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.]
Hmm, actually I like this idea. I'd assume that if someone's been working for 6 months, then they should have something to show for it. And maybe 2 years to actually get a project to the point that it's either succeeding/ failing on its own. Since most EAs live in expensive cities, that could be around $2k per month minimum.
So that would be around $12k for someone to "try a project out," and then if the project is doing well then around $50k per capita to see if the project can be "successful" or not. That's plausibly worth it.
So I guess we should add [EA fund for people to start new projects] to the list of projects that EAs maybe should start. One thing we'd have to consider is how do we make sure we don't just get people conning us for free money?