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Global Priorities Research reading group
2
AI safety reading group
3
What ageing-biomarker methods might be best for measuring the cumulative welfare of juveniles versus adults?
4
Brainstorm a list of possible policies we may want NGOs to advocate for
5
Collect Writeups about Institutional Change and Governance
6
Summarise a paper that analyzes market design solutions to donor coordinations
7
Historical effects of moral philosophy
8
Privacy Preserving Surveillance
9
X-risks mapping platform
10
Disentangling a debate regarding AI Failure Scenarios between Robin Hanson and Paul Christiano
11
Wikipedia pages for cognitive tools
12
Create infographics for sharing on social media
13
Review considerations regarding the chance of local, fast takeoff AGI
14
Should I fund clean meat or clean energy to reduce climate change?
15
Analyze Electoral Data from Australian Federal Elections
16
What creates effective social movements?
17
Identifying future EAs
18
Impact of mass migration and displacement of people as a result of climate change
19
Which policies of UK political parties are amenable to being nudged in a more beneficial direction?
20
Effective ways to impact a presidential election
21
How many bees are transported world-wide?
22
Predicting the results of the coming EA Survey
23
Use Giving Games to collect data
24
Leaf concentrate production
25
Fundraising for an effective charity
26
Create short publicity video for EA Intro Fellowships
27
Contribute to the LessWrong and EA forum code
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Description
Type
Tags
Skills/Background Needed
Reading group
Global Priorities Research
Reading group
AI risk

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:

Literature review
Animal Welfare

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.

Literature review
Research project
Surveys / Interviews
Policy

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

Literature review
Institutional Denison Making
Policy

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:


Skills and background needed
Literature review
Altruistic Coordination

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.

Literature review
Global Priorities Research
History
Philosophy

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.

Literature review
Civilization Resilience
Emerging Technologies
x-risk

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."

Communicate an idea
Literature review
Data Science and Analysis
Global Priorities Research
Software Development
x-risk

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.

Communicate an idea
AI risk

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

Communicate an idea
Improving individual reasoning or cognition

Familiarity with the basic cognitive tools is useful

Communicate an idea
Building Effective Altruism
Graphic Design

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.

Research evaluation
AI risk

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.

Impact evaluation
Alternative Protein
Climate Change

Understanding of the science of voting systems, or the prerequisites to learn that. Basic data analysis skills

Research project
Data Science and Analysis
Institutional Denison Making

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.

Research project
Building Effective Altruism
Social Sciences

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.


Research project
Building Effective Altruism
Psychology
Research project
Climate Change
Social Sciences
Research project
Institutional Denison Making
Policy

This is somewhat related:

https://80000hours.org/articles/how-much-does-a-vote-matter/

Research project
Politics

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”.

Fact post
Animal Welfare

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.

Forecasting
Building Effective Altruism
Forecasting

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. 

Workshop
Building Effective Altruism
Data Science and Analysis
Operations

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.

Engineering project
Civilization Resilience
Mechanical Engineering
x-risk
Community building
Operations
Communicate an idea
Community building
Building Effective Altruism

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).

Computer programming
Building Effective Altruism
Software Development

Programming, Web Development

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