There are lots of important project ideas in EA that people could work on, and I’d like to encourage people to explore more. When I was looking for projects to work on, I had difficulty thinking of what needed doing apart from obvious projects like raising money for GiveWell-recommended charities. I even had a sense that all the organisations that needed to exist existed, which is obviously not correct.
Fortunately many people have put together project ideas in important cause areas:
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Health
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Charity Entrepreneurship want to find founders to work on these, and will offer extensive guidance
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Poverty
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Poverty, health
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Successful applicants to these challenges receive seed funding
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Health, food and agriculture, human rights, education, water, gender equality, digital inclusion, climate change resilience, and electricity
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Poverty, health
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Lee Sharkey: Increasing Access to Pain Relief in Developing Countries
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Poverty, health
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Poverty
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Poverty
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Deep Science Ventures: Antibiotic resistance: what can you do?
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Health, catastrophic risk
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Health, catastrophic risk
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Climate change
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Brett Victor: What can a technologist do about climate change?
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Climate change
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AI safety
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MIRI: Agent Foundations for Aligning Superintelligence with Human Interests
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AI safety
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AI safety
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Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence
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AI safety
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AI safety
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World Resources Institute: Creating a sustainable food future
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Catastrophic risk
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Feeding everyone no matter what: managing food security after global catastrophe
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Catastrophic risk
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Mixed
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Mixed
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Mixed
This is far from exhaustive, but it’s a start.
However, it’s not clear whether lack of ideas is actually what’s stopping people from working on new projects. So I’d be interested to know:
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What’s blocking you from working on an altruistic project?
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Are there resources which the community could provide that would help?
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Do you have any more project ideas or lists of project ideas to add? - I'll keep this list updated with what I find.
[This came out of this thread on why things don’t get done in the EA community. Thanks to John Maxwell for being a commitment device.]
Thanks for doing this!
My sense is what people are missing is a set of social incentives to get started. Looking at any one of these, they feel overwhelming, they feel like they require skills that I don't have. It feels like if I start working on it, then EITHER I'm blocking someone whose better qualified from working on it OR someone who's better qualified will do it anyway and my efforts will be futile.
Or, in the case of research, my bad quality research will make it harder for people to find good quality research.
Or, in the case of something like "start one of the charities Givewell wants people to start", it feels like... just, a LOT of work.
And... this is all true. Kind of. But it's also true that the way people get good at things is by doing them. And I think it's sort of necessary for people to throw themselves into projects they aren't prepared for, as long as they can get tight feedback looks that enable them to improve.
I have half-formed opinions about what's needed to resolve that, that can be summarized as "better triaged mentorship." I'll try to write up more detailed thoughts soon.
This is odd. Personally my reaction is that I want to get to a project before other people do. Does bad research really make it harder to find good research? This doesn't seem like a likely phenomenon to me.