Disclaimer: I applied to FTX with a solution to this issue, but I hope this isn’t taken as a shady way of promoting my project. Now that decision e-mails are being sent out, I think it’s a great idea to post about your project here whether you got funded or not because: a) some other fund might be interested; b) your project might have certain misalignments that could use some eyeballs to root out; and c) feedback from other EAs can help you improve if you decide to continue your project anyway.
Epistemic status: Speculative and highly entrepreneurial; it might help to adopt a temporary hyperoptimistic “what if this succeeds wildly?” frame[1] before turning on one’s usual filters, but really the reason why I’m posting this is to get feedback and criticism. I am especially interested in knowing if there are possible harms that I didn’t think of, and if this is something that people would actually use.
I remember right before the pandemic hit that there was a palpable buzz about finding a potential Task Y[2], i.e.:
- Task Y is something that can be performed usefully by people who are not currently able to choose their career path entirely based on EA concerns*.
- Task Y is clearly effective, and doesn't become much less effective the more people who are doing it.
- The positive effects of Task Y are obvious to the person doing the task.
The problem is this: we have too many people but not enough problems to work on. And with the recent massive injection of available funding in the movement[3], not only will we see more growth in how many people join local meetups, attend workshops and conferences, or otherwise self-identify as EAs, we will also see people who are not as aligned with EA and are only attracted to the space because of money and prestige.
Let me itemise the points I’m making here so it’s less likely to misconstrue my position:
So what can be done?
For starters, I think we should not think of a Task Y but rather a plethora of them. I would be very surprised if we have exhausted the space of repeatable effective tasks with Earn to Give and Work at an EA organisation, and for highly uncertain research areas like longtermism where the consensus isn’t even close to settling yet, we should consider ourselves stuck in a local minima and be much, much more open to exploring alternatives quite different from what we currently have.
This means we need a systematic way of exploring the problem space while trying our best to minimise downside risk. I don’t think more available funding gets us there on its own, but rather smaller, but exponentially more projects being tried. And if we’re talking about small projects, why not go all the way down to individual tasks? This is important for two reasons:
At the very least, concrete tasks are much easier to verify than abstract, high-level ones like “participate in the EA forums” or “attend local meetups”.
Now, again, I would like to repeat my disclaimer above that I submitted a proposal about this to FTX Future Fund and so there is definitely a potential conflict of interest here. But I figured the panelists would have some way of distancing themselves from people who are trying to affect their judgment beyond the application form. Let me know if that assumption is wrong.
Anyway, so we believe we have worked out a system of tasks that solves the following problems simultaneously:
The answer is, you arrange the tasks in a tree[4] and then only let people move up once they’ve done the simpler tasks.
Let me explain. The core interaction loop (which is also available on our still-under-construction project website) can be broken down into four steps:
Suppose your task is to “give a lightning talk in your local EA meetup”. This is a good task not only because it’s repeatable but also because it directly improves your skill at public speaking, which is something that presumably everyone who wants to run an EA organisation should be decent at.
Now, it’s Saturday, another meetup day. You do your talk and submit a clip of it to the system. And then you wait. Why is it not instantaneous? Is it not a cardinal rule of UX design that interactions should be as fast as possible? No, because there are humans in the loop who will need to check your attempt if it’s the genuine article[5]. If not, or if the members of a task think you didn’t meet their standard, you can always try again.
But suppose you get approved. What happens then? Well, you are now a member of the task! That means you can talk to other members, get tips on how to do the task better, or even tips on how to do more advanced tasks. In this way, we steadily accumulate extremely specific and extremely focused tricks of the trade that you would not otherwise learn in books or even courses.
And if you wish to take your skillset further, you can either look for new tasks you’ve just unlocked (in other words, tasks that define your current one as a prerequisite) or you can create your own.
There are several complications about this scheme. First of all, who makes the tasks? And the cheeky answer is: everyone. But in practice, part of making this project succeed is having really compelling tasks available for people to do, and who better knows which tasks are valuable to the community than the most committed EAs working in orgs? Assembling a library of good tasks will require us to Do Things That Don’t Scale, and we hope that enough of that will allow us to, say, have “Found an EA megaproject” as a repeatable, scalable Task Y candidate.
Another thing is that, at first glance it’s not really clear why people would be incentivised to check other people’s work at all. But anecdotally speaking, after having founded or otherwise run multiple non-EA orgs in the last decade there is a certain sense of accomplishment in being the arbiter of quality in a scene, and regardless of the replication crisis there are still certain laws governing human behaviour that can be relied upon to predict people’s actions. In a way, we are trying to align a reputation system with an achievement system, both of which are solutions two different industries (social media and video games) have come up with and have kept using under the threat of market irrelevance if they’re wrong. So if this part doesn’t work out I would be violently surprised.
Lastly, why would this affect the funding landscape at all? Notice that all tasks are gated by your ability to do them at least once[6]. So what happens when you wish to create a task for something that’s still a bit beyond your ability? Inducement prizes. You specify the task, pay an entrance fee[7] to join a pool of people who would wish to attempt the challenge as well, then whoever submits the best attempt after a certain period of time (as judged by judiciously selected third-parties) wins the prize pool and gets to be the first arbiter for that task. At the very least, this public activity of regular competitions by the most skilled users of the platform is a great way to promote the system not only to EAs but to EA-adjacents who would otherwise not hear of what’s going on because they can’t see the more advanced tasks without having gone through the entire gauntlet
What do you think? Would you use such a system? I know there are a lot of moving parts here but I tried my best to convey why I think it would be a potentially impactful project to work on. And also, I know I said I was looking for possible harms in my disclaimer but I figured I should wait for others’ opinions before revealing my list so as not to prematurely constrain the hypothesis-space.
(insert LessWrong link here…once you find it) ↩︎
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uWWsiBdnHXcpr7kWm/can-the-ea-community-copy-teach-for-america-looking-for-task ↩︎
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fDLmDe8HQq2ueCxk6/ftx-future-fund-and-longtermism ↩︎
Actually, a directed acyclic graph, but the analogy to RPG-like skill trees is so much easier to understand. ↩︎
Part of what makes such a system work is the fact that it isn’t automated. If we stuck to machine-verifiable tasks, we wouldn’t be able to cover a wide variety of skills. And at the very least, would it not feel much better to know that actual EAs checked your work and found it satisfactory? ↩︎
Which would also cure people of analysis paralysis when it comes to exploring new skillsets, if the difficulty gaps between tasks are made narrow enough. ↩︎
Of course, nothing is stopping you, an outside observer, from sponsoring other people’s entrance fees or adding to the prize pool for that matter, which is a good way to guide and accelerate the careers of promising EA juniors. ↩︎