Earlier I had a conversation with Yonatan Cale about, among other things, ideas for EA projects that could be looking for founders. My prior is that āideas are easy, execution is hardā and therefor there are plenty of good ideas, he pushed back on this and cited this thread.
Then I went for a run and tried to think of some ideas. I havenāt checked to see if anyone has proposed any of them before, and given that I thought of them off the top of my head, they have likely already been discussed. We had talked about software projects specifically, but not all of these are software-centric. I havenāt spent longer than five minutes thinking about any of them, and I think itās unlikely any of them are particularly good; this is an exercise in generating ideas, on the grounds that if thereās enough of them, one of them might be good.
Prediction market aggregators that include markets from non-anglophone countries, eg Russia/āChina/āIndia. Basically Metaforecast but with more markets (maybe I should reach out to NuƱo to see if this would be possible?). I donāt know if those markets already existāif not, maybe they could be created.
A system to automate or crowd-source FOI requests, open source the data and provide tools to access and use it.
Basically any of the digital democracy tools Audrey Tang talked about on her episode of the 80000 Hours podcast. Build an MVP, pitch it to small local government, show some success, scale it up. Given the open-source nature of the tools currently used in Taiwan, ābuild an MVPā could be as easy as just running git clone polis. Low chance of success, potential for huge impact if successful regardless.
A system for polling representative samples of a population and/āor having demographic information available about those sampled. Something like mechanical turk but in app-form and not associated with Amazon.
Web scraping/āsentiment & quantitative analysis for information on Western/āRussian/āChinese/āIndian sites, similar to prediction market thing above. If lots of Chinese netizens suddenly start talking about shortening their AGI timelines, what information do they have that folks in the West donāt? Similarly, the analysis should be published in the same languages to try to foster a more global community.
Org specifically for AI info security. Could either be for pen testing or building new defensive tools.
I originally thought āsomething like Guesstimate but more specific to Bayes calculationsā but having looked at Guesstimate again, that already looks great.
A scientific journal which better incentivizes high quality research, eg by mandating preregistration, or by rewarding attempts to replicate studies. I presume this has been debated at length already though.
Obviously I know the last two definitely donāt have legs, and #1 seems like it might just be submitting a pull request after a weekend or two of work, but still. Iām confident that there is a non-zero amount of value across all of these ideas, that if I thought about them more thereās a possibility that they could yield an appreciable amount of value, and that I can think of a large number of similar ideas given more time, with at least some of them being better than the best one of these ideas.
Earlier I had a conversation with Yonatan Cale about, among other things, ideas for EA projects that could be looking for founders. My prior is that āideas are easy, execution is hardā and therefor there are plenty of good ideas, he pushed back on this and cited this thread.
Then I went for a run and tried to think of some ideas. I havenāt checked to see if anyone has proposed any of them before, and given that I thought of them off the top of my head, they have likely already been discussed. We had talked about software projects specifically, but not all of these are software-centric. I havenāt spent longer than five minutes thinking about any of them, and I think itās unlikely any of them are particularly good; this is an exercise in generating ideas, on the grounds that if thereās enough of them, one of them might be good.
Prediction market aggregators that include markets from non-anglophone countries, eg Russia/āChina/āIndia. Basically Metaforecast but with more markets (maybe I should reach out to NuƱo to see if this would be possible?). I donāt know if those markets already existāif not, maybe they could be created.
A system to automate or crowd-source FOI requests, open source the data and provide tools to access and use it.
Basically any of the digital democracy tools Audrey Tang talked about on her episode of the 80000 Hours podcast. Build an MVP, pitch it to small local government, show some success, scale it up. Given the open-source nature of the tools currently used in Taiwan, ābuild an MVPā could be as easy as just running
git clone polis. Low chance of success, potential for huge impact if successful regardless.A system for polling representative samples of a population and/āor having demographic information available about those sampled. Something like mechanical turk but in app-form and not associated with Amazon.
Web scraping/āsentiment & quantitative analysis for information on Western/āRussian/āChinese/āIndian sites, similar to prediction market thing above. If lots of Chinese netizens suddenly start talking about shortening their AGI timelines, what information do they have that folks in the West donāt? Similarly, the analysis should be published in the same languages to try to foster a more global community.
Org specifically for AI info security. Could either be for pen testing or building new defensive tools.
I originally thought āsomething like Guesstimate but more specific to Bayes calculationsā but having looked at Guesstimate again, that already looks great.
A scientific journal which better incentivizes high quality research, eg by mandating preregistration, or by rewarding attempts to replicate studies. I presume this has been debated at length already though.
Obviously I know the last two definitely donāt have legs, and #1 seems like it might just be submitting a pull request after a weekend or two of work, but still. Iām confident that there is a non-zero amount of value across all of these ideas, that if I thought about them more thereās a possibility that they could yield an appreciable amount of value, and that I can think of a large number of similar ideas given more time, with at least some of them being better than the best one of these ideas.