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:
- We would love to add great ideas to our list of projects.
- We are excited about experimenting with prizes to jumpstart creative ideas.
To participate, you can either
- Add your proposal as a comment to this post (one proposal per comment, please), or
- Fill in this form
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:
- You may submit refinements of ideas already on our website, but these might receive only a portion of the full prize.
- At our discretion, we will award partial prizes for submissions that are proposed by multiple people, or require additional work for us to make viable.
- At our discretion, we will award larger prizes for submissions that we really like.
- Prizes will be awarded at the sole discretion of the Future Fund.
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.)
Quantify the overall suffering from different conditions, and determine whether there's misallocation of resources in biomedical research.
I suspect there's a big gap between the distribution of resources allocated to the study of different diseases and what people actually suffer from the most. Among other factors that lead to non-optimal allocation, I'd guess that life-threatening diseases are overstudied whereas conditions that may really harm people's well-being, but are not deadly, are understudied. For example, I'd guess that chronic pain is understudied compared to how much suffering it inflicts on society. It would be valuable to quantify the overall human suffering from different conditions, and spot misallocations in biomedical research (and other societal efforts to treat these conditions). For example, a random cohort of individuals could be asked to take a survey asking what conditions they would want the most to get rid of, and how many life years they would be willing to sacrifice for it (either asking what is the maximum number of years they would be willing to sacrifice for an operation that would be guaranteed to reduce that number of years from their life expectancy and solve the condition they suffer from, or asking what's the maximum probability of dying in that operation that they would be willing to take). Given the survey's results, it should be possible to quantify the overall suffering from different conditions, and then detect mismatches between these estimates and estimates of the resources (money and talent) allocated into addressing these problems. It could also be interesting to try to address other potential reasons for mismatches between the social importance of conditions (in terms of overall well-being/suffering) and allocated resources, primarily the issue of tractability. For example, maybe condition A is causing more suffering than condition B, but it's easier to make progress on B, so we should prioritize it more. This could be figured out by interviewing experts and asking them to estimate how many resources it would take to make a given amount of progress (such as cutting the prevalence of the disease in half). I imagine that a similar style of studies could be carried out in other settings where we'd want to find out whether society's allocation of resources really reflects what people care about the most.
Related: Cochrane's series of papers on waste in science and Global Priorities Project's investigation into the cost-effectiveness of medical research