Relying on more billionaires (from various uncorrelated fields) might still be the  more cost-effective strategy.  But the community isn't just doing that anyway, we encourage everyone to give, even if just a little.

Same. I suggest "AI Safety Ideas: a collaborative AI safety research platform"

Thanks! What is your take on offering  shorter fellowships (e.g. 4 weeks instead of 8), as suggested here?

Clean meat could also have a huge impact on CO2 levels. According to Vinod Khosla (source):

• about 30-50% of all land area is used for animal husbandry
• clean meat and plant-based alternatives could allow us to take back most of it
• restoring this land would solve the carbon emissions problem by carbon capture (~100 out of 110 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s scenarios for carbon reductions on the planet involve freeing millions of acres of land for reforestation)

Agreed. And even in the scenario where we could continue to find more valuable patterns of matter even billions of years in the future, I don’t think that efforts to accelerate things now would have any significant impact on the value we will create in the future, because it seems very likely that our future value creation will mostly depend on major events that won’t have much to do with the current state of things.

Let’s consider the launch of Von Neumann probes throughout the universe as such a possible major event: even if we could increase our current growth rate by 1% with a better allocation of resources, it doesn’t mean that the future launch of these probes will be 1% more efficient. Rather, the outcomes of this event seem largely uncorrelated with our growth rate prior to that moment. At best, accelerating our growth would hasten the launch by a tiny bit, but this is very different than saying “increasing our growth by 1% now will increase our whole future utility by 1%”.

Yes I agree 100% that merely trying to create more EA jobs won't be enough, hence my 4th point. What I am suggesting is that we should both increase our internal capacity *and* change our message by making it clear that the work done at EA-branded orgs is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to having an impact.

Thanks for this, we can clearly do better. Some ideas:

• When you recruit as an org, be 100% transparent on the number of applicants you have for a given position, so that people don’t overestimate their chances.
• As a community, let's do more to promote the creation of more impactful orgs (e.g. through communications and increased funding for early-stage initiatives)
• Scale existing orgs by following best practices so that they can recruit more. Get experienced mentors on board if needed.
• Stop talking as if there was a binary divide between what is “EA” and what is “non-EA”. This is a spectrum, and we should promote way more than just the usual ~20 EA orgs as good career options (it seems we are getting better at this, but there's still a long way to go).
• Make it easier for EAs to collaborate on projects (e.g. by creating an online project platform), so that they can still have an impact even when they can’t or won’t be hired in an org. This could also boost the creation of new orgs that could then hire later on.

Great post. Here are some other lists of EA projects that were posted here a while back but can still be relevant:

• https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LG6gwxhrw48Dvteej/concrete-project-lists
• https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/n6dtnP5babfNaz2bW/69-things-that-might-be-pretty-effective-to-fund