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.)
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.
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.