Below is a list of EA project ideas which I've been thinking a bit about over the last few months. I'd be interested if people think I should take turn any of these ideas into top-level posts or shortform posts (and in future whether posts for individual ideas are better than a long list like this).^[1] Thanks!

I expect I'll write a couple more 'project ideas list' posts like this by the end of the year. Note that the order is mostly arbitrary.

If you could see yourself actually working on one of these, please do let me know. I might be able to connect you to other people who could work with, elaborate on details, or help you find funding.

Longtermist visualisations

Imagine a ‘timeline of everything’, showing major events (astronomical, geological, historical) from the Big Bang to the end of time. Users can zoom in and out, much like existing apps that show the scale of the universe.

Appreciating the vast amount of time ahead of us, and the relatively brief period of time that all of recorded human history makes up, is a key underlying intuition for longtermist arguments. The website could explain longtermist ideas as link to relevant reading, like The Precipice.

Various timelines of the universe have been made in video or graphic form, such as here. But I suspect being able to navigate through different scales of time yourself might be a very different experience.

Ultimately, you could imagine a website hosting a series of visualizations illustrating various longtermist ideas. These visualisations and graphics, some interactive, some updated with live data, could be tied together with essays about key longtermist topics, amounting to a kind of undirected, highly visual introduction to ideas from effective altruism and longtermism. You could imagine a handful of ‘tracks’ (e.g. big history, existential risks, technological progress, human progress) which tie together these graphics, once enough are made. I am excited by the prospect of Our World In Data adding new charts which could be of special interest from a longtermist perspective. But I do think this project could be different enough to warrant being separate, because the visualisations could be more creative, various in form, and perhaps less squarely data-driven.

I made a small start on this idea last year, and made plans to hire for it, but left it by the wayside because I got distracted.

Meta book ideas

B

...

Journalism

Further reading