I just want to flag that “megaprojects” are notoriously problematic. They seem to fail more often than other projects and run to be far more expensive than initially predicted.
There’s a whole field of study now into why they go so poorly.
The alternative is to have many projects start out small and just help them to scale up quickly. This is what Silicon Valley does, and it often works in spades. Basically all of the most successful companies started as tiny ventures, not megaprojects.
Starting and funding megaprojects from scratch is something you generally only do when you have no other option.
So if the question is, “which existing projects should scale to get $100m+”, that’s fine, but if the expectation is that these will be totally new projects, I’d suggest hesitancy.
How relevant is that literature on “megaprojects”? As far as I can tell it seems mostly focused on infrastructure—e.g. construction of big dams, bridges, and so on. Those projects seem very different from the kinds of projects that Ben and Will talk about. (Plus the latter have a smaller size, as mentioned.)
I don’t think the term “megaproject” is misleading or confusing, though others may disagree. The fact that Flyvbjerg and others have used it in one sense doesn’t necessarily mean we can’t use it in another sense.
I appreciate Ozzie flagging this, since a nontrivial fraction of the costs of my proposed idea (shelters) would in fact be construction costs for a fairly difficult/novel thing (eg construct an underground shelter for >100 people with BSL IV entry requirements, enough food, fuel and technical sophistication to support >100 people + >5000 frozen fertilized embryos for >30 years), so even if the objection is not applicable to the other project ideas, it should be applicable to mine.
The megaprojects literature does use it in those ways. I haven’t found that much discussion on what exactly Ben and Will do talk about, I just found a few tweets.
I’m fine with people defining megaproject in a different sense; but if so, I think it should be defined. In this case, it’s not clear to me what their definition is exactly.
My impression is that the commonality of megaproject failure is more “a really big project, with often a bunch of stakeholders, and is difficult to incrementally develop”, more so than being about bridges/dams in particular. Many huge software projects fit similar patterns and have had similar fates. Many large technocratic initiatives also had a lot of problems.
If you take out software, hardware, and technocratic initiatives, I’m not sure why kinds of projects there are that could make it to the $100Mil mark.
Honestly, many of the projects in the thread are more susceptible to the same flaws that apply to these infrastructure projects. Bridges and dams are far more tangible, and benefit from deep pools of experience.
Related to the bigger goal, I think few people here believe the value of this thread is in brainstorming a specific project proposal.
Rather, there’s lots of other value, e.g. in seeing if any ideas or domains pop out that might help further discussion, and knowledge of existing projects and experts might arise.
(There’s also a perspective that is a bit snobby and looks down on big, grandiose planning).
FWIW my reading of the question is: “What projects could be created, that have the potential to scale to $100m”. I didn’t read it as suggesting funding a megaproject from scratch.
Many EA projects are of the “start a research institute” flavour, and will likely never absorb $100m. I see the post as a plea for projects which could (after starting with smaller amounts and then scaling) absorb these sums of money. Much like Givedirectly wasn’t started with $100m/year budget right away, but has proven itself capable of deploying that much funding.
I think that’s my guess too, but I could easily imagine some readers not getting that. “Megaproject” as a term has often referred to projects that have to be planned in advance.
Megaprojects cost $1 billion or more. Ben Todd was using the (admittedly somewhat confusing) term ‘EA megaproject’ by which he meant a new project that could usefully spend $100m a year. So these concerns about megaprojects don’t apply. How about we use the term ‘$100m-scale project’? (I considered ‘kiloproject’ but that’s really niche.)
Note that $100M/year is not inconsistent with >$1B/project. For example, at an 8% discount rate, the net present value of a 100M/year annuity is about ~$1.25B
It sounds like there are two very different concerns here.
One is how large the project is. $100M vs. $1Billion.
The second is how “gradual” that project can be. Like, can it start small, or do we need to allocate $100M at once?
The concern i was bringing up was more about the latter. My main point was just that we should generally prioritize projects that can be neatly scaled up over ones that require a huge upfront cost.
In fairness, I think most of the suggested examples are things that have nice ramps of scaling them up. For example, the nuclear funding gap seems fairly gradual, and the Anthropic team seems to be mainly progressing ideas that they worked on from OpenAI.
Projects I’d be more concerned are ones like, ”We’ve never done this sort of thing before, we really can’t say how successful it will be, but here’s $100M, and it needs to be spent very quickly using plans that can’t change much at all.”
I’m not that concerned about the $100M vs. $1Bil difference. Many groups grow over time, so I’d imagine that most exciting $100M projects would be very likely to reach $1Bil after a few years.
Maybe just include something like this in the description:
”By Megaproject, I’m referring to any project that could eventually be scaled up to $100 Million, not ones that are planned from the start to cost $100 Million. In many cases this could include very small efforts that would have to achieve multiple levels of success to eventually get $100Million+ per year.”
I expect many people will also read these comments, so it’s not particularly important, but it could be nice.
I just want to flag that “megaprojects” are notoriously problematic. They seem to fail more often than other projects and run to be far more expensive than initially predicted.
There’s a whole field of study now into why they go so poorly.
Some articles I was able to find very quickly:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/construction/news/2020/feb/why-megaprojects-go-wrong-ucl-research-finds-main-causes-and-solutions-project-failure
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200214084902.htm
The alternative is to have many projects start out small and just help them to scale up quickly. This is what Silicon Valley does, and it often works in spades. Basically all of the most successful companies started as tiny ventures, not megaprojects.
Starting and funding megaprojects from scratch is something you generally only do when you have no other option.
So if the question is, “which existing projects should scale to get $100m+”, that’s fine, but if the expectation is that these will be totally new projects, I’d suggest hesitancy.
How relevant is that literature on “megaprojects”? As far as I can tell it seems mostly focused on infrastructure—e.g. construction of big dams, bridges, and so on. Those projects seem very different from the kinds of projects that Ben and Will talk about. (Plus the latter have a smaller size, as mentioned.)
I don’t think the term “megaproject” is misleading or confusing, though others may disagree. The fact that Flyvbjerg and others have used it in one sense doesn’t necessarily mean we can’t use it in another sense.
I appreciate Ozzie flagging this, since a nontrivial fraction of the costs of my proposed idea (shelters) would in fact be construction costs for a fairly difficult/novel thing (eg construct an underground shelter for >100 people with BSL IV entry requirements, enough food, fuel and technical sophistication to support >100 people + >5000 frozen fertilized embryos for >30 years), so even if the objection is not applicable to the other project ideas, it should be applicable to mine.
The megaprojects literature does use it in those ways. I haven’t found that much discussion on what exactly Ben and Will do talk about, I just found a few tweets.
I’m fine with people defining megaproject in a different sense; but if so, I think it should be defined. In this case, it’s not clear to me what their definition is exactly.
My impression is that the commonality of megaproject failure is more “a really big project, with often a bunch of stakeholders, and is difficult to incrementally develop”, more so than being about bridges/dams in particular. Many huge software projects fit similar patterns and have had similar fates. Many large technocratic initiatives also had a lot of problems.
If you take out software, hardware, and technocratic initiatives, I’m not sure why kinds of projects there are that could make it to the $100Mil mark.
Ok, probably more relevant is the the OLPC project. Here is an extremely readable overview.
Honestly, many of the projects in the thread are more susceptible to the same flaws that apply to these infrastructure projects. Bridges and dams are far more tangible, and benefit from deep pools of experience.
Related to the bigger goal, I think few people here believe the value of this thread is in brainstorming a specific project proposal.
Rather, there’s lots of other value, e.g. in seeing if any ideas or domains pop out that might help further discussion, and knowledge of existing projects and experts might arise.
(There’s also a perspective that is a bit snobby and looks down on big, grandiose planning).
FWIW my reading of the question is: “What projects could be created, that have the potential to scale to $100m”. I didn’t read it as suggesting funding a megaproject from scratch.
Many EA projects are of the “start a research institute” flavour, and will likely never absorb $100m. I see the post as a plea for projects which could (after starting with smaller amounts and then scaling) absorb these sums of money. Much like Givedirectly wasn’t started with $100m/year budget right away, but has proven itself capable of deploying that much funding.
I think that’s my guess too, but I could easily imagine some readers not getting that. “Megaproject” as a term has often referred to projects that have to be planned in advance.
Megaprojects cost $1 billion or more. Ben Todd was using the (admittedly somewhat confusing) term ‘EA megaproject’ by which he meant a new project that could usefully spend $100m a year. So these concerns about megaprojects don’t apply.
How about we use the term ‘$100m-scale project’? (I considered ‘kiloproject’ but that’s really niche.)
Note that $100M/year is not inconsistent with >$1B/project. For example, at an 8% discount rate, the net present value of a 100M/year annuity is about ~$1.25B
It sounds like there are two very different concerns here.
One is how large the project is. $100M vs. $1Billion.
The second is how “gradual” that project can be. Like, can it start small, or do we need to allocate $100M at once?
The concern i was bringing up was more about the latter. My main point was just that we should generally prioritize projects that can be neatly scaled up over ones that require a huge upfront cost.
In fairness, I think most of the suggested examples are things that have nice ramps of scaling them up. For example, the nuclear funding gap seems fairly gradual, and the Anthropic team seems to be mainly progressing ideas that they worked on from OpenAI.
Projects I’d be more concerned are ones like,
”We’ve never done this sort of thing before, we really can’t say how successful it will be, but here’s $100M, and it needs to be spent very quickly using plans that can’t change much at all.”
I’m not that concerned about the $100M vs. $1Bil difference. Many groups grow over time, so I’d imagine that most exciting $100M projects would be very likely to reach $1Bil after a few years.
what would you like it to say and I’ll edit it.
Maybe just include something like this in the description:
”By Megaproject, I’m referring to any project that could eventually be scaled up to $100 Million, not ones that are planned from the start to cost $100 Million. In many cases this could include very small efforts that would have to achieve multiple levels of success to eventually get $100Million+ per year.”
I expect many people will also read these comments, so it’s not particularly important, but it could be nice.
Glad this edit was included at the start of the post; it definitely helped me as I read through the ideas. Thanks!
Mega-scalable projects!
I think I like this phrase more, though it might take some defining.