Taras Morozov

Karma: 133

Taras Morozov 7 Mar 2022 7:19 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Research raising sanity waterline
It seems that teaching the general public rationality tools may cause more polarisations. That is because many ideas seem to be used primarily for argument-winning instead of truth-seeking.
There is a risk that some ideas will make people less rational when teaching rationality. For example, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote an article Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People.
Scott Alexander uses the term Symmetric and Asymmetric Weapons for a similar idea: Some thinking-tools are more useful for winning arguments than truth-seeking.
Therefore, there is a need for research into improving the general public’s rationality without causing harm and even more polarisation.

Taras Morozov 7 Mar 2022 6:53 UTC
12 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Create an organization doing literature reviews and research on demand
Values and Reflective Processes, Effective Altruism
Create a research organization that will offer literature reviews and research to other EA organizations. They will focus on questions that are not theory-heavy and can be approached by a generalists without previous deep knowledge of the field. Previous examples of such research are publications of AI Impacts or literature reviews by Luke Muehlhauser.
Besides research itself, this is useful also for:
- it frees up the time of senior researchers
- It can be a good training place for junior researchers.
- it may enable a larger infusion of valuable ideas from academia.

Taras Morozov 7 Mar 2022 6:46 UTC
19 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Research differential technological progress and trajectory changes
Research That Can Help Us Improve, Values and Reflective Processes
The idea of Differential technological progress (DTP) may be a crucial consideration for many at-first-glance good ideas like:
- improving scientific publishing
- increasing GDP
- increasing average intelligence
But given its importance, there hasn`t been much research and publications on GTP.
Central question for research is how to use DTP to prioritize interventions. Examples of subquestion to research are:
- when in the past there were intentional trajectory changes.
- what subgoals seem to be good when DTP is considered.
- and so on.

Taras Morozov 7 Mar 2022 6:42 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Find good ways to distribute books to people with high potential
Epistemic Institutions, Effective Altruism
This project has two parts:
1) find people with high potential, especially students.
2) find a good way to distribute books on world problems to them.
Ad 1: Examples:
- students in low and medium income countries may have a higher demand for English books
- participants on STEM olympiads
- people with SAT scores > x
- students in selective schools
Ad 2: It is important to do it in a nice, non-preaching way.
One possible implementation is a book club that sends out a book every two months, with regular online meetups for its readers.

Taras Morozov 7 Mar 2022 6:38 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Create and curate educational materials on EA-related topics
Effective Altruism
EA Fellowship and EA Handbook took existing resources and curated them into a good introduction to EA. Do something similar with different formats and subjects.
I.e., create:
- Fellowships
- Reading lists.
- record existing courses in academia
- and so on
With a goals to:
- make it easy to take up new fields.
In fields like:
- Rationality
- Bioweapons
- Forecasting
- and so on.

Taras Morozov 4 Mar 2022 17:56 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
To prove the point: ATM the most upvoted comment is also the oldest one—Pablo’s Retrospective grant evaluations.

Taras Morozov 4 Mar 2022 16:52 UTC
26 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Offer paid sabbatical to people considering changing careers
Empowering Exceptional People
People sometimes are locked-in in their non-EA careers because while working, they do not have time to:
- Prioritize what altruistic job would fit them best
- Learn what they need for this job
Create an organization that will offer paid sabbaticals to people considering changing careers to more EA-aligned jobs to help this transition. During the sabbatical, they could be members of a community of people in a similar situation, with coaching available.

Taras Morozov 4 Mar 2022 15:52 UTC
22 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Provide personal assistants for EAs
Empowering Exceptional People
Many senior EAs spend way too much with busywork because it is hard to get a good personal assistant. This is currently so because:
1. There is no obvious source of reliable, vetted assistants.
2. If an EA wants to become an assistant, it is harder for them to find a job for EA or on EA-related projects.
3. Assistants have an incentive to have many clients, to avoid loss of income if they would lose their client. This leads to assistants having less time per client, and thus more time is spent on communication and less on work itself.
4. Assistants tend to be paid personally by EAs instead of by their employers. That leads to using them less than would be optimal.
5. There is no community of assistants that would be sharing knowledge and helping each other.
All these factors would be removed if an agency managed personal assistants.

Taras Morozov 4 Mar 2022 15:31 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Look for UFOs
Space Governance
In recent years, there has been an upsurge in reports by the military on sightings of UFOs including detecting the same object with multiple modalities at once (examples: 1, 2).
Avi Loeb proposes to create a network of high-resolution sensors, (just as the military have). But compared to the military their results will not be classified and can be openly analyzed by scientists. The cost of doing this is in the order of millions of dollars.
Knowing if there are aliens has many consequences, including for the longtermism, since if the universe is densely populated, its expected moral value does not depend solely on our decisions.

Taras Morozov 4 Mar 2022 15:13 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Write encyclopedias (esp. Wikipedia), then translate them (esp. to Russian and Chinese)
Epistemic Institutions
Create a team of people who will write articles on Wikipedia on subjects related to EA. Why this is important is described here.
Besides writing articles on English Wikipedia, they can also:
1. Create good illustrations (somehow, medical articles tend to have much beter pictures than other areas)
2. Translate these articles to other languages (especially Russian and Chinese)
3. Topics that are not notable enough for Wikipedia can be described in a separate encyclopedia.

Taras Morozov 4 Mar 2022 15:01 UTC
13 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Open-source intelligence agency
Great Power Relations
Create an organization that will collect and analyze open-source intelligence information on critical topics (e.g. US nuclear arsenal, more examples below) and publish it online.
Many documents on US nuclear arsenal and military activities were obtained through Freedom of Information Act. Still, they were never analyzed properly because it is a lot of tedious work that journalists do not have the capacity or incentive to do. Standard open-source intelligence gathering methods can provide even more information. As a result, there is only a limited public understanding of important sources of x-risk.
Possible subjects of investigation:
1. State of nuclear arsenals of US and Russia.
2. Military developments of artificial intelligence
3. Propaganda and hacking capabilities of Russia and China.
4. State of AI Armsraces, both between states and between companies.
5. Monitoring activities of secret services of both Russian and USA. (For example, to better estimate the capabilities of GRU, NSA, and others).
6. (bioweapons has its own comment)

Taras Morozov 4 Mar 2022 14:41 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Create an independent organization working along the lines of Implementation Support Unit of Biological Weapons Convention
Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophe
Biological Weapons Convention, forbidding the development of biological weapons, was signed in 1972 by most countries. But compliance is verified by Implementation Support Unit (BCW ISU), with the budget in the range $1-2m and only roughly four employees. At the same time, it seems there is a fair probability that Russia has an active biological weapon development program.
Create an organization that will do open-source intelligence information gathering and analysis and publication on the bioweapon programs in Russia and others, including terrorist groups. Possibly also include monitoring dangerous biological research in academia, like gain-of-function, work with smallpox, etc.
What links here?
- Taras Morozov's comment on The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition by Nick_Beckstead (4 Mar 2022 15:01 UTC; 13 points)

Taras Morozov 4 Mar 2022 13:24 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
Find a niche to create a subsidized prediction market
Epistemic Institutions
One of the problems of current forecasting is that it isn’t getting attention from decision-makers. One way to jumpstart this is to create a subsidized market in some well-chosen area that will work well and thus publicly prove and legitimize the use of prediction markets.
One suitable idea is Robin Hanson’s idea with fire-CEO market:
Make two subsidized real-money markets on the stock price of each Fortune 500 firm, one market conditional on its CEO stepping down by quarter’s end, and the other conditional on not stepping down. The difference between these two prices would advice the board on dumping the CEO.

If active, these markets should attract business press, and then most of these CEOs would come to see what the markets say about them. Half a million would pay for legal/admin. The other half would only cover a $1000 subsidy per firm, but CEOs trying to manipulate would add lots of liquidity. A few years of data would let us clearly compare the returns of firms following market advice to firms not following. With clear data I’d encourage shareholders to sue boards ignoring market advice, and after a few wins most boards would weigh market advice heavily. A revolution in CEO accountability would then be complete, all for only a million.

Taras Morozov 4 Mar 2022 12:24 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Gavin’s comment on: The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition
I think Templeton Prize has become prestigious because they give more money than the Nobel on purpose.