What are the most ambitious EA projects that failed?
If we’re encouraged to be more ambitious, it would be nice to have a very rough idea of how cost-effective ambition is itself. Essentially, I’d love to find or arrive at an intuitive/quantitative estimate of the following variables:
[total # of particularly ‘ambitious’ past EA projects[1]]
[total # (or value) of successfwl projects in the same reference class]
In other words, is the reason why we don’t see more big wins in EA that people aren’t ambitious enough, or are big wins just really unlikely? Are we bottlenecked by ambition?
For this reason, I think it could be personally[2] valuable to see a list,[3] one that tries hard to be comprehensive, of failed, successfwl, and abandoned projects. Failing that, I’d love to just hear anecdotes.
Carrick Flynn’s political campaign is a prototypical example. Others include CFAR, Arbital, RAISE. Other ideas include published EA-inspired books that went under the radar, papers that intended to persuade academics but failed, or even just earning-to-give-motivated failed entrepreneurs, etc.
I currently seem to have a disproportionately high prior on the “hit rate” for really high ambition, just because I know some success stories (e.g. Sam Bankman-Fried), and this is despite the fact that I don’t see much extreme ambition in the water generally.
What are the most ambitious EA projects that failed?
If we’re encouraged to be more ambitious, it would be nice to have a very rough idea of how cost-effective ambition is itself. Essentially, I’d love to find or arrive at an intuitive/quantitative estimate of the following variables:
[total # of particularly ‘ambitious’ past EA projects[1]]
[total # (or value) of successfwl projects in the same reference class]
In other words, is the reason why we don’t see more big wins in EA that people aren’t ambitious enough, or are big wins just really unlikely? Are we bottlenecked by ambition?
For this reason, I think it could be personally[2] valuable to see a list,[3] one that tries hard to be comprehensive, of failed, successfwl, and abandoned projects. Failing that, I’d love to just hear anecdotes.
Carrick Flynn’s political campaign is a prototypical example. Others include CFAR, Arbital, RAISE. Other ideas include published EA-inspired books that went under the radar, papers that intended to persuade academics but failed, or even just earning-to-give-motivated failed entrepreneurs, etc.
I currently seem to have a disproportionately high prior on the “hit rate” for really high ambition, just because I know some success stories (e.g. Sam Bankman-Fried), and this is despite the fact that I don’t see much extreme ambition in the water generally.
Such a list could also be usefwl for publicly celebrating failure and communicating that we’re appreciative of people who risked trying. : )