In this post:
Assessing biomarkers of ageing as measures of cumulative animal welfare - EA Forum
Will Bradshaw of Wild Animal Initiative outlined the use of biomarkers of aging as a proxy for stress and thus welfare of animals.
In a following post:
basic knowledge of evolutionary biology and comparative psychology.
CE Report Animal Research.pdf
In the above report by Charity Entrepreneurship about Animal Research, they analyzed and compared many different possible new research organizations ideas.
On the top of their list they have "Animal Ask Research", which tries to figure out what are the best policies we should advocate for ("Asks"). Like pretty much everything in this list, a proper answer for that requires a lot of work and hence the call for a new organisation. However, it is definitely possible to make headway and have original contribution.
What Asks should someone advocate for? Pick a cause area (Doesn't have to be Animal Welfare), speak with relevant people to get a sense of the situation, brainstorm what Asks should be advocated for.
While outside of EA there is a lot of discussion about governance models, aligning incentives and systemic change, it is not organized well in EA. There is work related to improving institutional decision making, GPI has some works on future-generations-oriented government, there is work on voting methods by the Center For Election Science, there is work by Nick Bostrom on World-Governments, there are also forecasting, infrastructural and methodological works on better decision making processes.
As a first step, collect many different aspects of "governance" to a single forum post. You can try to link them together or create a taxonomy.
There are some discussions of systemic change in EA. Mostly these seem to be about "changing the system" rather than "creating a system", which may or may not be more important but we should be clear of the distinction
Familiarity with the concepts involved
Section 2.7 In GPI's research agenda, is about Altruistic Coordination. That is, how can different people that want to do good can collaboratively do better.
A specific question there is how can donors coordinate their contributions so that there are no perverse incentives that results from a limited room for funding. A possible first step here is to write a summary of a paper on the subject with some impossibility results, and write up the main relevant takeaways:
Familiarity with the subject
Attempt at understanding the role of moral philosophy in moral progress - EA Forum
In the above post, the authors conducted a quick research on the topic of the impact of moral philosophy on major moral shifts in society. Specifically, they looked at the the cases of women's rights and animal welfare.
In the end, they asked "What previous work exists examining the historical role of moral philosophy?".
A first step here is to find and briefly explain the conclusions of such works.
Familiarity with historical analysis can help.
There is a debate on whether we should have more or less surveillance.
On the one hand, more surveillance may help with future terrorism mitigation (particularly if terrorists will have much easier way of generating weapons of mass destruction).
On the other hand, it increases the possibility of a capable authoritarian government.
In an EAG presentation, Ben Garfinkel proposes that we can help both sides of the argument by improving the possibilities of preserving privacy while using mass surveillance.
Familiarity with modern cryptographic tools and relevant technologies is helpful but not necessary. Familiarity with the EA conversation on longtermism.
This is a project to make a platform to map probability estimates of existential risk in a user-friendly way. The most similar thing that already exists is this database of existential risk estimates.
This project idea has come up in numerous EA conversations as well as being suggested by Florent Berthet as part of Tech Initiatives: "To list the current existential risk organisations (and their needs), probability estimates for each risk, papers and discussions."
What failure looks like - LessWrong
In the above post, Paul Christiano explains how he views the likely catastrophe that may result from failure of AI Alignment.
Agency Failure AI Apocalypse?
In the above post, Robin Hanson makes a response in which he claims that this scenario results from a failure of solving a Principle-Agent problem which seems similar to other cases studyed in Economics.
Basic understanding of concepts in economics and AI alignment. Familiarity with the context of the discussion.
conceptually.org is a site founded by EAs that sends a weekly newsletter with a new concept each week that is meant to serve as a new cognitive tool.
The concepts there were carefully selected, and written to be clear and concise. Go through each of these concepts, and make sure that their wikipedia page exists and is on a high quality.
Will MacAskill mentioned this project idea in the following EA forum AMA:
Ask Me Anything! - EA Forum
Familiarity with the basic cognitive tools is useful
AI Safety work is critically dependent on estimates of the time, duration and magnitude of the creation of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). In particular, a local and fast takeoff (in which, say, a single innovation makes creating AGI easy to immediately deploy) is particularly risky.
Collecting arguments on this topic is helpful because opinion among well-informed thinkers on the topic seems to diverge from what would be expected given the arguments that we know about. This suggests that we are missing some important considerations, that we would need to well assess the chance of local, fast takeoff.
AI Impacts, an organisation devoted to analysis of estimated timeline for AGI, have a list of considerations for that case.
If you find local, fast take-off likely, check if the considerations that lead you to this view are represented. Alternately, interview someone else with a strong position about the considerations they find important. If there are any arguments or counterarguments that you think are missing, write a short page explaining the case.
AI and Programming expertise is needed.
This is an interesting impact evaluation one could do, where you look at the effect of clean meat and clean energy on climate change. A possible goal of this project could be to try and estimate which is better to fund in order to reduce the most greenhouse gas emissions per dollar (in expectation and on the margin).
This idea was suggested by Emma Abele, so contact her at emma2abele at gmail dot com if you are interested in this and she can give you more thoughts.
Understanding of the science of voting systems, or the prerequisites to learn that. Basic data analysis skills
Understanding of the science of voting systems, or the prerequisites to learn that. Basic data analysis skills
Social movements like effective altruism have the potential to unlock the abilities of large numbers of people by making it easier for them to coordinate and by providing social infrastructure to support altruistic activities. Yet, our understanding of what makes social movements effective or how to improve them is poor. Of particular interest is research into what makes social movements collapse and how to prevent the collapse of valuable movements. Conducting solid research and figuring out how to use its findings could be a multiplier of the EA movements as a whole.
Spencer Greenberg suggested a project idea at the 2020 EA Student Summit that was:
What traits (besides the obvious) differ most between EAs and non-EAs? Study these traits to yield predictions for what sort of people are likely to find the EA perspective appealing but just haven't heard about it yet.
This is somewhat related:
https://80000hours.org/articles/how-much-does-a-vote-matter/
Jason Schukraft from Rethink Priorities wrote a lengthy report on Honey Bee Welfare:
Managed Honey Bee Welfare: Problems and Potential Interventions - EA Forum
In the last section, there are many further research questions. The first one is about the effects of transport on bees.
Long-distance transport has worrying effects on honey bee physiology. Ahn et al. 2012 found that “bees experiencing transportation have trouble fully developing their food glands and this might affect their ability to nurse the next generation of workers”.
Estimation. Finding information.
Foretold.io is a platform for collaborative forecasting. In the following link are some questions related to the coming EA survey.
Foretold.io
These forecasts are an experiment in amplifying researchers and decision makers, so this should be thought of as a prototype for possible future infrastructure.
Familiarize yourself with basic forecasting methods, and then tackle a bunch of these questions.
Before doing the forecasting, should be calibrated and familiar with Forecasting in general.
Evan Gaensbauer will be working to create giving games that feature a number of different cause areas. By running these, you can help Evan, Rethink Charity, and The Life You Can Save collect data on people's interest in different cause areas.
ALLFED has proposed that leaf concentrate would be a good source of food in a nuclear winter situation. More information can be found on the ALLFED website here.
Contact Emma Abele emma2abele@gmail.com for more information if you are interested in this project. For about a year, Emma worked on this project as an undergraduate mechanical engineering capstone, and now she is looking to hand it off to another group of students. Here are some of Emma's slides showing the work she did.
The EA forum is forked from LessWrong. JPAddison is the person at CEA in charge of the EA forum Fork. Most of the work is thus done on LessWrong.
Tackle an open issue at
LessWrong2/Lesswrong2
From a first view, the code is not very open-source friendly (the tags do not seem to be maintained, for example).
Programming, Web Development