe with more experimental donation designs like donor lotteries and impact certificates, maybe with software that helps people to make EA-style impact estimates.
It seems that FTX's Regranting Program could be a great way to scalably distribute funds & build the grantmaker pipeline.
We (Training for Good) are also developing a grantmaker training programme like what James has described here to help build up EA's grantmaking capacity (which could complement FTX's Regranting Program nicely). It will likely be an 8 week, part-time programme, with a small pot of "regranting" money for each participant and we're pretty excited to launch this in the next few months.
In the meantime, we're looking for 5-10 people to beta test a scaled-down version of this programme (starting at the end of March). The time commitment for this beta test would be ~5 hours per week (~2 hrs reading, ~2 hrs projects, ~1 hr group discussion). If anyone reading this is interested, feel free to shoot me an email [email protected]
Top ML researchers to AI safety researchers
Pay top ML researchers to switch to AI safety
Problem: <.001% of the world’s brightest minds are working on AI safety. Many are working on AI capabilities.
Solution: Pay them to switch. Pay them their same salary, or more, or maybe a lot more.
EA Productivity Fund
Increase the output of top longtermists by paying for things like coaching, therapy, personal assistants, and more.
Problem: Longtermism is severely talent constrained. Yet, even though these services could easily increase a top EAs productivity by 10-50%, many can’t afford them or would be put off by the cost (imposter syndrome or just because it feels selfish).
Solution: Create a lightly-administered fund to pay for them. It’s unclear what the best way would be to select who gets funding, but a very simple decision metric could be to give it to anybody who gets funding from Open Phil, LTFF, SFF, or FTX. This would leverage other people’s existing vetting work.
Automated Open Project Ideas Board
The Future Fund
All of these ideas should be submitted to a board where anyone can forecast their value in dollars lives saved per $ as rated by a trusted research organisation, say Rethink Priorities. The forecasts can be reputation or prediction markets. Then that research organisation checks 1% of the ideas and scores them. These scores are used to weight the other forecasts. This creates a scalable system for ranking ideas. Then funders can donate to them as they see fit.
Massive US-China exchange programme
Great power conflict, AI
Fund (university) students to live in the other country in a host family: between US-China, Russia-US, China-India, potentially India-Pakistan. This is important if one thinks that personal experience make it less likely that individuals incentivise or encourage escalation, war and certain competitive dynamics.
This might have a hard time meeting the same effectiveness bar as #13, "Talent Search" and #17, "Advocacy for US High-Skill Immigration", which might end up having some similar effects but seem like more leveraged interventions.
I disagree, as this idea seems much more explicitly targeted at reducing the potential for great power conflict, and I haven't yet seen many other tractable ideas in that domain.
My understanding is the Erasmus Programme was explicitly started in part to reduce the chance of conflict between European states.
Nuclear/Great Power Conflict Movement Building
Effective Altruism
Given the current situation in Ukraine, movement-building related to nuclear x-risk or great power conflict would likely be much more tractable than it was up until recently. We don't know how long this period will last for and the memory of the public can be short, so we intend to advantage of this opportunity. This outreach should focus on people with an interest in policy or potential student group organisers as these people are most likely to have an influence here.
(Per Nick's note, reposting)
Market shaping and advanced market commitments
Epistemic institutions; Economic Growth
Market shaping is when an idea can only be jump-started by committed demand or other forces. Operation Warp Speed is the most recent example of market-shaping through advanced market commitments, but it has been used several times for other vaccine development. We are interested in funding work to understand when market-shaping makes sense, ideas for creating and funding market-shaping methods, and specific market-shaping or advanced market commitments in our areas of interest.
(I drafted this then realized that it is largely the same as Zac's comment above - so I've strong upvoted that comment and I'm posting here in case my take on it is useful.)
Crowding in other funding
We're excited to see ideas for structuring projects in our areas of interest that leverage our funds by aligning with the tastes of other funders and investors. While we are excited about spending billions of dollars on the best projects we can find, we're also excited to include other funders and investors in the journey of helping these projects scale in the best way possible. We would like to maximize the chance that other sources of funding come in. Some projects are inherently widely attractive and some others are only ever likely to attract (or want) longtermist funding. But, we expect that there are many projects where one or more general mechanisms can be applied to crowd in other funding. This may include:
An Organisation that Sells its Impact for Profit
Empowering Exceptional People, Epistemic Institutions
Nonprofits are inefficient in some respects: they don't maximize value for anyone the way for-profits do for their customers. Moreover, they lack market valuations, so successful nonprofits scale too slowly while unsuccessful ones linger too long. One way to address this is to start an organisation that only accepts funding that incentivizes impact. Its revenue would come from: (1) Selling Impact Cerificates, (2) Prizes, and/or (3) Grants (but only if they value the work at a similar level to the impact certificates). Such an organization could operate on an entirely for-profit basis. Funding would be raised from for-profit investors. Staff would be paid in salary plus equity. The main premise here is that increased salaries are a small price to pay for the efficiencies that can be gained from for-profit markets. Of course, this can only succeed if the funding mechanisms (1-3) become sufficiently popular, but given the increased funding in longtermist circles, this now looks increasingly likely.
See also Retrospective grant evaluations, Retroactive public goods funding, Impact Markets, Megastar salaries for AI Alignment Work, Limited Scope Impact Purchase.
Rationalism But For Group Psychology
Epistemic Institutions
LessWrong and the rationalist community have done well to highlight biases and help individuals become more rational, as well as creating a community around this. But most of the biggest things in life are done by groups and organizations.
We'd like to see a project that takes group psychology / organizational psychology and turns it into a rationalist movement with actionable advice to help groups be less biased and help groups achieve more impact, like how the original rationalist movement did so with individuals. We imagine this would involve identifying useful ideas from group psychology / organizational psychology literature and popularizing them in the rationalist community, as well as trying to intentionally experiment. Perhaps this could come up with better ideas for meetings, how to hire, how to attract talent, better ways to help align employees with organizational goals, better ways to keep track of projects, etc.
Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion and not the opinion of Rethink Priorities. This project idea was not seen by anyone else at Rethink Priorities prior to posting.
The Epistea Summer Experiment was a glorious example of this.
Wild animal suffering in space
Space governance, moral circle expansion.
Terraforming other planets might cause animals to come to exist in these planets, either because of intentional or unintentional behaviors. These animals might live net negative lives.
Also, we cannot rule out the possibility that there are already wild "animals" (or any form of sentient beings) who might be suffering from net negative lives in other planets. (this does not relate directly to the Fermi Paradox, which is highly intelligent lives, not lives per se)
Relevant research include:
Another great concern of mine is that even if biological humans are completely replaced with ems or de novo artificial intelligence, these processes will probably run on great server farms that likely produce heat and need cooling. That results in a temperature gradient that might make it possible for small sentient beings, such as invertebrates, to live there. Their conditions may be bad, they may be r-strategists and suffer in great proportions, and they may also be numerous if these AI server farms spread throughout the whole light cone of the future.
My intuition is that very few people (maybe Simon Eckerström Liedholm?) have thought about this so far, so maybe there are easy interventions to make that less likely to happen.
Brian Tomasik and Michael Dello-Iacovo have related articles.
Here's a related question I asked.
AI alignment prize suggestion: Introduce AI Safety concepts into the ML community
Artificial Intelligence
Recently, there have been several papers published at top ML conferences that introduced concepts from the AI safety community into the broader ML community. Such papers often define a problem, explain why it matters, sometimes formalise it, often include extensive experiments to showcase the problem, sometimes include some initial suggestions for remedies. Such papers are useful in several ways: they popularise AI alignment concepts, pave the way for further research, and demonstrate that researchers can do alignment research while also publishing in top venues. A great example would be Optimal Policies Tend To Seek Power, published in NeurIPS. Future Fund could advertise prizes for any paper that gets published in a top ML/NLP/Computer Vision conference (from ML, that would be NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR) and introduces a key concept of AI alignment.
Risk:
The course presents possible solutions to these risks, and the students feel like they "understood" AI risk, and in the future it will be harder to these students about AI risk since they feel like they already have an understanding, even though it is wrong.
I am specifically worried about this because I try imagining who would write the course and who would teach it. Will these people be able to point out the problems in the current approaches to alignment? Will these people be able to "hold an argument" in class well enough to point out holes in the solutions that the students will suggest after thinking about the problem for five minutes?
I'm not saying this isn't solvable, just a risk.
EA Macrostrategy:
Effective Altruism
Many people write about the general strategy that EA should take, but almost no-one outside of CEA has this as their main focus. Macrostrategy involves understanding all of the different organisations and projects in EA, how they work together, what the gaps are and the ways in which EA could fail to achieve its goals. Some resources should be spent here as an exploratory grant to see what this turns up.
Evaluating large foundations
Effective Altruism
Givewell looks at actors: object-level charities, people who do stuff. But logically, it's even more worth scrutinising megadonors (assuming that they care about impact or public opinion about their operations, and thus that our analysis could actually have some effect on them).
For instance, we've seen claims that the Global Fund, who spend $4B per year, meet a 2x GiveDirectly bar but not a Givewell Top Charity bar.
This matters because most charity - and even most good charity - is still not by EAs or run on EA lines. Also, even big cautious foundations can risk waste / harm, as arguably happened with the Gates Foundation and IHME - it's important to understand the base rate of conservative giving failing, so that we can compare hits-based giving. And you only have to persuade a couple of people in a foundation before you're redirecting massive amounts.
Refining EA communications and messaging
Values and Reflective Processes, Research That Can Help Us Improve
If we want to motivate a broad spectrum of people about the importance of doing good and ensuring the long-term goes well, it's imperative we find out which messages are "sticky" and which ones are forgotten quickly. Testing various communication frames, particularly for key target audiences like highly talented students, will support EA outreach projects in better tailoring their messaging. Better communications could hugely increase the number of people that consume EA content, relate to the values of the EA movement, and ultimately commit their life to doing good. We'd be excited to see people testing various frames and messaging, across a range of target audiences, using methodologies such as surveys, focus groups, digital media, and more.
I think this exists (but could be much bigger and should still be funded by this fund).
Deciding which projects to fund is hard, and one of the reasons for that is that it's hard to guess which projects will succeed and which will fail. But wait, startups have solved this problem perfectly: Anybody is allowed to vet a startup and decide to invest (bet) their money on this startup succeeding, and if the startup does succeed, then the early investors get a big financial return.
The EA community could do the same, only it is missing the part where we give big financial returns to projects that turned out good.
This would make the fund's job much easier: They would have to vet which project helped IN RETROSPECT, which is much easier, and they'll leave the hard prediction work to the market.
I heard of a promising EA project that is for some reason having trouble raising funds. I'm considering funding it myself, though I am not rich and that would be somewhat broken to do. But I AM rich enough to fund this project and bet on it working well enough to get a Retroactive Public Good grant in the future, if such a thing existed. I also might have some advantage over the EA Fund in vetting this project.
https://medium.com/ethereum-optimism/retroactive-public-goods-funding-33c9b7d00f0c
Related: Impact Certificates
EA Forum Writers
Pay top EA Forum contributors to write about EA topics full time
Problem: Some of the EA Forum’s top writers don’t work on EA, but contribute some of the community’s most important ideas via writing.
Solution: Pay them to write about EA ideas full time. This could be combined with the independent researcher incubator quite well.
Pay users based on post karma.
(but not comment or question karma which are really easy to get in comparison)
Goodharts law
don't think we'd be wedded to a single metric. Also isn't karma already weak to goodhearts law? I think we should already be concerned with this.
I don't think we'd be wedded to this metric
A “Red Team” to rigorously explore possible futures and advocate against interventions that threaten to backfire
Research That Can Help Us Improve, Effective Altruism, Epistemic Institutions, Values and Reflective Processes
Motivation. There are a lot of proposals here. There are additional proposals on the Future Fund website. There are additional proposals also on various lists I have collected. Many EA charities are already implementing ambitious interventions. But really we’re quite clueless about what the future will bring.
This week alone I’ve discussed with friends and acquaintances three decisions in completely different contexts that might make the difference between paradise and hell for all sentient life, and not just in the abstract in the way that cluelessness forces us to assign some probability to almost any outcome but in the sense were we could point to concrete mechanisms along which the failure might occur. Yet we had to decide. I imagine that people in more influential positions than mine have to make similar decisions on almost a daily basis and on hardly any more information.
As a result, the robustness of an intervention has been the key criterion for prioritization for me for the past six years now. It’s something like the number and breadth of scenarios that trusted, impartial people have thought through along which the intervention may have any effect, especially unintended effects, divided by the number of bad failure modes that they’ve found and haven’t been able to mitigate. I mostly don’t bother to think about probabilities for this exercise, though that would be even better.
Tools. Organizations should continue to do their own red-teaming in-house, but that is probably always going to be less rigorous and systematic than what a dedicated red-teaming team could do.
I hear that Policy Horizons Canada (h/t Jaques Thibodeau), RAND (h/t Christian Tarsney), and others have experience in eliciting such scenarios systematically. The goal is often to have a policy response ready for every eventuality. The focus may need to be different for effective alturism and especially any interventions to do with existential and suffering risks: We can probe our candidate interventions using scenario planning or ensample simulations and discard them if they seem too risky.
I imagine that you could also set up a system akin to a prediction market platform but with stronger incentives to create new markets and to conditionally chain markets, including the UI/UX to make voting on conditional predictions frictionless, without much mental math.
Jaques Thibodeau is also thinking about using machine learning tools to aid with the elicitation of scenarios.
Organization. The final “Red Team” organization needs to have strong social buy-in from EA-branded organizations to offset the social awkwardness of being a perpetual critic. It’ll probably need to recruit the sort of people who thrive in the role of a devil’s advocate. But it’ll also need to hold itself to its own high standards and disband if it finds that its own mission is at risk of backfiring badly.
I had a similar idea, and I think that a few more things need to be included in the discussion of this.
There are multiple levels of ideas in EA, and I think that a red team becomes much more valuable when they are engaging with issues that are applicable to the whole of EA.
I think ideas like the institutional critique of EA, the other heavy tail, and others are often not read and internalized by EAs. I think it is worth having a team that makes arguments like this, then breaks them down and provides methods for avoiding the pitfalls pointed out in them.
Things brought up in critique of EA should be specifically recognized and talked about as good. These ideas should be recognized, held up to be examined, then passed out to our community so that we can grow and overcome the objections.
I'm almost always lurking on the forum, and I don't often see posts talking about EA critiques.
That should change.
I basically agree but in this proposal I was really referring to such things as “Professor X is using probabilistic programming to model regularities in human moral preferences. How can that backfire and result in the destruction of our world? What other risks can we find? Can X mitigate them?”
I also think that the category that you’re referring to is very valuable but I think those are “simply” contributions to priorities research as they are published by the Global Priorities Institute (e.g., working papers by Greaves and Tarsney come to mind). Rethink Priorities, Open Phil, FHI, and various individuals also occasionally publish articles that I would class that way. I think priorities research is one of the most important fields of EA and much broader than my proposal, but it is also well-known. Hence why my proposal is not meant to be about that.
Subsidise catastrophic risk-related markets on prediction markets
Prediction markets and catastrophic risk
Many markets don't exist because there isn't enough liquidity. A fund could create important longtermist markets on biorisk, AI safetry and nuclear war by pledging to provide significant liquidity once created. This would likely still only work for markets resolving in 1-10 years, due to inflation, but still*.
*It has been suggested to run prediction markets which use indices rather than currency. But people have shown reluctance to bet on ETH markets, so might show reluctance here too.
FTX, which itself runs prediction markets, might be particularly well-suited for prediction-market interventions like this. I myself think that they could do a lot to advance people's understanding of prediction markets if in addition to their presidential prediction market, they also offered a conditional prediction market of how an indicator like the S&P 500 would do 1 week after the 2024 election, conditional on the Republicans winning vs the Democrats winning. Conditional prediction markets for important indicators on big national elections would provide both directly useful info in addition to educating people about prediction markets' potential.
My company seeks to predict or rapidly recognize health security catastrophes, and also requires an influx of capital when such an event occurs (since we wind up with loads of new consulting opportunities to help respond).
Is there currently any way for us to incentivize thick markets on topics that are correlated with our business? The idea of getting the information plus the hedge is super appealing!
Pandemic preparedness in LMIC countries
Biorisk
COVID has shown us that biorisk challenges fall on all countries, regardless of how prepared and well-resourced the countries are. While there certainly are many problems with pandemic preparedness high-income countries that need to be addressed, LMIC countries face even more issues in helping detect, identify, contain, mitigate, and/or prevent currently known and novel pathogens. Additionally, even after high income countries successfully contain a pathogen it may continue to spread within LMIC countries opening up risk of further more virulent mutations.
We'd like to see a project that works with LMIC governments to understand their current pandemic prevention plans and understand their local context. This project would especially focused on novel pathogens that are more severe than currently known pathogens -- and help provide the resources and knowledge needed to upgrade their plans to match the best practices of current bio-risk experts. Such a project would likely benefit from a team that contains expertise working with LMIC countries. An emergency fund and expert advice can also be provisioned to be ready to go when pathogens are detected.
Within the effective altruism movement, some organizations that have successfully worked with LMIC countries like the Lead Exposure Elimination Project, Fortify Health, Suvita, Wave, and Fish Welfare Initiative could be consulted about how they successfully adapted to local contexts. Outside of our immediate movement, it will be important to work with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and understand what they are doing and where their efforts may need additional support.
A large grant to Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) targeted to concerns about novel pathogens may also be warranted.
Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion and not the opinion of Rethink Priorities. This project idea was not seen by anyone else at Rethink Priorities prior to posting.
Longtermist risk screening and certification of institutions
Artificial Intelligence, Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophe
Companies, nonprofits and government institutions participate and invest in activities that might significantly increase global catastrophic risk like gain-of-function research or research that might increase the likelihood of unaligned AGI. We’d like to see an organisation that evaluates and proposes policies and practices that should be followed in order to reduce these risks. Institutions that commit to following these practices and submit themselves to independent audits could be certified. This could help investors and funders to screen institutions for potential risks. It could also be used in future corporate campaigns to move companies and investors into adopting responsible practices.
How would this be effective, rather than creating additional work on granmakers and increasing the entry barriers for grantees. Seems to many similar schemes for other kinds of risk end up as meaningless box-ticking enterprises which would lead to less effectiveness and possibly reputational harm to EA.
This is my prior when I hear a new audit proposed, though I hope it won't apply in your case.
I agree that there is a risk that this leads to additional burden without meaningful impact.
Seeing the numbers of certifications currently deployed that are used public-facing for marketing as well as to reduce supply-chain risks (see for example this certifier) I would see the chance that longtermist causes like biosecurity risks will be incorporated into existing standards or launched as new standards within the next 10 years at 70%.
If we can preempt this with building one or more standards based on actual expected impact instead of just using it to tick boxes. If this bet works out then we might make a counterfactual impact however I would also like to see the organisation shut down after doing research if it doesn't see a path to a certification having impact.
Resilient ways to archive valuable technical / cultural / ecological information
Biorisk and recovery from catastrophe
In ancient Sumeria, clay tablets recording ordinary market transactions were considered disposable. But today's much larger and wealthier civilization considers them priceless for the historical insight they offer. By the same logic, if human civilization millennia from now becomes a flourishing utopia, they'll probably wish that modern-day civilization had done a better job at resiliently preserving valuable information. For example, over the past 120 years, around 1 vertebrate species has gone extinct each year, meaning we permanently lose the unique genetic info that arose in that species through millions of years of evolution.
There are many existing projects in this space -- like the internet archive, museums storing cultural artifacts, and efforts to protect endangered species. But almost none of these projects are designed robustly enough to last many centuries with the long-term future in mind. Museums can burn down, modern digital storage technologies like CDs and flash memory aren't designed to last for centuries, and many critically endangered species (such as those which are "extinct in the wild" but survive in captivity) would likely go extinct if their precarious life-support breeding programs ever lost funding or were disrupted by war/disaster/etc. At FTX, we're potentially interested in funding new, resilient approaches to storing valuable information, including the DNA sequences of living creatures.
(Filed under "recovery from catastrophe" because it involves archiving and burying stuff, but importantly I think the benefit of resilient cultural/ecological archiving (rather than preserving crucial technical knowledge) is actually larger in best-case utopian scenarios.)
Agreed, very important in my view! I’ve been meaning to post a very similar proposal with one important addition:
Anthropogenic causes of civilizational collapse are (arguably) much more likely than natural ones. These anthropogenic causes are enabled by technology. If we preserve an unbiased sample of today’s knowledge or even if it’s the knowledge that we consider to have been most important, it may just steer the next cycle of our civilization right into the same kind of catastrophe again. If we make the information particularly durable, maybe we’ll even steer all future cycles of our civilization into the same kind of catastrophe.
The selection of the information needs to be very carefully thought out. Maybe only information on thorium reactors rather than uranium ones; only information on clear energy sources; only information on proof of stake; only information on farming low-suffering food; no prose or poetry that glorifies natural death or war; etc.
I think that is also something that none of the existing projects take into account.
Language models for detecting bad scholarship
Epistemic institutions
Anyone who has done desk research carefully knows that many citations don't support the claim they're cited for - usually in a subtle way, but sometimes a total nonsequitur. Here's a fun list of 13 features we need to protect ourselves.
This seems to be a side effect of academia scaling so much in recent decades - it's not that scientists are more dishonest than other groups, it's that they don't have time to carefully read everything in their sub-sub-field (... while maintaining their current arms-race publication tempo).
Take some claim P which is below the threshold of obviousness that warrants a citation.
It seems relatively easy, given current tech, to answer: (1) "Does the cited article say P?" This question is closely related to document summarisation - not a solved task, but the state of the art is workable. Having a reliable estimate of even this weak kind of citation quality would make reading research much easier - but under the above assumption of unread sources, it would also stop many bad citations from being written in the first place.
It is very hard to answer (2) "Is the cited article strong evidence for P?", mostly because of the lack of a ground-truth dataset.
We elaborate on this here.
(Thanks to Jungwon Byun and Gwern Branwen for comments.)
Getting former hiring managers from quant firms to help with alignment hiring
Artificial Intelligence, Empowering Exceptional People
Despite having lots of funding, alignment seems to not have been very successful at attracting top talent to date. Quant firms, on the other hand, have become known for very successfully acquiring talent and putting them to work on difficult conceptual and engineering problems. Although buy-in to alignment before one can contribute is often cited as a reason, this is, if anything, even more of a problem for quant firms, since very few people are inherently interested in quant trading as an end. As such, importing some of this know how could help substantially improve alignment hiring and onboarding efficiency.
On malevolence: How exactly does power corrupt?
Artificial Intelligence / Values and Reflective Processes
How does it happen, if it happens? Some plausible stories:
Yes, that's interesting and plausibly very useful to understand better. Might also affect some EAs at some point.
Power changes your incentives so much that it corrupts all but the strongest. The difference with the last one is that value drift is almost immediate upon getting power.
The hedonic treadmill might be part of it. You get used to the personal perks quickly, so you still feel motivated & justified to still put ~90% of your energy into problems that affect you personally -> removing threats to your rule, marginal status-improvements, getting along with people close to you
And some discussion about the backwards causation idea is here in an oldie from Yudkowsky: Why Does Power Corrupt?
Bounty Budgets
Like Regranting, but for Bounties
Problem: In the same way that regranting decentralizes grantmaking, so do the same thing for bounties. For example, give the top 20 AI safety researchers up to $100,000 to create bounties or RFPs for, say, technical research problems. They could also reallocate their budget to other trusted people, creating a system of decentralized trust.
In theory, FTX’s regrantors could already do this with their existing budgets, but this would encourage people to think creatively about using bounties or RFPs.
Bounties are great because you only pay out if it's successful. If hypothetically each researcher created 5 bounties at $10,000 each that’d be 100 bounties - lots of experiments.
RFPs are great because it puts less risk on the applicants but also is a scalable, low-management way to turn money into impact.
Examples: 1) I’ll pay you $1,000 for every bounty idea that gets funded
2) Richard Ngo
More public EA charity evaluators
Effective Altruism
There are dozens of EA fundraising organizations deferring to just a handful of organizations that publish their research on funding opportunities, most notably GiveWell, Founders Pledge and Animal Charity Evaluators. We would like to see more professional funding opportunity research organizations sharing their research with the public, both to increase the quality of research in the areas that are currently covered - through competition and diversity of perspectives and methodologies - and to cover important areas that aren’t yet covered such as AI and EA meta.
AI Safety “school” / More AI safety Courses
Train People in AI Safety at Scale
Problem: Part of the talent bottleneck is caused by there not being enough people who have the relevant skills and knowledge to do AI safety work. Right now, there’s no clear way to gain those skills. There’s the AGI Fundamentals curriculum, which has been a great success, but aside from that, there’s just a handful of reading lists. This ambiguity and lack of structure lead to way fewer people getting into the field than otherwise would.
Solution: Create an AI safety “school” or a bunch more AI safety courses. Make it so that if you finish the AGI Fundamentals course there are a lot more courses where you can dive deeper into various topics (e.g. an interpretability course, values learning course, an agent foundations course, etc). Make it so there’s a clear curriculum to build up your technical skills (probably just finding the best existing courses, putting them in the right order, and adding some accountability systems). This could be funded course by course, or funded as a school, which would probably lead to more and better quality content in the long run.
Offer paid sabbatical to people considering changing careers
Empowering Exceptional People
People sometimes are locked-in in their non-EA careers because while working, they do not have time to:
Create an organization that will offer paid sabbaticals to people considering changing careers to more EA-aligned jobs to help this transition. During the sabbatical, they could be members of a community of people in a similar situation, with coaching available.
Agree. I think that having an Advance Market Commitment system for this makes sense. E.g., FTX says 'We will fund mid-career academics/professionals for up to x months to do y. ' My experience is that most of the high value people I know who are good professional are sufficiently time poor and dissuaded by uncertainty that they won't spend 2-5 hours to apply for something they don't know they will get. The barriers and costs are probably greater than most EA funders realise.
An alternative/related idea is to have a simple EOI system where people can submit a fleshed out CV and a paragraph and then get a AMC on an application - e.g., We think that there is a more than 60% chance that we would fund this and would therefore welcome a full application.
A public EA impact investing evaluator
Effective Altruism, Empowering Exceptional People
Charity evaluators that publicly share their research - such as GiveWell, Founders Pledge and Animal Charity Evaluators - have arguably not only helped move a lot of money to effective funding opportunities but also introduced many people to the principles of effective altruism, which they have applied in their lives in various ways. Apart from some relatively small projects (1) (2) (3) there is currently no public EA research presence in the growing impact investing sector, which is both large in the amount of money being invested and in its potential to draw more exceptional people’s attention to the effective altruism movement. We’d love to see an organization that takes GiveWell-quality funding opportunity research to the impact investing space and publicly shares its findings.
Seeing this late, but this is a wonderful idea! Will Roderick and I worked on "GiveWell for Impact Investing" a while ago and published this research on the EA Forum. We ultimately pursued other professional priorities, but we continue to think the space is very promising, stay involved, and may reenter it in the future.
Predicting Our Future Grants
Epistemic Institutions, Research That Can Help Us Improve
If we had access to a crystal ball that allowed us to know exactly what our grants five years from now otherwise would have been, we can make substantially better decisions now. Just making the grants we'd otherwise have made five years in the future can save a lot of grantmaking time and money, as well as cause many amazing projects to happen more quickly.
We don't have a crystal ball that lets us see future grants. But perhaps high-quality forecasts can be the next best thing. Thus, we're extremely excited about people experimenting with Prediction-Evaluation setups to predict the Future Fund's future grants with high accuracy, helping us to potentially allocate better grants more quickly.
Participatory longtermism
Values and reflective processes, Effective Altruism
Most longtermist and EA ideas come from a small group of people with similar backgrounds, but could affect the global population now and in the future. This creates the risk of longtermist decisionmakers not being aligned with that wider population. Participatory methods aim to involve people decisionmaking about issues that affect them, and they have become common in fields such as international development, global health, and humanitarian aid. Although a lot could be learned from existing participatory methods, they would need to be adapted to issues of concern to EAs and longtermists. The fund could support the development of new participatory methods that fit with EA and longtermist concerns, and could fund the running of participatory processes on key issues.
Additional notes:
This comments section is pretty participatory.
Cool idea! :) You might be interested in skimming the report Deliberation May Improve Decision-Making from Rethink Priorities.
> In this essay from Rethink Priorities, we discuss the opportunities that deliberative reforms offer for improving institutional decision-making. We begin by describing deliberation and its links to democratic theory, and then sketch out examples of deliberative designs. Following this, we explore the evidence that deliberation can engender fact-based reasoning, opinion change, and under certain conditions can motivate longterm thinking. So far, most deliberative initiatives have not been invested with a direct role in the decision-making process and so the majority of policy effects we see are indirect. Providing deliberative bodies with a binding and direct role in decision-making could improve this state of affairs. We end by highlighting some limitations and areas of uncertainty before noting who is already working in this area and avenues for further research.
Love the idea - just writing to add that Futures Studies, participatory futures in particular & future scenario methodologies could be really useful for Longtermist research. Methods in these fields can be highly rigorous (I've been working with some futures experts as part of a project to design 3 visions of the future - which have just finished going through a lengthly stress-testing and crowd-sourcing process to open them up to public reflection and input), especially if the scenario design is approached in a systematised way using a well-developed framework.
I could imagine various projects that aim to create a variety of different desirable visions of the future through participatory methods, identifying core characteristics, pathways towards them, system dynamics and so on to illustrate the value and importance of longtermist governance to get there. Just one idea, but there are plenty of ways to apply this field to EA/Longtermism!
Would love to talk about your idea more as it also chimes with a paper I'm drafting, 'Contesting Longtermism', looking at some of the core tensions within the concept and how these could be opened up to wider input. If you're interested in talking about it, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]
Thanks for the point about rigor - I'm not that familiar with participatory futures but had encountered it through an organisation that tends to be a bit hypey. But good to know there is rigorous work in that field.
I agree that there are lots of opportunities to apply to EA/Longtermism and your paper sounds interesting. I'll send an email.
Research on the long-run determinants of civilizational progress
Economic growth
What factors were the root cause of the industrial revolution? Why did industrialization happen in the time and place and ways that it did? How have the key factors supporting economic growth changed over the last two centuries? Why do some developing countries manage to "catch up" to the first world, while others lag behind or get stuck in a "middle-income trap"? Is the pace of entrepreneurship or scientific innovation slowing down -- and if so, what can we do about it? Is increasing amounts of "vetocracy" an inevitable disease that afflicts all stable and prosperous societies (as Holden Karnofsky argues here), or can we hope to change our culture or institutions to restore dynamism? At FTX, we'd be interested to fund research into these "progress studies" questions. We're also interested in funding advocacy groups promoting potential policy reforms derived from the ideas of the progress studies movement.
See also many of Zac Townsend's ideas, the idea of nuclear power & GMO advocacy, and my list of object-level planks in the progress-studies platform.
Pay prestigious universities to host free EA-related courses to very large numbers of government officials from around the world
Empowering Exceptional People
The direct benefit of the courses would be to give government officials better tools for thinking and talking with each other.
The indirect benefit could be to allow large numbers of pre-disposed officials to be seen by <some organisation> who could use the opportunity to identify those with particular potential and offer them extra support or opportunities so they can make an even bigger impact.
The need for it to be free is to overcome the blocker of otherwise needing to write a business case for attendance which may then require some sort of tortuous approval process.
The need for it to be hosted at a prestigious university is to overcome the blocker of justifying to bosses or colleagues why the course is worthwhile by allowing piggybacking off the University's brand.
Infrastructure to support independent researchers
Epistemic Institutions, Empowering Exceptional People
The EA and Longtermist communities appear to contain a relatively large proportion of independent researchers compared to traditional academia. While working independently can provide the freedom to address impactful topics by liberating researchers from the perversive incentives, bureaucracy, and other constraints imposed on academics, the lack of institutional support can impose other difficulties that range from routine (e.g. difficulties accessing pay-walled publications) to restrictive (e.g. lack of mentorship, limited opportunities for professional development). Virtual independent scholarship institutes have recently emerged to provide institutional support (e.g. affiliation for submitting journal articles, grant management) for academic researchers working independently. We expect that facilitating additional and more productive independent EA and Longtermist research will increase the demographic diversity and expand the geographical inclusivity of these communities of researchers. Initially, we would like to determine the main needs and limitations independent researchers in these areas face and then support the creation of a virtual institute focussed on addressing those points.
This project was inspired by proposals written by Arika Virapongse and recent posts by Linch Zhang.
(I think this is a good idea! For anyone perusing these FTX project ideas in the future, here is a post I wrote exploring drawbacks and uncertanties that prevent people like me from getting excited about independent research as a career.)
EA Health Institute/Chief Wellness Officer
Empowering Exceptional People, Effective Altruism, Community Building
Optimizing physical and mental health can improve cognitive performance and decrease burnout. We need EAs/longtermists to have the health resilience to weather the storm - physical fitness, sleep, nutrition, mental health. An institution could be created to assist EA aligned organizations and individuals. Using best practices from high performance workplace health, both personal and organizational, and innovative new ideas, a wellness team could help EAs have sustainable and productive careers. This could be done through consulting, coaching, preparation of educational materials or retreats. From a community growth perspective, EA becomes more attractive to some when one doesn’t have to sacrifice health for deeply meaningful work.
(Disclosure -I'm a physician/physician wellness SME - helping with this could be a good personal fit)
Unified, quantified world model
Epistemic Institutions, Effective Altruism, Values and Refelctive Processes, Research That Can Help Us Improve
Effective altruism started out, to some extend, with a strong focus on quantitative prioritization along the lines of GiveWell’s quantitative models, the Disease Control Priorities studies, etc. But they largely ignore complex, often nonlinear effects of these interventions on culture, international coordination, and the long-term future. Attempts to transfer the same rigor to quantative models of the long-term future (such as Tarsney’s set of models in The Epistemic Challenge to Longtermism) are still in their infancy. Otherwise effective altruist prioritization today is a grab bag of hundreds of considerations that interact in complex ways that (probably) no one has an overview over. Decision-makers may forget to take half of them into account if they haven’t recently thought about them. That makes it hard to prioritize, and misprioritization becomes more and more costly with every year.
A dedicated think tank could create and continually expand a unified world model that (1) is a repository of all considerations that affect altruistic decision-making, (2) makes explicit the interactions between these considerations, (3) gauges its own uncertainty, (4) allows for the prioritization of interventions with no common proxy measure for their impact via interventions that can be measured via several proxies, and (5) averages between multiple ways to estimate uncertain quantities.
Alternatively, a tech (charity) startup could create standardized APIs for models of small parts of the world so that they can be recombined analogously to how I can recombine many open-source React libraries to create my own software. Then an ecosystem of researchers could form who publish any models they create for everyone to use and recombine. (This could be bootstrapped via consultancy services for those groups who are interested in small parts of the world.)
People who are working on this are QURI (Ozzie Gooen, Sam Nolen), Aryeh Englander, Paal Kvarberg, and maybe others. I considered it for a few months (summary of my thinking). Some of them pursue the approach of direct modeling via Bayesian networks while QURI pursues the approach of building an ecosystem around a standardized API.
Cool - you might also be interested in my submission, "Comprehensive, personalized, open source simulation engine for public policy reforms". It's not in the pitch but my intent is for it to be global as well.
Awesome, upvoted! You can also have a look at my “Red team” proposal. It proposes to use methods from your field applied to any EA interventions (political and otherwise) to steel them against the risk of having harmful effects.
Civic sector software
Economic Growth, Values and Reflective Processes
Software and software vendors are among the biggest barriers to instituting new public policies or processes. The last twenty years have seen staggering advances in technology, user interfaces, and user-centric design, but governments have been left behind, saddled with outdated, bespoke, and inefficient software solutions. Worse, change of any kind can be impractical with existing technology systems or when choosing from existing vendors. This fact prevents public servants from implementing new evidence-based practices, becoming more data-driven, or experimenting with new service models.
Recent improvements in civic technology are often at the fringes of government activity, while investments in best practices or “what works” are often impossible for any government to implement because of technology. So while over the last five years, there has been an explosion of investments and activity around “civic innovation,” the results are often mediocre. On the one hand, governments end up with little more than tech toys or apps that have no relationship to the outcomes that matter (e.g. poverty alleviation, service delivery). While on the other hand, tens of millions of dollars are invested in academic research, thought leadership, and pilot programs on improving outcomes that matter, but no government can ever practically implement them because of their software.
Done correctly software can be the wedge to radically improve governments. The process to build that technology can be inclusive: engaging users inside government, citizens that interface with programs, community stakeholders, and outside experts and academics.
We are interested in funding tools that vastly and fundamentally improve the provisioning of services by civic organizations.
Hey, this is somewhat my domain.
The bottleneck is not building software, it is more like "governments are old gray organizations that don't want to change anything".
If you find any place where the actual software development is the bottleneck, I'd be very happy to hear and maybe take part in it. I also expect many other EA developers to want to take part, it sounds like a good project
(For context, I was the Chief Data Officer of the California State Government and CTO of Newark, NJ when Cory Booker was Mayor).
I actually think the way to do this is to partner with one city and build everything they need to run the city. The problem is that people can't use piecemeal systems very well. It would just take a huge initial set of capital -- like exactly the type of capital that could be provided here.
Ah ok forget about it being somewhat my domain :P
Sounds like a really interesting suggestion. Especially if it would be for a city that "matters" (that will help people do important things?), I think this project could interest me and others
(I'm interested if you have opinions about https://zencity.io/, as a domain expert)
Somewhat related, I submitted "Comprehensive, personalized, open source simulation engine for public policy reforms". Governments could also use the simulation engine to explore policy reforms and to improve operations, e.g. to establish individual households' eligibility for means-tested benefit programs.
Teaching secondary school students about the most pressing issues for humanity's long-term future
Values and Reflective Processes, Effective Altruism
Secondary education focuses mostly on the past and present, and tends not to address the most pressing issues for humanity’s long-term future. I would like to see textbooks, courses, and/or curriculum reform that promote evidence-based and thoughtful discourse about the major threats facing the long-term future of humanity. Secondary school students are a promising group for such outreach and education because they have their whole careers ahead of them, and numerous studies have shown that they care about the future. This may serve a significant benefit in making more young people care about these issues and support them with either their time or money
High-quality human data
Artificial Intelligence
Most proposals for aligning advanced AI require collecting high-quality human data on complex tasks such as evaluating whether a critique of an argument was good, breaking a difficult question into easier subquestions, or examining the outputs of interpretability tools. Collecting high-quality human data is also necessary for many current alignment research projects.
We’d like to see a human data startup that prioritizes data quality over financial cost. It would follow complex instructions, ensure high data quality and reliability, and operate with a fast feedback loop that’s optimized for researchers’ workflow. Having access to this service would make it quicker and easier for safety teams to iterate on different alignment approaches
Some alignment research teams currently manage their own contractors because existing services (such as surgehq.ai and scale.ai) don’t fully address their needs; a competent human data startup could free up considerable amounts of time for top researchers.
Such an organization could also practice and build capacity for things that might be needed at ‘crunch time’ – i.e., rapidly producing moderately large amounts of human data, or checking a large volume of output from interpretability tools or adversarial probes with very high reliability.
The market for high-quality data will likely grow – as AI labs train increasingly large models at a high compute cost, they will become more willing to pay for data. As models become more competent, data needs to be more sophisticated or higher-quality to actually improve model performance.
Making it less annoying for researchers to gather high-quality human data relative to using more compute would incentivize the entire field towards doing work that’s more helpful for alignment, e.g., improving products by making them more aligned rather than by using more compute.
[Thanks to Jonas V for writing a bunch of this comment for me]
[Views are my own and do not represent that of my employer]
Advocacy for digital minds
Artificial Intelligence, Values and Reflective Processes, Effective Altruism
Digital sentience is likely to be widespread in the most important future scenarios. It may be possible to shape the development and deployment of artificially sentient beings in various ways, e.g. through corporate outreach and lobbying. For example, constitutions can be drafted or revised to grant personhood on the basis of sentience; corporate charters can include responsibilities to sentient subroutines; and laws regarding safe artificial intelligence can be tailored to consider the interests of a sentient system. We would like to see an organization dedicated to identifying and pursuing opportunities to protect the interests of digital minds. There could be one or multiple organizations. We expect foundational research to be crucial here; a successful effort would hinge on thorough research into potential policies and the best ways of identifying digital suffering.
X-risk Art Competitions
Fund competitions to make x-risk art to create emotion
Problem: Some EAs find longtermism intellectually compelling but not emotionally compelling, so they don’t work on it, yet feel guilty.
Solution: Hold competitions where artists make art explicitly intended to make x-risk emotionally compelling. Use crowd voting to determine winners.
Translate EA content at scale
Reach More Potential EAs in Non-English Languages
Problem: Lots of potential EAs don’t speak English, but most EA content hasn’t been translated
Solution: Pay people to translate the top EA content of all time into the most popular languages, then promote it to the relevant language communities.
Little addition: I imagine that knowledgeable EAs in the respective target countries should do that as opposed to professional translators so that they can do full language and cultural mediation rather than just translating the words.
Provide personal assistants for EAs
Empowering Exceptional People
Many senior EAs spend way too much with busywork because it is hard to get a good personal assistant. This is currently so because:
All these factors would be removed if an agency managed personal assistants.
Kat Woods (Nonlinear) is someone to talk to when it comes to this project.
Institutions as coordination mechanisms
Artificial Intelligence, Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophe, Great Power Relations, Space Governance, Values and Reflective Processes
A lot of major problems - such as biorisk, AI governance risk and the risks of great power war - can be modeled as coordination problems, and may be at least partially solved via better coordination among the relevant actors. We’d love to see experiments with institutions that use mechanism design to allow actors to coordinate better. One current example of such an institution is NATO: Article 5 is a coordination mechanism that aligns the interests of NATO member states. But we could create similar institutions for e.g. biorisk, where countries commit to a matching mechanism - where “everyone acts in a certain way if everyone else does” - with costs imposed to defectors to solve a tragedy of the commons dynamic.
Sjir, you may be interested in Roote's work on meta existential risk!
Thank you!
Experiments with and within video games
Values and Reflective Processes, Empowering Exceptional People
Video games are a powerful tool to reach hundreds of millions of people, an engine of creativity and innovation, and a fertile ground for experimentation. We’d love to see experiments with and within video games that help create new tools to address major issues. For instance, we’d love experiments with new governance and incentive systems and institutions, new ways to educate people about pressing problems, games that simulate actual problems and allow players to brainstorm solutions, and games that help identify and recruit exceptional people.
Replicate the Project Ideas Competition for other types of communities than EAs
Research That Can Help Us Improve
People have contributed a lot of really insightful and promising ideas here. Given that "there are no wrong ideas in brainstorming" and that there may be systematic blind spots for effective altruists/longtermists' paradigm, perhaps doing this broad-idea-crowdsourcing exercise in other types of communities could get us new, potentially promising ideas.
Regular prizes/awards for EA art
Effective Altruism
Works of art (e.g. stories, music, visual art) can be a major force inspiring people to do something or care about something. Prizes can directly lead to work (see for example the creative writing contest), but might also have an even bigger role in defining and promoting some type of work or some quality in works. Creating a (for example) annual prize/award scheme might go a long way towards defining and promoting an EA-aligned genre (consider how the existence of Hugo and Nebula awards helps define and promote science fiction). The existence of a prestigious / high-paying prize for the presence of specific qualities in a work is also likely to draw attention to those qualities more broadly; news like "Work X wins award for its depiction of [thoughtful altruism] / [the long-term future] / [epistemic rigor under uncertainty]" might make those qualities more of a conversation topic and something that more artists want to depict and explore, with knock-on effects for culture.
Impact markets to smooth out retroactive funding
Effective Altruism, Empowering Excetional People, Economic Growth, Epistemic Institutions
Yonatan Cale already made the case for retroactive funding, i.e. that it’s easier to tell what has succeeded than what will succeed. The questions of what will succeed, in turn, can be answered by a market.
Investors will try to predict which charities will succeed to the point of receiving retroactive funding. A retroactive funder can make larger grants in proportion to their reduction in uncertainty (5–10x), time savings from having to do less vetting (~ 2x), and delay (~ 1.5x). Hence investors with enough foresight can even make a profit and turn the prediction of retro fund decisions into their business model. Promising charities can bootstrap rapidly with these early financial injections, successful serial charity entrepreneurs can accumulate more and more capital to reinvest into their next charity venture, and funders save time because they have to do only a fraction of the vetting.
We – Kenny Bambridge, Matt Brooks, Dony Christie, Denis Drescher, and a number of advisors – are actively working toward this goal. I’ve been thinking about the mechanisms and risks of this undertaking for a few months and I’m working on a future EA Forum post. I’ve also been in touch with Owen Cotton-Barratt.
Studying Economics Growth Deterrents and Cost Disease
Economic growth
Economic growth has forces working against it. Cost disease is the most well-known and pernicious of these in developed economies. We are interested in funding work on understanding, preventing, and reversing cost disease and other mechanisms that are slowing economic growth.
(Inspired by Patrick Collison)
Secure full-stack open-source computing for information security
Artificial Intelligence, Biorisk, Research that will help us improve
Much of our sensitive research and weaponry, like AI, biolabs, nuclear weapons, etc, are built upon insecure infrastructure. Think of a scenario in the future where one hacker could hack and control fleets of self-driving cars and essentially have a swarm of missiles. Real information security would need to build the full stack of computing from the hardware, OS, compilers, to application layers. It would also ideally be open-source and inspectable to ensure security.
Funding Stress/Penetration Tests of vital orgs/infrastructure
Cyber Risks, Cybersecurity
Most orgs don't spend enough on ensuring their infrastructure is safe from hackers and we should ensure that labs working on AI safety, biorisk companies, EA orgs etc. are safe from malicious hackers.
Longtermist democracy / institutional quality index
Values and Reflective Processes, Epistemic Institutions
Several indices exist to quantify the degree of liberal democracy in all countries and territories around the world, like Freedom in the World and the EIU's Democracy Index. These indices are convenient for describing and comparing the state of liberal democracy in different countries, because they distill the various complicated aspects of a state's political system into one or more numbers that are easy for a layperson to understand.
We propose a "democracy index" that emphasizes the qualities of political systems that are most relevant to making the long-term future go well. Such qualities could include voting systems, free and fair elections, voter competence, and capacity for long-term planning in government - and the set of qualities used could be based on research such as this post. This index would help make analysis of countries and territories' political systems more accessible to EAs/longtermists who aren't political scientists, since it would distill them down to a few easy-to-understand numbers. It would also help the longtermist community track progress towards better political systems and identify opportunities to improve institutions.
See also: the CGD's Commitment to Development Index
Fund Sentinel, a nationwide pandemic early response system (originally suggested by alexrjl)
Biowarfare
Fund the biosecurity program explained on this podcast. Any time anyone gets sick you sequence a sample. Any unknown genetic material gets sequenced again at a higher level. This allows for rapid response to new pathogens.
Politician forecasting stipend
Politics, better epistemics
Many people think politicians are underpaid. Many think they have a poor grasp of the likelihood of future events. Offer every Senator and Representative a yearly sum to make public predictions about future public statistics. The forecasting would help them correct their own errors and provide a valuable source of information on who makes good decisions about the future and who doesn't.
Making Future Grantmaking More Optimal
Effective altruism
Moderators for EA/Longtermist FB/Groups or Discords
Effective Altruism
(Refinement of EA-relevant Substacks, Youtube, social media, etc. )
Given the huge amount of funding available to EA, we probably don't want to skimp on moderators for major Facebook or Slack or Discord groups even though these have traditionally been run by volunteers. It'd be worthwhile at least experimenting to see if paid part-time moderators would be able to add extra value by writing up summaries/content for the groups, running online calls, setting up networking spreadsheets and spending more time thinking through strategy.
Risks: We might end up paying money for work that we would have gotten for free. Attempts to set up networking spreadsheets or run calls might have minimal participation and hence minimal impact.
Fyi paid part-time moderators would need buy-in from the online community – the EA Corner Discord seems against paid moderators, for example.
I really appreciate how many ideas you're proposing, Chris!
Fyi paid part-time moderators would need buy-in from the online community – the EA Corner Discord seems against paid moderators, for example.
Of course. I guess I could see some negative effects from how it could encourage people to seek the mod roles as a way of being paid rather than because they could do a good job. I think that this issue could mostly be avoided by offering student level rates. Running a Facebook group seems like a nice entrypoint into EA movement building.
I really appreciate how many ideas you're proposing, Chris!
Thanks, you're welcome!
Incentives could also be aligned by offering existing volunteer mods a salary to spend more time moderating.
More Insight Timelines
In 2018, the Median Group produced an impressive timeline of all of the insights required for current AI, stretching back to China's Han Dynasty(!)
The obvious extension is to alignment insights. Along with some judgment calls about relative importance, this would help any effort to estimate / forecast progress, and things like the importance of academia and non-EAs to AI alignment. (See our past work for an example of something in dire need of an exhaustive weighted insight list.)
Another set in need of collection are more general breakthroughs - engineering records broken, paradigms invented, art styles inaugurated - to help us answer giant vague questions about e.g. slowdowns in physics, perverse equilibria in academic production, and "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?"
Research differential technological progress and trajectory changes
Research That Can Help Us Improve, Values and Reflective Processes
The idea of Differential technological progress (DTP) may be a crucial consideration for many at-first-glance good ideas like:
- improving scientific publishing
- increasing GDP
- increasing average intelligence
But given its importance, there hasn`t been much research and publications on GTP.
Central question for research is how to use DTP to prioritize interventions. Examples of subquestion to research are:
- when in the past there were intentional trajectory changes.
- what subgoals seem to be good when DTP is considered.
- and so on.
Bridging-based Ranking for Recommender Systems
Artificial Intelligence, Epistemic Institutions, Values and Reflective Processes, Great Power Relations
Recommender systems are used by platforms like FB/Meta, YouTube/Google, Twitter, TikTok, etc. to direct the attention of billions of people every day. These systems, due to a combination of psychological, sociological, organizational, etc. factors are currently most likely to reward content producers with attention if they stoke division (e.g. outgroup animosity). Because attention is a currency that can be converted into money, power, and status, this "bias toward division” has impacts groups at every scale; from local school boards to Congress to geopolitics.
Ensuring that recommender systems can mitigate this bias is crucial to functional democracy, to cooperation on catastrophic risks (e.g. AGI, pandemics, climate change), and simply to reducing the likelihood of escalating wars. We urgently need more research on how to better design recommender systems; we need to create open source implementations that do the right thing from the start which can be adopted by cash-strapped startups; and we need a mix of pressure and support to ensure these improvements will be rapidly deployed at platform scale.
Headhunter Office: targeted recruitment of aligned MDs, and other mid-career professionals
Effective Altruism, Community Growth and Diversity
I am a physician, and I have several conversations a week with bright, altruistic, and burned out colleagues. These professionals are often in a position to earn to give, and also can be entrepreneurial and adept at navigating complex systems and could be future organizational leaders or 'founder types'. Currently, there are cosmetic MLM groups and others recruiting from this group of physicians looking to make their lives more fulfilling and meaningful while still earning an income - there is literally an MD Exit strategy facebook group.
I propose an EA headhunter office to recruit for the community. For example, recruiting physicians explicitly, using some of the successful techniques that pharma uses like having physicians recruit their peers. Perhaps there are similar aligned mid-career professionals in law, public administration, engineering, etc.
Support for EAs having children
Empowering Exceptional People, Effective Altruism
Children of EAs are much more likely to become EAs (100-1000x?) and future generations of EAs may have a large impact. Having children usually means a pause in work which is poorly compensated and difficult to time. I propose an institute to support EAs wishing to have children. EAs could be could be supported with fertility costs, including egg freezing, and be given grants for parental leave which improve parental and child health outcomes. There are many trade offs in parenting, which could be discussed in an EA parenting forum. Building a community could benefit these EA parents and their children.
Evidence for 100-1000x estimate? What is the base rate for children following their parents? When I've seen this discussed before, the conclusion is usually that memetic transfer of EA is much easier than genetic transfer of EA.
That’s a good point. I agree it’s the culture more than the DNA which matters and I don’t know the real numbers. Of course, my husband and I were identified as gifted and it looks very likely our children will be too, and we also have read them Open Boarders as a bedtime story. Adopted children of EAs are also probably much more likely than average to become EAs. I think of organized religions and how they encourage children and future generations - there may be a lesson for us there.
I would have thought it would be higher value on the margin to spread EA to talented people who already exist than to make more people.
There are many trade offs in parenting, which could be discussed in an EA parenting forum.
Very minor, but just wanted to check you were aware of, and had joined if interested, the EA parents facebook group.
I didn’t know that, nor did my husband (Alex D), who is much more in the EA space. Thank you for posting, I will join. We are seriously considering going to Nassau with our neuro atypical kids (4 and 7) next winter, and are trying to figure out how it would work for schooling/childcare in particular.
DIY decentralized nucleic acid observatory
Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophes
As part of the larger effort of building an early detection center for novel pathogens, a smaller self-sustaining version is needed for remote locations. The ideal early-detection center would not only have surveillance stations in the largest hubs and airports of the world, but also in as many medium sized ones as possible. For this it is needed to provide a ready-made, small and transportable product which allows meta-genomic surveillance of wastewater or air ventilation. One solution would be designing a workflow utilizing the easily scalable and portable technology of nanopore sequencing and combining it with a workflow to extract nucleic acids from wastewater. The sharing of instructions on how to build and use this method could lead to a "do it yourself" (DIY) and decentralized version of a nucleic acid observatory. Instead of staffing a whole lab at a central location, it would be possible to only have one or two personnel in key locations who use this product to sequence samples directly and only transmit the data to the larger surveillance effort.
A global observatory for institutional improvement opportunities
Research That Can Help Us Improve, Great Power Relations, Epistemic Institutions
Actions taken by powerful institutions—such as central governments, large corporations, influential media outlets, and R&D labs—can dramatically shape people's lives today and cast a shadow long into the future. It can be hard to know what philanthropic strategies would be most likely to drive better would outcomes, however, because each individual institution is itself a complex ecosystem of incentives, external pressures, norms, policies, and bureaucratic structures. An ongoing project to document how important institutions operate in practice and spot relevant windows of opportunity (e.g., legislation under consideration, upcoming leadership transitions, etc.) as they emerge would be very helpful for mapping the strategic landscape across virtually all of our other interest areas.
EA content translation service
Effective Altruism, Movement Building
(Maybe add to #30 - diversity in EA)
EA-related texts are often using academic language needed to convey complex concepts. For non-native speakers reading and understanding those texts takes a lot more time than reading about the same topic in their native language would. Furthermore, today many educated people in important positions, especcially in non-western countries, do not at or only poorly speak English. (This is likely part of the reason that EA currently mainly exists in English speaking countries and almost exclusively consists of people speaking English well.)
To make EA widely known and easy to understand there needs to be a translation service enabling e.g. 80k, important Forum posts or the Precipice to be read in different languages. This would not only make EA easier to understand - and thus spread ideas further - but also likely increase epistemic diversity of the community by making EA more international.
Pipeline for writing books
Effective altruism
It's plausible that more EAs/longtermists should be writing books on the interesting subjects they are experts in, but they currently do not because of a lack of experience or other types of friction. Crowdsourced resources, networks, and grants may help facilitate this. Books written by EAs would have at least two benefits: (a) dissemination of knowledge, and (b) earning-to-give opportunities (via royalties).
This is an interesting idea; it definitely seems plausible that EAs (who often have a lot of unique knowledge!) might be underrating the benefits of writing books. Could you expand a little on what you are thinking here? (I'd also be interested to hear from anyone else with relevant experience.) How hard is it to publish a book? If you try, do you have a high chance of getting rejected? How do people usually do marketing and get people to read their stuff?
Maybe this is too cynical of me (or too internet-centric), but I doubt the main benefits would come from earning royalties (not likely to be very profitable relative to other things skilled EAs could be doing!) or spreading knowledge (just read the blog posts!). But I think trying to publish more EA books might help greatly with:
Say we found a new EA organization, "80,000 Pages", to help people publish books on impactful themes. What kinds of helpful stuff could this organization do?
Thanks so much, Jackson!
I have never published a book, but some EAs have written quite famous and well-written books. In addition to what you suggested, I was thinking "80,000 pages" could organize mentoring relationships for other EAs who are interested in writing a book, writer's circles, a crowdsourced step-by-step guide, etc. Networking in general is very important for publishing and publicizing books, from what I can gather, so any help on getting one's foot in the door could be quite helpful.
My brother has written several books and currently coaches people on how to publish it and market it on Amazon. He would be open to being paid for advice in this area (just dm me)
I think the dissemination and prestige are the best arguments so far.
Institute/Grants for improving the science of indoor air quality
Biorisk
During Covid we learned that ‘air is the new poop’ in terms of hygiene. Improving indoor air quality can prevent respiratory pathogen transmission both in the case of a pandemic and for general health. A granting agency could support advances in indoor air quality and their implementation such as in airplanes and classrooms.
Longtermism Policy Lab
Epistemic Institutions, Values and Reflective Processes, Great Power Relations, Space Governance, Research That Can Help Us Improve
Despite the growing recognition of the importance of long-term perspectives, governance remains oriented around short-term incentives. More coordination and collaboration between researchers and policymakers, practicioners and industry professionals is needed to translate research into policy. The Longtermism Policy Lab will bridge this gap, working with societal partners and governments at all levels (local to global) to undertake policy experiments. The Lab will also contain a research component, establishing and pursuing an ambitious interdisciplinary Longtermism research agenda, including an emphasis on research that doesn't fit well within either academia or traditional research institutes. We want to see this organisation serve as a direct link between longtermism as a governance approach and its implementation within all levels of governance across the globe.
(Per Nick's post, reposting)
Private-sector ARPA models
All
Many of the technological innovations of the last fifty years have their genesis in experiments run by DARPA. ARPA models are characterized by individual decision-makers taking on risky bets within defined themes, setting ambitious goals, and mobilizing top researchers and entrepreneurs to meet them. We are interested in funding work to study these funding models and to create similar models in our areas of interest.
In case you drew inspiration from some of our suggestions in the megaprojects article, we would like to retroactively apply.
Promote Ethical Corporate Behavior
EA to purchase 5% of Blackrock and 5% of Vanguard shares. To be clear, I don't mean 5% of their index funds, but rather 5% of the underlying fund management companies.
EA's investment of circa $10 billion can be leveraged into a board seat on companies that manage circa $20 trillion in assets. EA could lobby these companies to apply a corporate ethics tests on all their index funds. E.g. excluding coal and promoting other EA priorities.
Thanks for this suggesting, I'm really interested in this general direction, in case anybody wants to dig into it a bit more. It spontaneously seems unlikely to me that investing this large share of EA money is the best bet, but I wonder if there are other ways to influence them (e.g. as I understand Blackrock and Vanguard senior managers simply got convinced that climate change is a downside for their longterm profit, and they probably should believe the same for misaligned AI / AI races). Maybe another route would be to ensure that those investment firms will be able to influence & coordinate the behavior of tech firms to reduce competitive dynamics.
Anti-Pollution of the universe
Space governance
As we take one small step for man, our giant leap for humanity leaves footprints of toxicity that we justify as ‘negative externalities’. There are currently 20,000 catalogued objects comprised of rocket shards, collision debris and inactive satellites which cause major traffic risks in orbit around our planet whilst also likely polluting the universe. As Boeing, OneWeb, SpaceX etc increase their launches, we similarly add to the congestion and space collision probabilities. (read as disasters waiting to happen). There are currently NO debris removal methods. If we’ve learnt anything from our current micro history of mankind on Earth – it’s that the nature/universe around us is important since we’re intricately linked and that there are costs to our polluting behaviour in the pursuit of ‘territory/energy etc’. Hence when we’re playing at the macro cosmic level – it is even more imperative that we get this framework/relationship/thought process right.
Nuclear Funding Shortfall
Nuclear Risk
There has been a significant shortfall in nuclear risk funding. The most effective elements of this could be covered by the fund.
Superforecasting team
Global catastrophic risks
We know that top forecasters exist, but few are currently employed to predict around long term risks. These forecasters should be supported by developers to help maximise their accuracy and output. Multiple organisations could employ 100s or 1000s of top forecasters to analyse developing situations and suggest outcomes that are most likely to resolve them for the interests of all consciousness.
CEA for the developing world
Effective Altruism
The main EA movement building organization, CEA, focuses primarily on talented students in top universities of developed countries. This seems to be due to a combination of geographical and cultural proximity, quantity of English speakers, and ease of finding top talent. However, there is a huge amount of untapped talent in developing countries that may be more easily reached through dedicated organizations optimized for being culturally, linguistically, and geographically close to such talent, such as a CEA for India or Brazil. Such an organization would develop its own goals and strategies tailored to their respective regions, such as prioritizing nationwide prizes over group-by-group support, hiring local EA talent to lead projects, and identifying and partnering with regionally influential universities and institutions. This project would not only contribute to increasing diversity in EA, but also foster organizational competition by allowing different movement building strategies, and better position the EA movement for unexpected geopolitical power shifts.
An ecosystem of organizations to initiate a “Hasty Reflection”
Values and Reflective Processes, Epistemic Institutions, Effective Altruism, Research That Can Help Us Improve
The Long Reflection appears to me to be robustly desirable. It only suffers from being more or less unrealistic depending on how it is construed.
In particular, I feel that two aspects of it are in tension: (1) delaying important, risky, and irreversible decisions until after we’ve arrived at a Long Reflection–facilitated consensus on them, and (2) waiting with the Long Reflection itself until after we’ve achieved existential security.
I would expect, as a prior, that most things happen because of economic or political necessity, which is very hard to influence. Hence the Long Reflection either has to ramp up early enough that we can arrive at consensus conclusions and then engage in the advocacy efforts that’ll be necessary to improve over the default outcomes or else risk that flawed solutions get locked in forever. But the first comes at the risk of diverting resources from existential security. This indicates that there is some optimal trade-off point between existential security and timely conclusions. (From this 2020 blog post of mine.)
Michael Aird suggested to not use the term “Long Reflection” for the institution that I’m aiming for because it doesn’t share enough features with Ord’s Long Reflection. I call it “Hasty Reflection” for now. If AI allows, we’ll perhaps leave our solar system within the coming millennium or even just a few centuries. The communication delays between parts of the human civilization will then quickly increase to years, which will prevent efficient conversations. Barring the invention of faster-than-light communication, we will need to solve ethics and coordination and resiliently install the solution in our civilization before that happens. That seems like a project that may well take more than a millennium, so it’s fairly urgent. (Though likely less urgent than AI safety.)
I envision that the Hasty Reflection will have the following components:
Parts of the Effective Altruism community already form some sort of proto–Hasty Reflection, so it should be easier to bootstrap a proper Hasty Reflection out of EA than to start from scratch.
Scandinavian-like parental leave (25 weeks +) in EA organizations
Leading the way with a policy combating demographic decline, while supporting talent selection and diversity in EA community
Paid parental leave creates an incentive to have (more) kids - or rather, it takes away part of the large financial incentive not to have kids. My concrete suggestion is to fund Scandinavian-like parental leaves for employees in specified EA organizations. This would open up more access to the large pool of talented family oriented persons. Further, having an unusually beneficial parental leave benefit could inspire other organizations to follow, and thus help combat demographic decline. The idea should be quite easy to pilot, implement and scale, and the results relatively easy to measure.
Good idea, just in terms of talent selection and diversity. Has such parental leave had a noticeable effect on fertility / demographic decline in Scandinavia?
Hi, Greg. Thank you for your question. I'm very interested in exploring this idea further. First, I want to say that I have not done deep research on the topic. But I know some stuff, and I suspect some stuff. I could be wrong. Here are some of my thoughts:
1) My first point is that it is very plausible that paid leave period has a substantial effect on birth rates. I would sort of have a null hypothesis that there is a large effect, rather than zero/small effect.
2) I'm a statistician, and normally don't put too much weight on personal experience. But before all my three pregnancies a thorough analysis with the conclusion "this is doable financially", was very important in my decision-making. This N=1 (or N=3 if counting three kids), partly forms my opinion on the null hypothesis above. My impression is that most responsible adults have similar thought processes before getting pregnant. Further, after graduating, I was very motivated to have an impactful career. The apparent lack of job security and paid parental leave made sure I was 0% interested in any job at an EA org. Not the end of the world in this specific case, but there are probably a lot of more talented women out there, who also have a 0% interest for the same reasons.
3) I wrote Scandinavian-like because these are countries with generous parental leaves, and I know the setup well, as I'm Norwegian. Again, I have not researched in detail, but all three Scandinavian countries have birth rates well above the average in Europe. I also know France is on top of the birth statistics, and have generous set-ups. If I was French, the headline would maybe point to France instead of Scandinavia :)
4) Apart from (3), it is not straightforward to see a direct effect on leave times and birth rates in Scandinavia. Policies change very slowly over time (might add 1 week every now and then), and changes go hand-in-hand with other policies as free/subsidized kindergardens.
5) It seems to be a bit under-researched whether these policies have effect or not, and it is hard to analyze because of (4). That is at least my impression. So this could be really interesting and valuable as an experiment as well. It could provide insight into the effect of the Trillions (++??) governments use to support the systems today.
6) In Norway I have seen an interesting development over the last 10 years or so. Here, the social security covers 100% of your salary for 49 weeks, but with a max limit of about 60,000 $. About 10 years ago a few companies began to pay any salary above 60K to their employees during the leave. Now, 10 years later, this is standard in the market, and expected from any decent employer. This supports the opportunity to lead the way and affect what other companies might do in the future.
Does this make any sense? :) Happy to discuss this further, and to hear from others who might have more thoughts/research on the topic.
Monitoring Nanotechnologies and APM
Nanotechnologies, and a catastrophic scenario linked to it called “Grey goo”, have received very little attention recently (more information here ), whereas nanotechnologies keep moving forward and that some think that it’s one of the most plausible ways of getting extinct.
We’d be excited that a person or an organization closely monitors the evolution of the field and produces content on how dangerous it is. Knowing whether there are actionable steps that could be taken now or not would be very valuable for both funders and researchers of the longtermist community.
Quick start kit for new EA orgs
EA ops
Stipe atlas for longtermist orgs. Rather than figuring out the best tools, registrations, and practices for every new org, figure out the best default options and provide an easy interface to start up faster.
I just read the the Charity Entrepreneurship handbook How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit. That seems to fit the bill. Maybe having country-specific versions of it and versions for longtermist orgs, would be even better.
Campaign to eliminate lead globally
Economic Growth
Lead exposure limits IQ, takes over 1M lives every year and costs Africa alone $130B annually, 4% of GDP: an extraordinary limit on human potential. Most lead exposure is through paint in buildings and toys. The US banned lead paint in 1978 but 60% of countries still permit it. We would like to see ideas for a global policy campaign, perhaps similar to Bloomberg’s $1B tobacco advocacy campaign (estimated to have saved ~30M lives), to push for regulations and industry monitoring.
Epistemic status: The “prize” feels very large but I am not aware of proven interventions for lead regulations. 30 minutes of Googling suggests the only existing implementer (www.leadelimination.org) might be too small for this level of funding so there may not be many applicants.
Conflict of interest: I work for a small, new non-profit focused on $B giving. We are generally focused on projects with large, existing implementers so have not pursued lead elimination policy beyond initial light research
Build LMIC university capacity
Economic growth, Empowering exceptional people
Universities in LMICs often have limited access to funding. Additional funding could enable many good outcomes including:
Funding could be focussed on issues of concern to EAs, such as pandemics, or could be unrestricted to boost overall university capacity. As well as funding universities, funds could be provided for networks, independent labs, access to journals, travel and conferences, spinout companies etc.
Increasing Earth’s probability of survival
Space governance
Currently as we transition from a Kardashev Type 0 to Type 1 civilization, our probability of encountering/alerting other civilisations increases exponentially. This is somewhat ironic that we may fall upon our impetus. Citing dark forest theory that the end game is such that ‘lacking assurances, the safety option for any species is to annihilate other life forms before they have a chance to do the same’, means that humanity is immediately on the defensive. (Applying a chronological framework and assuming linearity of time) As of such – we should fund ways to increase our probability of survival (by either deterrence mechanisms, signalling non threat or camouflage) such that we may evolve uninterrupted. (This also assumes we don’t kill ourselves first, the probability of which is sadly also non zero)
Just throwing out crazy suggestions (I’m sensing that’s what the thematic is here) would be something like hyper gravity generation device that bends observable light emitted from our planet, so much so that when observed – we would look like a blackhole.
Combatting DeepFake
Epistemic Institutions, Artificial Intelligence
As AI advances –Numerous high quality deepfake videos/images are being produced at an alarmingly increasing rate. Delving into the question ‘What happens when we can’t trust our eyes and ears anymore?’, This immediately raises obvious signals that it will affect many industries such as journalism, military, celebrities, government etc. Proactively funding a superior ML anti-deepfake bot for commercial use is important such that images/videos can be properly verified. The end game will likely come down to some degree of superior computing power since both are ML based algos – hence the advantage here would be first mover and/or altruistic (think along the same example of free antivirus software) in nature.
Targeted practical statistical training
Economic Growth, Values and Reflective Processes
"Human cognition is characterized by cognitive biases, which systematically lead to errors in judgment: errors that can potentially be catastrophic (e.g., overconfidence as a cause of war). For example, a strong case can be made that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been an irrational decision of Putin, a consequence of which is potential nuclear war. Overconfidence is a cause of wars and of underpreparation for catastrophes (e.g., pandemics, as illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic).
One way to reduce detrimental and potentially catastrophic decisions is to provide people with statistical training that can help empower beneficial decision-making via correct calibration of beliefs. (Statistical training to keep track of the mean past payoff/observation can be helpful in a general sense; see my paper on the evolution of human cognitive biases and implications.) At the moment, statistical training is provided to a very small percentage of people, and most provisions of statistical training are not laser-focused on the improvement of practical learning/decision-making capabilities, but for other indirect goals (e.g., prerequisite for STEM undergraduate majors). It may be helpful to (1) encourage practical, impactful aspects in the provision of statistical training and (2) broaden its provision to a wider segment of people."
(Quote from my post 'Broadening statistical education")
Given resource limitations, it may make sense to target the provision of practical statistics training to high-impact decision-makers, such as those in government. An ambitious example is that just as the US president is given a confidential briefing about the nuclear protocols, so too can the president be briefed about statistical reasoning and how to thereby make well-calibrated decisions on behalf of the nation.
Mental health treatment to prevent anthropogenic catastrophic/existential risks
Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophe
Issues of mental health can be very harmful to the well-being of the self and others. The degree to which this harm can occur can, when combined with technology, even result in catastrophic/existential risks. (The Russian invasion of Ukraine, the cause of which may be the mental state of Putin, can plausibly lead to nuclear war. Another example is engineered pandemics.) Given the disproportionately anthropogenic skew of catastrophic/existential risks, research/funding/advocacy for mental health treatment (general or targeted) may help prevent such risks.
Reminds me of some of the proposals here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LpkXtFXdsRd4rG8Kb/reducing-long-term-risks-from-malevolent-actors
We therefore consider interventions to reduce the expected influence of malevolent humans on the long-term future.
- The development of manipulation-proof measures of malevolence seems valuable, since they could be used to screen for malevolent humans in high-impact settings, such as heads of government or CEOs. (More)
- We also explore possible future technologies that may offer unprecedented leverage to mitigate against malevolent traits. (More)
- Selecting against psychopathic and sadistic tendencies in genetically enhanced, highly intelligent humans might be particularly important. However, risks of unintended negative consequences must be handled with extreme caution. (More)
Yes, I think these proposals together could be especially high-impact, since people who pass screening may develop issues of mental health down the line.
Rule of Law Fund
Values and Reflective Processes and Economic Growth
A strong rule of law helps ensure equity, human rights, property rights, contract enforcement, and due process. Many countries are still developing their legal systems. Between 2010 and 2020 twenty-four different countries ratified a constitution. The legal systems that evolve today will have a lasting impact on future generations.
This fund would offer funding for organizations and individuals engaged in legal scholarship and litigation that align with the Future Fund’s guiding principles, with a specific focus on strengthening the rule of law in countries with less developed legal institutions.
Retrospective grant evaluations
Research That Can Help Us Improve
I'd like to expand on this: a think-tank/paper that formulates a way of evaluating all grants by a set of objective, quantifiable, criteria. This in order to better inform future allocation decisions so that each dollar spent ends up making the greatest impact possible.
In this respect Retrospective Grant Evaluations, is but one variable to measure grant effectiveness.
I have a few more ideas that can be combined to create some kind of weighted scoring mechanism for grant evaluation:
Obviously this list could go on and this is just a small number of possible variables. The idea is simply to build a model that can score the utility of a proposed grant.
Is this neglecting the notion that some of the grants are to strategically develop interest by presentation appealing to different decisionmakers, since the objectives are rather already known, such as improve lives of humans and animals in the long term and prevent actors, including those who use and develop AI to reduce the wellbeing of these individuals? It can be a bit of a reputational loss risk to evaluate 'well, we started convincing the government to focus on the long term by appealing by the extent of the future so now we can start talking about the quality of life in various geographies, and if this goes well then we move onto the advancement of animal-positive systems across the spacetime?'