Great post; I like the taxonomy of project types and example ideas. Lots of people who become interested in EA have a background in programming (including myself). This magnifies the importance of exploring EA applications of software engineering, since we could probably unlock a lot of really skilled human capital if we found great altruistic software projects for them to work on.
I think there is also a lot to explore in terms of the incentives, organizational structure, and for-profit potential vs intrinsic charitableness of different project types:
The crypto world has a lot of promising object-level ideas about enabling new forms of social organization & governance, and I am also excited about how they are exploring new models for incentivizing software development projects: public goods funding via strange mechanisms like Gitcoin and retroactive awards, or the idea of funding developers’ contributions to distributed open-source-style projects using a project-specific coin. (It would be awesome to have an EA donation pool where donors could vote for their preferred charities using Gitcoin’s system of quadradic public-goods funding.)
I think there are a lot of things we can learn by examining the open-source software movement—see my detailed thoughts here. As with crypto, I think we can learn from both the actual software itself and the culture/incentives around development. Some open source programs/libraries/etc seem like very important public goods that wouldn’t have been possible without the effort of an altruistic FOSS developer—examining success stories here could provide inspiration for EA software project ideas. The culture that grew up to promote FOSS development is also interesting and has some similarities to EA. EA programmers should seek to learn from both the successes and the limitations of open-source culture.
Of course, there are a lot of software teams that become profitable private companies—note-taking tools like Roam & Notion, money-transfer tools like Wave, etc. If a business can be built around a given software tool without much compromising the altruistic benefit of the tool, all the better, since we can then spend our philanthropic budget elsewhere! I think better virtual collaboration software is a huge potential area for profitable+altruistic projects, especially remote-working software that is tailored specifically towards helping people in developing countries work together with employers in the First World.
Of course, the downside of trying to run a profitable business is that everybody else is trying to do that too, so profitable areas are naturally less neglected. But there are always exceptions, and there’s also a lot of room for “marginal charity”—like running a for-profit business but with a particular emphasis on creating the product that will lead to maximum positive externalities (like Wave). There’s also a whole category of philanthropic projects that could produce some revenue to offset their costs but would still need philanthropic support. (Like how some poverty-reduction places sell the bednets or whatever for a cheap below-cost fee, to ensure products go to those who will use them and to defray costs. Or how Beyond Meat, psychedelic medicine, etc, were supported by donations early on but are now capable of raking in the big bucks on their own.)
I am also interested in some career-related questions related to marginal charity—ie, if you are a software engineer thinking about contributing to EA by earning-to-give, to what extent should you try a medium strategy like “mostly earn to give but also bias your career towards especially altruistic projects”, versus to what extent should you try to go all the way in one direction (building skills and ladder-climbing up the Google hierarchy as best you can) or the other (trying to find the MOST beneficial project where you can have the most impact, then treating any earning-to-give potential as icing on the cake). But those are still fuzzy questions in my mind that I will have to think more about before I write them up properly.
Anyways, thanks for this! As someone who has participated in various forecasting tournaments and used tools like Guesstimate, I am certainly psyched about QURI’s work and the potential for better forecasting/estimation tools.
Great post; I like the taxonomy of project types and example ideas. Lots of people who become interested in EA have a background in programming (including myself). This magnifies the importance of exploring EA applications of software engineering, since we could probably unlock a lot of really skilled human capital if we found great altruistic software projects for them to work on.
I think there is also a lot to explore in terms of the incentives, organizational structure, and for-profit potential vs intrinsic charitableness of different project types:
The crypto world has a lot of promising object-level ideas about enabling new forms of social organization & governance, and I am also excited about how they are exploring new models for incentivizing software development projects: public goods funding via strange mechanisms like Gitcoin and retroactive awards, or the idea of funding developers’ contributions to distributed open-source-style projects using a project-specific coin. (It would be awesome to have an EA donation pool where donors could vote for their preferred charities using Gitcoin’s system of quadradic public-goods funding.)
I think there are a lot of things we can learn by examining the open-source software movement—see my detailed thoughts here. As with crypto, I think we can learn from both the actual software itself and the culture/incentives around development. Some open source programs/libraries/etc seem like very important public goods that wouldn’t have been possible without the effort of an altruistic FOSS developer—examining success stories here could provide inspiration for EA software project ideas. The culture that grew up to promote FOSS development is also interesting and has some similarities to EA. EA programmers should seek to learn from both the successes and the limitations of open-source culture.
Of course, there are a lot of software teams that become profitable private companies—note-taking tools like Roam & Notion, money-transfer tools like Wave, etc. If a business can be built around a given software tool without much compromising the altruistic benefit of the tool, all the better, since we can then spend our philanthropic budget elsewhere! I think better virtual collaboration software is a huge potential area for profitable+altruistic projects, especially remote-working software that is tailored specifically towards helping people in developing countries work together with employers in the First World.
Of course, the downside of trying to run a profitable business is that everybody else is trying to do that too, so profitable areas are naturally less neglected. But there are always exceptions, and there’s also a lot of room for “marginal charity”—like running a for-profit business but with a particular emphasis on creating the product that will lead to maximum positive externalities (like Wave). There’s also a whole category of philanthropic projects that could produce some revenue to offset their costs but would still need philanthropic support. (Like how some poverty-reduction places sell the bednets or whatever for a cheap below-cost fee, to ensure products go to those who will use them and to defray costs. Or how Beyond Meat, psychedelic medicine, etc, were supported by donations early on but are now capable of raking in the big bucks on their own.)
I am also interested in some career-related questions related to marginal charity—ie, if you are a software engineer thinking about contributing to EA by earning-to-give, to what extent should you try a medium strategy like “mostly earn to give but also bias your career towards especially altruistic projects”, versus to what extent should you try to go all the way in one direction (building skills and ladder-climbing up the Google hierarchy as best you can) or the other (trying to find the MOST beneficial project where you can have the most impact, then treating any earning-to-give potential as icing on the cake). But those are still fuzzy questions in my mind that I will have to think more about before I write them up properly.
Anyways, thanks for this! As someone who has participated in various forecasting tournaments and used tools like Guesstimate, I am certainly psyched about QURI’s work and the potential for better forecasting/estimation tools.