Your suggestions are good and we can imagine doing them in the future, but I think we should prioritise the research problem for reasons I’ll explain.
For your matching developers with projects scenarios (e.g. conference or prizes), they would make sense if:
We already knew what the most effective software projects were
There was an undersupply of software developers taking them up, perhaps because they didn’t know about them
We think that there is some truth in this—it’s hard to find lists of tech orgs of any type, and there aren’t many lists of tech orgs that plausibly have a high positive impact. However, I don’t think we’re anywhere close to knowing what the most high impact software projects or organisations are. We are planning to publish a list of altruistic tech organisations, although we’ll be unable to prioritise them until we have made more progress on research.
There’s an analogy with early 80,000 Hours or GiveWell here. Early 80,000 Hours could have put all its effort into promoting what it thought at the time was the best way to have impact—earning to give. As we’ve found out, this would have been a mistake. By focussing on research they’ve developed much better advice than ‘everyone should do earning to give’.
Similarly GiveWell or Giving What We Can could have just picked a few charities that on the face of it seemed high impact and then worked on finding donors for them. If they’d done this and then stopped researching, they probably wouldn’t have found the options that they have now, nor would they be as credible for donors.
On running informal meetings:
This could have a couple of purposes:
Matching people with orgs or other people so they can work on important projects
Getting people talking about high impact tech so that we can make progress on working out what tech is high impact
I’ve addressed point 1 already. On point 2, I don’t think meetups or conferences are the best way to make progress. The questions we are trying to answer are very difficult and I don’t think people informally talking will cause much progress to happen.
Imagine if EA had started with some people asking ‘How can we have the most impact?’ and then instead of setting up organisations like GiveWell and 80,000 Hours, they had immediately concentrated on community, running conferences and meetups. I think we might have ended up like the conventional ethical sector—lots of people doing things and lots of ideas, but not much progress on prioritisation.
A stronger version of this option would be a more formal structure. There could be a forum (in person or online) for dedicated people to try to make progress on these questions. I think this could be a good option although we’d need to think about how to keep quality high.
I read Givewell’s ‘Science policy and infrastructure’ proposal but I don’t see how it relates to our project. What kinds of software regulation might we lobby politicians to change?
Your suggestions are good and we can imagine doing them in the future, but I think we should prioritise the research problem for reasons I’ll explain.
For your matching developers with projects scenarios (e.g. conference or prizes), they would make sense if:
We already knew what the most effective software projects were
There was an undersupply of software developers taking them up, perhaps because they didn’t know about them
We think that there is some truth in this—it’s hard to find lists of tech orgs of any type, and there aren’t many lists of tech orgs that plausibly have a high positive impact. However, I don’t think we’re anywhere close to knowing what the most high impact software projects or organisations are. We are planning to publish a list of altruistic tech organisations, although we’ll be unable to prioritise them until we have made more progress on research.
There’s an analogy with early 80,000 Hours or GiveWell here. Early 80,000 Hours could have put all its effort into promoting what it thought at the time was the best way to have impact—earning to give. As we’ve found out, this would have been a mistake. By focussing on research they’ve developed much better advice than ‘everyone should do earning to give’.
Similarly GiveWell or Giving What We Can could have just picked a few charities that on the face of it seemed high impact and then worked on finding donors for them. If they’d done this and then stopped researching, they probably wouldn’t have found the options that they have now, nor would they be as credible for donors.
On running informal meetings:
This could have a couple of purposes:
Matching people with orgs or other people so they can work on important projects
Getting people talking about high impact tech so that we can make progress on working out what tech is high impact
I’ve addressed point 1 already. On point 2, I don’t think meetups or conferences are the best way to make progress. The questions we are trying to answer are very difficult and I don’t think people informally talking will cause much progress to happen.
Imagine if EA had started with some people asking ‘How can we have the most impact?’ and then instead of setting up organisations like GiveWell and 80,000 Hours, they had immediately concentrated on community, running conferences and meetups. I think we might have ended up like the conventional ethical sector—lots of people doing things and lots of ideas, but not much progress on prioritisation.
A stronger version of this option would be a more formal structure. There could be a forum (in person or online) for dedicated people to try to make progress on these questions. I think this could be a good option although we’d need to think about how to keep quality high.
I read Givewell’s ‘Science policy and infrastructure’ proposal but I don’t see how it relates to our project. What kinds of software regulation might we lobby politicians to change?
Cool.
One could look at:
digital intellectual property
software in surveillance
software in science
software in GCRs (including autonomous weapons)
http://blog.givewell.org/2014/05/29/potential-u-s-policy-focus-areas/
This seems particularly impactful, although it needs some senior political advisors to get moving.