EA Projects I'd Like to See - EA Forum

@tags:: #lit✍/📰️article/highlights
@links:: effective altruism (ea),
@ref:: EA Projects I'd Like to See - EA Forum
@author:: forum.effectivealtruism.org

2023-10-05 forum.effectivealtruism.org - EA Projects I'd Like to See - EA Forum

Book cover of "EA Projects I'd Like to See - EA Forum"

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Notes

Longtermist visualisations

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Ultimately, you could imagine a website hosting a series of visualizations illustrating various longtermist ideas. These visualisations and graphics, some interactive, some updated with live data, could be tied together with essays about key longtermist topics, amounting to a kind of undirected, highly visual introduction to ideas from effective altruism and longtermism. You could imagine a handful of ‘tracks’ (e.g. big history, existential risks, technological progress, human progress) which tie together these graphics, once enough are made.
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Meta book ideas

Book grantmaking

Buying back rights

Translations

An EA publishing house

Buying articles

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An overlay journal is a journal (almost always exclusively online) that does not produce its own content, but selects from texts that are already (freely) available online. The selection process can look just like that of a ‘real’ journal, including a board of editors and peer review.
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Overlay Journal

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I think one of the most valuable features of EA is its epistemic culture: the way EAs reason about hard problems. I feel unusually free to discuss close to anything that seems important; I worry an unusually small amount about offending my superiors or saying something that could easy be taken out of context, accidentally offending my peers by disagreeing with them, or about saying naive things with the aim of being corrected. I do not believe this culture is guaranteed to persist without effort to maintain it, which I think should include continuing to foster a culture of openly questioning and criticising crucial assumptions. In particular, I don't want anyone within or beyond EA to have good reason to worry about the consequences of voicing good-faith criticisms. Positively encouraging and funding those criticisms, and similar 'red-teaming'[8] activities is a clear way to address that.
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Funding criticism of effective altruism

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Points of confusion go under-reported. It can be embarrassing to announce that you're simply confused about some assumption that everyone else seems to regard as obvious. I expect there's some amount of pluralistic ignorance at play here, and the less of this the better.
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- pluralistic ignorance, epistemics,

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Because (especially longtermist) EA has grown so rapidly, big projects now might be grounding their theories of change in a relatively small amount of early research.
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A good deal of research which informs EA decision-making is conducted by generalists rather than subject experts. We might benefit from employing subject experts to review that research and point out blind spots.
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But you could also imagine offering grants for individuals to write critical pieces. This might involve disagreeing with an influential view or piece ("I dispute X"), or it could involve engaging with a neglected perspective or discipline ("X seems to have missed Y, here's how you can add it in").
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To address those worries, EA (research) organisations might be encouraged to create a /critique-us page on their website, where they list key claims that they would most like to see scrutinised, and positively encourage people to critically investigate them.
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For instance, the project could involve a dedicated website, which lists each piece with some meta-commentary, links to discussion on the EA Forum, related pieces, and so on. It could even become a journal, although I suspect this might be jumping the gun given the absence of a journal for any part of EA itself.
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Space governance research centre

Book ideas

A (New) Introduction to Effective Altruism

Utilitarianism: a Modern Introduction and Defence

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If you're a philanthropic movement and you want to avoid the mistakes and retrace the successes of your predecessors, a good start might be learning about the history of philanthropy. So I'm pro more books that tell the story of (e.g. 20th c.) philanthropy, and which try to draw out actionable lessons.
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- ideas, philanthropy, books,

History of Philanthropy

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The website HistPhil is is a web publication on the history of the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors
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A Verbal History of EA

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To be specific: imagine something like 50–150 interviews with people who were close to different parts of EA — who were in Oxford when Giving What We Can got started, who were around the Bay when things spread west and collided with rationalist people and 80,000 Hours got started, and so on.
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Exploring Utopia

Megaprojects idea contest

One-on-one advice matchmaking platform

Quadratic funding pools for EAs

Conclusion