I think bounties and requests for proposals (RFPs) are powerful and underutilized in EA. This is just a quick experiment to see if there are any interesting ideas floating around that might be bounty-able or RFP-able.
If your idea is interesting to me, I’ll shop it around to smarter people with relevant expertise, and if it gets funded, I’ll pay you $1,000.
Ideas can be either be objectively verifiable or they can be subjectively evaluated by a judge. For example, to minimize Goodharting the bounty, you might propose that a panel of AI safety experts judge the bounty submissions.
The deadline is November 15th. If it goes well, I'll open it up to more submissions.
Email me your ideas - rough ones are fine! - at emersonspartz@nonlinear.org, DM me on Twitter @EmersonSpartz, or submit them here.
(Note: Maybe some of the following projects I suggest already have been done. I haven't thoroughly researched that. If you know that something like I suggest to do has already been done, please comment!)
Some ideas for bounties (or grants) for projects or tasks:
I would also love to see people funded, who are just thinking about how the EA community could coordinate better, how efficiency of research in EA-aligned causes can be increased, how EA should be developed in the future, what possible good (mega-)projects are, how to increase the bottleneck of EA (e.g. how to integrate good leadership into EA).
About 1&2: I don't think that should be done just by someone, but by one or more AI researchers who have an extremely good overview about the whole field of AI safety and are able to explain it well to people without prior knowledge. I think it should be something like by far the best introduction. Something which is clearly the thing you would recommend something who is wondering about what AI safety is.
Those are all quite big and important tasks. I think it would be better to advertise those tasks and reach out to qualified people and then fund interested people so they do those tasks, instead of creating bounties, but bounties could work as well.
Of course, you could also create a bounty like "for every 100k$ you raise for EA, you get 5k$" or so. (Yes just totally convince Elon Musk of EA and become a billionaire xD.) But I'm not sure if that would be a good idea, because there could be some downside risk to the image of EA fundraisers.
Two more ideas:
- Create an extremely good video as introduction to effective altruism. (Should be convincing and lead to action.)
- maybe also create a very good video or article discussing objections against effective altruism (and why they may be questionable, if they are questionable)
- Create well-designed T-shirts with (funny) EA, longtermist or AI safety printings, that I would love to walk around with in public and hope that someone asks me about it. (I would prefer if there is no "effective altruism" directly on the T-shirt. Maybe sth into this direction,
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