Advocacy for [metascience, land-use reform, clean energy technologies, or other individual planks of the progress studies platform]
Economic growth, Epistemic institutions
You already list high-skill immigration advocacy, pandemic-prevention breakthroughs, and a variety of institutional-innovation topics; why not the rest of the “abundance agenda”? (I already listed general/high-level philosophical research, but here I am suggesting specific sub-areas.)
Land use, construction costs, “yimby”, etc. -- Has it gotten more difficult for civilization to build things? At this point, ordinary Yimby activism might be too mainstream for a cutting-edge FTX program, but there are still a lot of potential angles here—maybe experiment with Harberger taxes or help develop software to estimate land value accurately and finally make Georgism possible in practice? Maybe figure out how to reverse the causes of high construction costs?
Metascience—you already mention “Higher epistemic standards for journalism and books”, but metascience is a big field! Other people in this thread have already suggested great ways to experiment with new funding and research models like “focused research organizations” and ARPA models. Also, apart from trying to get scientific journals to adopt higher epistemic standards, I’d be interested in research into ways that we could better incentivize scientists to focus on higher-impact areas and focus on exploring new areas, rather than unduly rewarding incremental work in fashionable fields.
Advocacy for [metascience, land-use reform, clean energy technologies, or other individual planks of the progress studies platform]
Economic growth, Epistemic institutions
You already list high-skill immigration advocacy, pandemic-prevention breakthroughs, and a variety of institutional-innovation topics; why not the rest of the “abundance agenda”? (I already listed general/high-level philosophical research, but here I am suggesting specific sub-areas.)
Land use, construction costs, “yimby”, etc. -- Has it gotten more difficult for civilization to build things? At this point, ordinary Yimby activism might be too mainstream for a cutting-edge FTX program, but there are still a lot of potential angles here—maybe experiment with Harberger taxes or help develop software to estimate land value accurately and finally make Georgism possible in practice? Maybe figure out how to reverse the causes of high construction costs?
Metascience—you already mention “Higher epistemic standards for journalism and books”, but metascience is a big field! Other people in this thread have already suggested great ways to experiment with new funding and research models like “focused research organizations” and ARPA models. Also, apart from trying to get scientific journals to adopt higher epistemic standards, I’d be interested in research into ways that we could better incentivize scientists to focus on higher-impact areas and focus on exploring new areas, rather than unduly rewarding incremental work in fashionable fields.
New energy technologies like nuclear, geothermal, fusion, and utility-scale storage—abundant energy would be a huge boon for human welfare. In some places, like when it comes to investing in geothermal or nuclear-power startups, for-profit venture capitalists are probably better suited to the task than a charitable longtermist fund. But there might be some helpful lobbying angles where a charitable group could get valuable leverage. Advocating for streamlined construction permitting, better and more flexible nuclear regulation, improved electrical grids, time-varying electricity prices to encourage efficient off-peak power usage, etc.