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.]
My approach here is to look for ways to help people in the EA community save money on basic needs. A pattern I'm noticing is that they often seem to be good for community building too.
Examples of this:
1) The EA Safety net project, which I've just started working on with dedicated others.
2) Shared housing for people involved with EA & rationality. An especially promising example is the Accelerator Project, I think. I've also found 19 rationality/EA houses around the world so far (I'm slowly working on getting one going in the Netherlands).
3) Even simpler: couchsurfing
I think that scaling cost-saving solutions like these are a more promising area to explore than funding basic incomes (depending on how many people take part for the time put into kickstarting the project). Whether spending time on starting a cost-saving project yourself is worth it does depend on your skills and opportunities.
For me, funding movement building/far future orgs generally makes more sense than a basic income (most of which goes to giving a coordinated group of people incomes so they can take risks) unless a basic income would target high-potential people only. Or perhaps you could fund someone to start a cost-savings project. :-)
There is also the Kernel Project (Manchester, UK) - rationalist & rationalist-adjacent low cost living and community building. I would be happy to see more EAs involved.