Concrete project lists

[Richard_Batty]

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:

• Charity Entrepreneurship: promising new charities

  • Health

  • Charity Entrepreneurship want to find founders to work on these, and will offer extensive guidance

• GiveWell: Global poverty charities we’d like to see

  • Poverty

• D-Prize: Poverty intervention distribution challenges

  • Poverty, health

  • Successful applicants to these challenges receive seed funding

• Institute for Transformative Technologies: 50 breakthroughs needed for sustainable global development

  • Health, food and agriculture, human rights, education, water, gender equality, digital inclusion, climate change resilience, and electricity

• FIND: Needed diagnostic devices for the developing world

  • Poverty, health

• Lee Sharkey: Increasing Access to Pain Relief in Developing Countries

  • Poverty, health

• Good Technology Project: Financial services for the poor

  • Poverty

• World Bank: The Opportunities for Digitising Payments

  • Poverty

• Deep Science Ventures: Antibiotic resistance: what can you do?

  • Health, catastrophic risk

• Good Technology Project: Biosurveillance

  • Health, catastrophic risk

• Mission Innovation: Climate change innovation challenges

  • Climate change

• Brett Victor: What can a technologist do about climate change?

  • Climate change

• Concrete problems in AI safety

  • AI safety

• MIRI: Agent Foundations for Aligning Superintelligence with Human Interests

  • AI safety

• MIRI: Alignment for Advanced Machine Learning Systems

  • AI safety

• Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence

  • AI safety

• Luke Muehlhauser: How to study superintelligence strategy

  • AI safety

• World Resources Institute: Creating a sustainable food future

  • Catastrophic risk

• Feeding everyone no matter what: managing food security after global catastrophe

  • Catastrophic risk

• EA Ventures: Promising project ideas

  • Mixed

• .impact: Projects list

  • Mixed

• Good Technology Project: Open projects in EA

  • 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:

• What’s blocking you from working on an altruistic project?

• Are there resources which the community could provide that would help?

• 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.]