Would be interesting to see an argument that the EA forum is net negative. It creates the impression that new ideas are being considered and voices are being heard, but people who have power and influence seldom actually are open to influence from EA posts, nor are there effective mechanisms by which others (like gatekeepers) disseminate such information. The most highly upvoted, and thus accessible posts are either cute, meta-level clever commentary that's often not actionable or by high status EAs or orgs that have little difficulty having their voices be heard (although having a convenient place for them to share stuff is a useful function).

I do feel like as a place for new ideas to translate into research and, ultimately, impactful action, the EA forum is quite overrated. While I wouldn't agree that it's net negative, I worry that there is an assumption by community members that it is doing things that it isn't.

The short version: How can people contribute to EA if they don't have lots of extra money and they don't have the skillsets to work at organizations focused on important problems?

The slightly longer version: The primary path that is promoted for contributing is something along the lines of "get skills and then do work." And I think that is a great suggestion for people who either A) have the ability to choose a field to work in (such as a college undergraduate), or B) already have the skills and can relatively easily pivot (such as experienced project managers or software developers). EA organizations don't really have a great need for nurses, for history professors, for plumbers, etc. Some people are able to afford to take a few years off work to reskill and then start a new career, but not everyone is able to do that. I know that I would be hard pressed to pay for tuition, food, and housing while spending a few years doing studies/retraining.

The secondary path is composed of variations on "donate money." This is great for people with high incomes (or more moderate incomes that are predicted to be very stable for the future, such as tenured professors), and simply isn't as feasible for people with lower incomes or with unstable future incomes.

So as a community, I'm not sure what our messaging should be for people who aren't able to easily shift their career, and who don't have much money to spare. I suspect that the answer might be some variation of "not all people can contribute to effective altruism; this community isn't for everyone." But I'm hoping that there is something else out there.

Maybe a report from someone with a strong network in the silicon valley scene about how AI safety's reputation is evolving post-OAI-board-stuff. (I'm sure there are lots of takes that exist, and I guess I'd be curious for either a data driven approach or a post which tries to take a levelheaded survey of different archetypes.)

I'm basically always interested in potential lessons for EA/EA-related projects from various social movements/fields/projects.

Note that you can find existing research that hasn't been discussed (much) on the Forum and link-post it (I bet there's a lot of useful stuff out there), maybe with some notes on your takeaways. 

Example movements/fields/topics: 

• Environmentalism — I've heard people bring up the environmentalist/climate movement a bunch in informal discussions as an example for various hypotheses, including "movements splinter/develop highly counterproductive & influential factions" or "movements can get widespread interest and make policy progress" etc. 
• The effectiveness of protest — I'm interested in more research/work on this (see e.g. this and this).
• Modern academia (maybe specific fields) — seems like there are probably various successes/failures/ideas we could learn from. 
• Animal welfare
• Mohism (see also)
• Medicine/psychology in different time periods

Some resources, examples, etc. (not exhaustive or even a coherent category): 

• Social and intellectual movements (topic page)
• Key Lessons From Social Movement History
• Why do social movements fail: Two concrete examples
• Some history topics it might be very valuable to investigate  (and Humanities Research Ideas for Longtermists )
• More generally: Research agendas, questions, and project lists

I would like someone write a post expanding on X-risks to all life v. to humans. Despite the importance of this consideration, it seems to have been almost completely neglected in EA discussion.

If I were to write on this, I’d reframe the issue somewhat differently than the author does in that post. Instead of a dichotomy between two types of risks, one could see it as a gradation of risks that push things back an increasing number of possible great filters. Risks to all life and risks to humans would then be two specific instances of this more general phenomenon.

I would really appreciate further analysis of family planning as an intervention.  Some specific questions I’d like to see tackled:

• What is the cost effectiveness of these interventions/organizations when looking at a variety of metrics (e.g. preventing maternal deaths, preventing obstetric fistula, increasing subjective well-being, increasing wealth etc.)?
  • Some framework for tallying these benefits.
• Do these interventions lead to a permanent reduction in family size, or a temporary one?
• What is the impact to farmed animals (i.e. does this intervention benefit from the meat-eater problem)?
• What about climate change or other environmental impacts?

Here are some posts that provide a start:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WYmJoDxJZToDcA9Bq/population-size-growth-and-reproductive-choice-highly

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zgBmSgyWECJcbhmpc/family-planning-a-significant-opportunity-for-impact

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BMzmCohuPYRaGPcZD/maybe-family-planning-charities-are-better-for-farmed

And here’s a really good report on one org:

https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/family-empowerment-media

And CE has some good reports on some interventions:

https://www.charityentrepreneurship.com/health-reports

What a biosafe world looks like

Basically like "What Success Looks Like" (which is about transformative AI) but instead about what a world would look like that is really well protected from catastrophic pandemics. 

It could be set in e.g. 2035, and describe what technologies and (political) mechanisms have been implemented to make the world "biosafe"—i.e. safe from global catastrophic biological risks. 

I could even imagine versions of this that are a fictional story, maybe describing the life of someone living in that potential future.

List of theory of change documents of EA orgs.

I think it would be cool to have an overview of how different organizations think about their theory of change and how they present it. This would be helpful for organizations that don't yet have a public theory of change but would like to create one. It would also be useful for getting a clearer picture of what the high-level plans of different orgs are.

How can we make effective altruism more appealing to political conservatives without alienating engaged liberals? If there is an inevitable trade-off between the two, what is the optimal equilibrium, how close to it are we, and can we get closer?

Investigating incentives in EA organisations. Is money still the primary incentive? If not, how should we think about the intra-EA economy?

I would really love to see someone, ideally someone with a background in philosophy, explore what effective altruism (either EA as a whole or various sub-causes of EA) would look like if the Epicurean view of death, namely that death is neither bad nor good (nor "neutral") for the individual who dies since they themselves cannot experience the sensation, and by extension the badness (or goodness), of death^[1], were to actually be taken seriously.

I am not a philosopher, nor am I studying philosophy, and thus I believe I would not be able to tackle this project with the rigour and depth I feel it needs. Despite my limited knowledge on the subject, and as unintuitive as this idea of how to treat death may appear, I am as yet unable to rationalise my way out of the overall idea, which seems trivial when I really think about it. Given this, however, I am quite disappointed that it doesn't appear to be taken seriously, or even mentioned, within EA (a few brief mentions of it, most prominently here by the Happier Lives Institute, but unfortunately not much elsewhere).

I have been reading^[2] "Epicurus and the Singularity of Death" by David B. Suits^[3], through which the author attempts to defend the Epicurean view of death, first in its abstract form and then by testing its implications against real-life cases such as premature death, deprivation, killing and suicide, among others. I believe this book may be of use to some who wish to go down this particular rabbit hole.

Death happens to all living beings, and it is central to almost all ethical theories and beliefs throughout history, and Epicurus' idea of death is, I assume at least, commonly studied in courses on the philosophy of death. An issue as important as death, therefore, ought to be explored and discussed fully and thoroughly, which I do not at all see in the EA community regarding the Epicurean view.

1. ^{^}

   Epicurus' Letter to Menoeceus; translated by Cyril Bailey (1926)

2. ^{^}

   I had to take a break from it about a third of the way through in order to focus on my studies, but I will return to it once I am able to.

3. ^{^}

   Get the PDF for free off LibGen if you want

Not sure if this already exists somewhere (would love recommendations!), but I'd be really excited to see a clear and carefully linked/referenced overview or summary of what various agriculture/farming ~lobby groups do to influence laws and public opinion, and how they do it (with a focus on anything related to animal welfare concerns). This seems relevant.

A post about the current status of the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) and a post-mortem if it has shut down. Some users including me have speculated that FHI is dead, but an official confirmation of the org's status would count as a reliable source for Wikipedia purposes.

A steel manned version of the best longtermist argument(s) against AI safety as the top priority cause area.

If we take utilitarianism at face value, what are the most likely candidates for the physical substrate of 'a utilon'? Is it plausible there are multiple such substrates? Can we usefully speculate on any interesting properties they might have?

I would love for someone to do research on the question about the Global AIS upskilling pipeline / funnel, to gain a better understanding about the supply and demand of seats. 

This would enable field builders to gain a better understanding where the bottlenecks are (early/late stage). In so, hopefully we could create better ToCs on where and how to intervene in the system; toward the goal creating more well-suited and cost-effective programs, or in other ways to increase amount of talent going into the field.

The MVP version of the analysis could be done by reaching out to the current upskilling programs and ask them something along the lines of: how many of your applicants that you couldn't admit are you somewhat confident could become strong AIS contributors? 

In my mind, this would include programs such as MATS, PIBBS, ARENA, AISF, and others. 

In a perfect world with much more resources, the analysis would include how academia, the industry and governments position themselves in the global "pipeline", or how they enable people to become AIS contributors. 

Edit: minor. 

What would it take to eradicate all infectious diseases by 2050?

I want to see high-level abstract research what it would take to eliminate all infectious disease by a certain date, e.g. 2050 or 2080

I really liked "10 technologies that won't exist in 5 years" by Jacob Trefethen, and this post would have a similar vibe. 

do some very rough BOTECs

• how much did it cost to eliminate smallpox?
• how much did it cost to almost eliminate polio?
• what other diseases have been eradicated?
• come up with average cost of eliminating one disease
• of course last mile is the hardest and maybe most costly
• what other attempts at eradicating diseases failed and how much did that cost?
  • malaria

Some kind of investigation into feedback mechanisms to reward good nonprofit work and potentially penalise bad nonprofit work that are more organic/finer instruments than 'you get a grant or you don't'. 

I know impact certificates are a possibility, but I don't understand what the secondary market for those could be. They also seem more relevant to individuals and possibly organisations than regular employees at organisations.

I'd be interested to understand why there are still huge shortfalls in the supposedly top effective charities.

For example, AMF has a funding gap of $300 milion. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has an endowment of $67 billion, which of course they intend to donate away. Bill Gates also endorses GiveWell, and has an explicit focus on solving Malaria (it also lists 20 organizations that they partner with, but AMF is not one of it).

So why isn't the AMF funding gap plugged yet, by the Gates foundation, or anyone else? As for the Foundation, is it a matter of grant evaluation process? Is there anything else relevant I should know to better understand the whole funding landscape of these issues?

What are the most likely scenarios in which we don't see transformative AI this century or perhaps for even longer? Do they require strong assumptions about (e.g.) theory of mind?

The most effective way to reduce global hunger

I'd love to see two types of posts that were already requested in the last version of this thread:

• From Aaron: "More journalistic articles about EA projects. [...] Telling an interesting story about the work of a person/organization, while mixing in the origin story, interesting details about the people involved, photos, etc."
• From Ben: "More accessible summaries of technical work." (I might share some ideas for technical work I'd love to see summarized later.)

A post on voting statistics on the EAF. I am (perhaps unsurprisingly by now!) interested especially in gender break-down. I would have liked to do this myself with the forum API and getting help from some AI code writer and perhaps also for using user names or descriptions to guess at gender. But I just think I do not have time. I would be super interested to see if there are indications that posts from users perceived to be female gets less votes and/or more downvoted. I guess this is less about what I want someone to write about than what work I would love for someone to do. I think potentially the data is right there in front of us.

Bumping my list of EA Communication Project Ideas

Are there reasonably engaging narrative tropes (or could we invent effective new ones) that could easily be recycled in genre fiction to promote effective altruist principles, in much the same way that e.g. the noble savage trope can easily be used to promote ecocentric philosophies, no-one gets left behind trope promotes localism, etc?

Write a concrete proposal for a scalable bunker system that would be robust and reliable enough to preserve technological civilisation in the event of human extinction due to e.g. nuclear winter, biopandemics on the surface. How much would it cost? Given that many people assert it would be much easier than settling other planets, why hasn't anyone started building such systems en mass, and how could we remove whatever the blocker is?

Some empirical research into the fragile world hypothesis, in particular with reference to energy return on investment (EROI). Is there a less extreme version of 'The great energy descent' that implies that average societal EROI could stay at sustainable levels but only absent shocks, and that one or two big shocks could push it below that point and make it a) impossible to recover or b) possible to recover but only after such a major restructuring of our economy that it would resemble the collapse of civiliation?

An updated version of Luisa Rodriguez's 'What is the likelihood that civilizational collapse would cause technological stagnation? (outdated research)' post that took into account her subsequent concerns, and looked beyond 'reaching an industrial revolution' to 'rebuilding an economy large enough to eventually become spacefaring'.

Comparing different ARPAs, ARIA, and SPRIN-D

• Could be an interesting blog post to compare the ARPAs in the US with ARIA in the UK and SPRIN-D in Germany
• What do they have in common?
  • What are their most important differences?
  • Would be cool to summarise all these comparisons in a nice table

What proportion of people working in population ethics have experienced some kind of prolonged significant suffering themselves, e.g. destitution, 3rd degree burns on a large proportion of the body? What proportion of people working in population ethics have spoken to and listened to the views of people who have experienced extreme suffering in order to try and mitigate their own experiential gap? How does this impact their conclusions?

I am concerned that the views of people who have experience significant suffering are very under-represented and this results in a bias in many areas of society, including population ethics.

Thanks for organising this, Toby!

I think it would be interesting to have a post on "Is the EA Forum becoming polarised?". For example, the EA Forum team could see how the following metrics have evolved over time for posts and comments:

• Ratio r = "karma"/"karma movement" < 1, where:
  • "Karma" is just the score showing up on comments and posts, which is equal to "karma from light and strong upvotes (positive)" + "karma from light and strong downvotes (negative)".
  • "Karma movement" equals "karma from light and strong upvotes (positive)" - "karma from light and strong downvotes (negative)".
  • A decreasing r would be a sign of greater polarisation. If r = 1 for a given post/comment, it was just upvoted or downvotes, i.e. voting was not polarised at all.
• Correlation between "karma from light and strong upvotes (positive)" and -"karma from light and strong downvotes (negative)".
  • A more positive correlation would mean a stronger association between upvotes and downvotes.
  • The correlation coefficient could be plotted across time computing one value for each month or year.

I guess the EA Forum has become more polarised according to these metrics, but this may be a little of a rosy retrospection.

Many of the post ideas on my list of things I want to write would be basically as good if someone else wrote them (and they come with some existing prioritisation in agreevotes)

Is there an underunexplored option to fund early stage for-profits that seem to have high potential social value? Might it sometimes be worth funding them in exchange for basically 0 equity so that it's comparatively easy for them to raise further funding the normal way?

(Somewhat adjacent to the Qs posed by Brad West and Max Görlitz) Does the EA community spend enough time and resource on outreach and public engagement activity? 
I often wonder whether, despite being fictional, Chidi Anagonye has done more for effective altruism than all EA orgs combined, given there is so much focus on an academic exchange of ideas and it's not clear to me how wide-reaching a lot of the existing Effective Altruism (with a capital E and A) organisations truly are; the number of pledgers on Giving What We Can is quite low for example - and awareness of many of these organisations is low outside of the EA community itself. Has there - via theory of change or impact assessment work, been an evaluation of how much prioritisation should be given to public engagement and to what extent this aligns with the reality of how much activity is currently undertaken in this space? 

I want somebody to flesh out some of the negative comments on Open Philanthropy's announcement about funding forecasting into an actual post.

I don't have a background in forecasting or any insider knowledge of EA community dynamics, so I'm the wrong person to write this post but I might if nobody steps forward to claim it.

I want someone to write a post on bets as insurance. Sometimes, placing monetary bets against your own interests may help make worst-case scenarios less bad. For example, if one thinks Trump is an existential threat, they might bet money on Trump winning so they have more resources to deal with the fallout in the event that he does win. One could also bet against good news, e.g., last year I bet real money against the room-temperature superconductor stuff being legit, which ensured that either it was legit, or I'd make a bunch of money; I thought this guaranteed net good news in either case. 

Someone could think through the risks and benefits of this approach and/or create a larger list of promising insurance-bets.

I'd like to see research on methods we could use to effectively and efficiently collect data at large scales with minimal costs.

I'm not sure how much of a bottleneck (high-quality) data collection is in different cause-areas, but since it is super important to so many cause-areas, I think it would be well worth looking into. I imagine that surely there has to be at least some low-hanging fruit in terms of ways we can obtain lots of data for various cause-areas, buy I'd love some proper investigation into these ways.