In direct violation of the instruction to put ideas in distinct comments, here’s a list of ideas most of which are so underbaked they’re basically raw:
Meta/infrastructure
Buy a hotel/condo/appt building (maybe the Travelodge?) in Berkeley and turn it into an EA Hotel
Offer to buy EAs no-doctor-required blood tests like this one that test for common productivity-hampering issues (e.g. b12 deficiency, anemia, hypothyroidism)
Figure out how to put to good use some greater proportion of the approximately 1 Billion recent college grads who want to work at an “EA org”
This might look like a collective of independent-ish researchers?
(uncertain) I think a super high impact thing that a single high school senior could decide to do is to attend a good state honors college or non-Ivy university without a thriving EA club/scene and make it happen there.
I tentatively think it would be worth, say, turning down Harvard to go to the U of Maryland Honors college and start an EA group there
To incentivize this, make it cool and normal to credibly say that this is what one did
To a first approximation, 0% of students outside of the Ivies and maybe 10 other campuses have heard of EA. The fruit is underground at this point
Animal welfare
(Ok this one is like 60% baked) A moderately-intensive BOTEC says that wild fish slaughter accounts for 250 million years of extreme fish suffering per year from asphyxiation or being gutted alive
The linked BOTEC also includes my conservative, lower bound estimate that this is morally equivalent to ~5B human deaths per year
Idea: idk, like do something about this. Like figure out how to make it cheap and easy to kill fish en masse in a quicker and/or more humanely
This one might turn into an actual forum post
Related: can we just raise (farm) a ton of fish ourselves, but using humane practices, with donations subsidizing the cost difference relative to standard aquaculture
This also might turn into a blog post
Hot takes
There should be way more all-things-considered, direct comparisons between cause areas.
In particular, I don’t think a complete case has been made (even from a total utilitarian, longtermist perspective) that at the current funding margin, it makes sense to spend marginal dollars on longtermist-motivated projects instead of animal welfare projects.
As just one demonstration, the Fish Welfare Initiative says they have a nearly $200k funding gap for 2022
Note (as of 6pm June 24) I may update this comment and/or break parts into their own comments as I recall other ideas I’ve had
In direct violation of the instruction to put ideas in distinct comments, here’s a list of ideas most of which are so underbaked they’re basically raw:
Meta/infrastructure
Buy a hotel/condo/appt building (maybe the Travelodge?) in Berkeley and turn it into an EA Hotel
Offer to buy EAs no-doctor-required blood tests like this one that test for common productivity-hampering issues (e.g. b12 deficiency, anemia, hypothyroidism)
Figure out how to put to good use some greater proportion of the approximately 1 Billion recent college grads who want to work at an “EA org”
This might look like a collective of independent-ish researchers?
(uncertain) I think a super high impact thing that a single high school senior could decide to do is to attend a good state honors college or non-Ivy university without a thriving EA club/scene and make it happen there.
I tentatively think it would be worth, say, turning down Harvard to go to the U of Maryland Honors college and start an EA group there
To incentivize this, make it cool and normal to credibly say that this is what one did
To a first approximation, 0% of students outside of the Ivies and maybe 10 other campuses have heard of EA. The fruit is underground at this point
Animal welfare
(Ok this one is like 60% baked) A moderately-intensive BOTEC says that wild fish slaughter accounts for 250 million years of extreme fish suffering per year from asphyxiation or being gutted alive
The linked BOTEC also includes my conservative, lower bound estimate that this is morally equivalent to ~5B human deaths per year
Idea: idk, like do something about this. Like figure out how to make it cheap and easy to kill fish en masse in a quicker and/or more humanely
This one might turn into an actual forum post
Related: can we just raise (farm) a ton of fish ourselves, but using humane practices, with donations subsidizing the cost difference relative to standard aquaculture
This also might turn into a blog post
Hot takes
There should be way more all-things-considered, direct comparisons between cause areas.
In particular, I don’t think a complete case has been made (even from a total utilitarian, longtermist perspective) that at the current funding margin, it makes sense to spend marginal dollars on longtermist-motivated projects instead of animal welfare projects.
As just one demonstration, the Fish Welfare Initiative says they have a nearly $200k funding gap for 2022
Note (as of 6pm June 24) I may update this comment and/or break parts into their own comments as I recall other ideas I’ve had