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.]
I wanted to dedicate myself to making youtube-videos at some point, but I have another project that I'm prioritizing instead so I'm not spending much time on this at the moment. However, with enough outside help I think that together we might achieve a good impact.
Making videos for existing channels (like e.g. Vox) without expecting payment from them, is a possibility to look into, although convincing them probably would be hard, and the requirements for quality would be challenging. The most likely scenario is publishing to a channel of our own though.
Here is a google-document with some relevant thoughts (ideas and drafts for episodes, etc): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iVRb85Dkb6e04M0mAkiCJwPg7Y29cjUQboXy-OdCcus/edit#
Video-production is a kind of task where a large fraction of the work can be done while listening to podcasts and such once one has done the necessary learning, but many hours are required. If anyone could be interested in working on this, and could see themselves potentially making this project a significant priority in their lives for several years, then feel very free to search up "Tor Barstad" on Facebook and get in touch for a video-conversation or something :)
Just want to respond that I'd be interested in doing this sort of thing for a short period of time (a few months) to test to waters.