Published on June 8, 2021 6:58 PM GMT

Epistemic status: This post leans heavily on my personal experience and is not well-researched. I’m not a doctor, nor have I studied medicine. I do consider myself pretty good at Googling things though. Also, a real doctor did look over and at least tacitly approve of this post. I’m not doing much in the way of literature review, validating claims, etc so take everything with a teaspoon of salt. There are also more side effects and bad interactions than I’m able to mention. Do your own research before you try any interventions I suggest! Also, if you find something definitely wrong in the post let me know in the comments and I’ll try to correct it.

Over the past two years or so I’ve been on a long journey to figure out why I often have joint pain (gradually expanding to almost all my joints), gut problems, and episodes of extreme fatigue about once a week. When I say extreme fatigue try to imagine the following: moving sucks and you don’t want to do it, same with thinking about things, and lying on the floor for half an hour because you slid off your chair seems like a reasonable thing to do.

I am not totally sure I’m at the end of this journey but I’ve learned enough to say things which will probably be useful for some people. I was really surprised by a lot of what I found and I expect many of you will be too. I’m also really surprised by the lack of something like this piece out in the world as this is so clearly a thing many people struggle with (if it already exists please post a link in the comments!).

The main things I have looked at are food sensitivities, stress, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and gut health. There are obviously a ton of reasons why you could be fatigued (or have other hard-to-diagnose health issues). To demonstrate how hard this is, this is why we have catch-all diagnoses like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue which nobody really knows what to do with. They just represent some bundle of symptoms with no clear underlying cause (and people have really been trying to find a cause!). Fatigue is a symptom of tons of major illnesses. Suffice to say this is super difficult and I’m just covering a few possibilities. Also, obligatory disclaimer: this is not medical advice.

Why is this important?

My guess is that a bunch of you, maybe most, are not at or near optimal health. This might be a not-knowing-what-the-world-should-look-like-before-you-try-on-glasses kind of thing. You might not realize just how much energy you could have. For example, you probably don’t need to be tired for the first hour or two after you wake up! It’s possible to wake up and feel great most of the time (I’m pretty sure...). Of course sleep, exercise, and nutrition are the obvious things to do and you should almost certainly try those first. There are also good guides on those already (and I see them discussed often in EA circles). If you’re still having problems after that though you probably don’t need to keep having those problems. And if you can solve those problems now the expected value is generally extraordinary. If you get a 1% energy gain consistently through your lifetime because of something you find out now, that is super valuable.

Like more valuable than almost anything else you could possibly do for your productivity. If you already have health issues then probably you’re going to get a whole lot more than a 1% energy gain (I’d estimate a 20-100% gain for me if I can solve my issue. This could lead to a much higher boost in impact over the long-term). That’s going to matter a whole lot more than whether you use ultraworking or focusmate, what note-taking software you use, etc etc. Seriously, if you have health problems you should really focus on those first before you worry about minor changes to productivity habits (unless of course you're fairly sure your health problems are intractable).

Over these years of having low energy I might have become a little biased towards thinking...

Published on June 8, 2021 6:58 PM GMT

Epistemic status: This post leans heavily on my personal experience and is not well-researched. I’m not a doctor, nor have I studied medicine. I do consider myself pretty good at Googling things though. Also, a real doctor did look over and at least tacitly approve of this post. I’m not doing much in the way of literature review, validating claims, etc so take everything with a teaspoon of salt. There are also more side effects and bad interactions than I’m able to mention. Do your own research before you try any interventions I suggest! Also, if you find something definitely wrong in the post let me know in the comments and I’ll try to correct it.

Over the past two years or so I’ve been on a long journey to figure out why I often have joint pain (gradually expanding to almost all my joints), gut problems, and episodes of extreme fatigue about once a week. When I say extreme fatigue try to imagine the following: moving sucks and you don’t want to do it, same with thinking about things, and lying on the floor for half an hour because you slid off your chair seems like a reasonable thing to do.

I am not totally sure I’m at the end of this journey but I’ve learned enough to say things which will probably be useful for some people. I was really surprised by a lot of what I found and I expect many of you will be too. I’m also really surprised by the lack of something like this piece out in the world as this is so clearly a thing many people struggle with (if it already exists please post a link in the comments!).

The main things I have looked at are food sensitivities, stress, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and gut health. There are obviously a ton of reasons why you could be fatigued (or have other hard-to-diagnose health issues). To demonstrate how hard this is, this is why we have catch-all diagnoses like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue which nobody really knows what to do with. They just represent some bundle of symptoms with no clear underlying cause (and people have really been trying to find a cause!). Fatigue is a symptom of tons of major illnesses. Suffice to say this is super difficult and I’m just covering a few possibilities. Also, obligatory disclaimer: this is not medical advice.

Why is this important?

My guess is that a bunch of you, maybe most, are not at or near optimal health. This might be a not-knowing-what-the-world-should-look-like-before-you-try-on-glasses kind of thing. You might not realize just how much energy you could have. For example, you probably don’t need to be tired for the first hour or two after you wake up! It’s possible to wake up and feel great most of the time (I’m pretty sure...). Of course sleep, exercise, and nutrition are the obvious things to do and you should almost certainly try those first. There are also good guides on those already (and I see them discussed often in EA circles). If you’re still having problems after that though you probably don’t need to keep having those problems. And if you can solve those problems now the expected value is generally extraordinary. If you get a 1% energy gain consistently through your lifetime because of something you find out now, that is super valuable.

Like more valuable than almost anything else you could possibly do for your productivity. If you already have health issues then probably you’re going to get a whole lot more than a 1% energy gain (I’d estimate a 20-100% gain for me if I can solve my issue. This could lead to a much higher boost in impact over the long-term). That’s going to matter a whole lot more than whether you use ultraworking or focusmate, what note-taking software you use, etc etc. Seriously, if you have health problems you should really focus on those first before you worry about minor changes to productivity habits (unless of course you're fairly sure your health problems are intractable).

Over these years of having low energy I might have become a little biased towards thinking...

Published on June 8, 2021 1:55 PM GMT

Thanks to Luca Righetti, Elise Bohan, Fin Moorhouse, Max Daniel, Konrad Seifert and Maxime Stauffer for their valuable comments and thoughts on the draft and future steps.

Summary and introduction

Throughout this post, I will explore some overlaps between sustainability (focusing on Sustainable Development Goals) and longtermism (focusing on Global Catastrophic Risks mitigation).

I wrote this over a two-week period to get some tentative thoughts out. My goal with posting this is to find other people interested in thinking about the intersection of sustainable development and GCRs mitigation as well as to invite feedback for how/if to proceed with research or practical projects in this area. The write-up doesn't represent any strongly held and stable views, but is meant to explore if there is a policy opportunity for longtermists to work with sustainable development policies. More specifically, I want to see if it is worth pushing the next SDGs agenda with a bigger focus on GCRs mitigation.

Roughly, I want to explore if this is a bridge worth building:

In the first section, I will briefly overview the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Global Catastrophic Risks (GCRs), explaining why it could make sense to start building a link between these. In section 2, I will explore how GCRs mitigation fits into the SDGs, using COVID-19 as an example of how risk mitigation is foundational to sustainable development. In section 3, I will quickly point out some potential overlaps between longtermism and sustainability and mention the idea of a risk budget as the ultimate non-renewable resource. In section 4, I will portray a way of understanding SDGs in terms of longtermist grand strategies, followed by a final section exploring the pros and cons of building this bridge and possible future steps if it is worth pursuing.

1. Overview of SDGs and GCRs

SDGsI am broadly interested in the overlap between sustainability –with its many definitions– and longtermism, but first I want to explore the SDGs primarily for their policy opportunities (other sustainability frameworks could be explored in future posts).In 2015 the United Nations General assembly set up the Sustainable Development Goals, which are 17 goals meant to be accomplished by 2030. They were adopted by all UN members and are a “call for action” for member states to eradicate poverty and improve different quality of life indicators whilst also tackling climate change and environmental damage. Here is a summarized timeline of sustainability and sustainable development:

The concept of sustainability can be traced back at least to 1700, and was applied to forestry in Saxony. It emerged in a time of scarcity when the mining industry had consumed whole forests and trees had been cut out at unsustainable rates for decades, threatening the livelihood of thousands.

20th century: environmental movements started to point out that there were environmental costs associated with the many material benefits that were now being enjoyed due to the industrial revolution from the 18th and 19th century.

In 1973 and 1979 there were energy crises that demonstrated the extent to which the global community had become dependent on non-renewable energy resources.

1970s: The concept of "degrowth" (somewhat related to sustainability) properly appeared during the 1970s. It was a political, economic, and social movement that critiqued “productivism”, the paradigm of economic growth, pointing out the social and ecological harm caused by the pursuit of infinite growth and Western "development" imperatives.

1987: Modern concept of sustainable development derived from the Brundtland Commission (appointed by the UN secretary general), intended as a response to the conflict between globalized economic growth and the accelerating ecological degradation. The challenge was to harmonize prosperity with ecology.Sustainable development is the organizing principle for meeting human d...

Published on June 8, 2021 1:55 PM GMT

Thanks to Luca Righetti, Elise Bohan, Fin Moorhouse, Max Daniel, Konrad Seifert and Maxime Stauffer for their valuable comments and thoughts on the draft and future steps.

Summary and introduction

Throughout this post, I will explore some overlaps between sustainability (focusing on Sustainable Development Goals) and longtermism (focusing on Global Catastrophic Risks mitigation).

I wrote this over a two-week period to get some tentative thoughts out. My goal with posting this is to find other people interested in thinking about the intersection of sustainable development and GCRs mitigation as well as to invite feedback for how/if to proceed with research or practical projects in this area. The write-up doesn't represent any strongly held and stable views, but is meant to explore if there is a policy opportunity for longtermists to work with sustainable development policies. More specifically, I want to see if it is worth pushing the next SDGs agenda with a bigger focus on GCRs mitigation.

Roughly, I want to explore if this is a bridge worth building:

In the first section, I will briefly overview the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Global Catastrophic Risks (GCRs), explaining why it could make sense to start building a link between these. In section 2, I will explore how GCRs mitigation fits into the SDGs, using COVID-19 as an example of how risk mitigation is foundational to sustainable development. In section 3, I will quickly point out some potential overlaps between longtermism and sustainability and mention the idea of a risk budget as the ultimate non-renewable resource. In section 4, I will portray a way of understanding SDGs in terms of longtermist grand strategies, followed by a final section exploring the pros and cons of building this bridge and possible future steps if it is worth pursuing.

1. Overview of SDGs and GCRs

SDGsI am broadly interested in the overlap between sustainability –with its many definitions– and longtermism, but first I want to explore the SDGs primarily for their policy opportunities (other sustainability frameworks could be explored in future posts).In 2015 the United Nations General assembly set up the Sustainable Development Goals, which are 17 goals meant to be accomplished by 2030. They were adopted by all UN members and are a “call for action” for member states to eradicate poverty and improve different quality of life indicators whilst also tackling climate change and environmental damage. Here is a summarized timeline of sustainability and sustainable development:

The concept of sustainability can be traced back at least to 1700, and was applied to forestry in Saxony. It emerged in a time of scarcity when the mining industry had consumed whole forests and trees had been cut out at unsustainable rates for decades, threatening the livelihood of thousands.

20th century: environmental movements started to point out that there were environmental costs associated with the many material benefits that were now being enjoyed due to the industrial revolution from the 18th and 19th century.

In 1973 and 1979 there were energy crises that demonstrated the extent to which the global community had become dependent on non-renewable energy resources.

1970s: The concept of "degrowth" (somewhat related to sustainability) properly appeared during the 1970s. It was a political, economic, and social movement that critiqued “productivism”, the paradigm of economic growth, pointing out the social and ecological harm caused by the pursuit of infinite growth and Western "development" imperatives.

1987: Modern concept of sustainable development derived from the Brundtland Commission (appointed by the UN secretary general), intended as a response to the conflict between globalized economic growth and the accelerating ecological degradation. The challenge was to harmonize prosperity with ecology.Sustainable development is the organizing principle for meeting human d...

Published on June 8, 2021 5:12 PM GMT

Cross-posted to LessWrong.

Summary

In August 2020, we conducted an online survey of prominent AI safety and governance researchers. You can see a copy of the survey at this link.

We sent the survey to 135 researchers at leading AI safety/governance research organisations (including AI Impacts, CHAI, CLR, CSER, CSET, FHI, FLI, GCRI, MILA, MIRI, Open Philanthropy and PAI) and a number of independent researchers. We received 75 responses, a response rate of 56%.

The survey aimed to identify which AI existential risk scenarios (which we will refer to simply as “risk scenarios”) those researchers find most likely, in order to (1) help with prioritising future work on exploring AI risk scenarios, and (2) facilitate discourse and understanding within the AI safety and governance community, including between researchers who have different views.

In our view, the key result is that there was considerable disagreement among researchers about which risk scenarios are the most likely, and high uncertainty expressed by most individual researchers about their estimates.

This suggests that there is a lot of value in exploring the likelihood of different AI risk scenarios in more detail, especially given the limited scrutiny that most scenarios have received. This could look like:

Fleshing out and analysing the scenarios mentioned in this post which have received less scrutiny.

We welcome feedback on any aspects of the survey.

Motivation

It has been argued that AI could pose an existential risk. The original risk scenarios were described by Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky. More recently, these have been criticised, and a number of alternative scenarios have been proposed. There has been some useful work exploring these alternative scenarios, but much of this is informal. Most pieces are only presented as blog posts, with neither the detail of a book, nor the rigour of a peer-reviewed publication. For further discussion of this dynamic, see work by Ben Garfinkel, Richard Ngo and Tom Adamczewski.

The result is that it is no longer clear which AI risk scenarios experts find most plausible. We think this state of affairs is unsatisfactory for at least two reasons. First, since many of the proposed scenarios seem underdeveloped, there is room for further work analyzing them in more detail. But this is time-consuming and there are a wide range of scenarios that could be analysed, so knowing which scenarios leading experts find most plausible is useful for prioritising this work. Second, since the views of top researchers will influence the views of the broader AI safety and governance community, it is important to make the full spectrum of views more widely available. The survey is intended to be a first step in this direction.

The survey

We asked researchers to estimate the probability of five AI risk scenarios, conditional on an existential catastrophe due to AI having occurred. There was also a catch-all “other scenarios” option.

These were the five scenarios we asked about, and the descriptions we gave in the survey:

"Superintelligence"

A single AI system with goals that are hostile to humanity quickly becomes sufficiently capable for complete world domination, and causes the future to contain very little of what we value, as described in “Superintelligence”.

Part 2 of “What failure looks like”

This involves multiple AIs accidentally being trained to seek influence, and then failing catastrophically once they are sufficiently capable, causing humans to become extinct or otherwise permanently lose all influence over the future.

Part 1 of “What failure looks like”

This involves AIs pursuing easy-to-measure goals, rather than the goals humans actually care about, causing us to permanently lose some influence over the future (excluding cases where the “Superintelligence” scenario or Part 2 of “What failure looks like” also occur).

War.

Some kind of war between humans, exacerbated by developments in AI, ca...

Published on June 8, 2021 5:12 PM GMT

Cross-posted to LessWrong.

Summary

In August 2020, we conducted an online survey of prominent AI safety and governance researchers. You can see a copy of the survey at this link.

We sent the survey to 135 researchers at leading AI safety/governance research organisations (including AI Impacts, CHAI, CLR, CSER, CSET, FHI, FLI, GCRI, MILA, MIRI, Open Philanthropy and PAI) and a number of independent researchers. We received 75 responses, a response rate of 56%.

The survey aimed to identify which AI existential risk scenarios (which we will refer to simply as “risk scenarios”) those researchers find most likely, in order to (1) help with prioritising future work on exploring AI risk scenarios, and (2) facilitate discourse and understanding within the AI safety and governance community, including between researchers who have different views.

In our view, the key result is that there was considerable disagreement among researchers about which risk scenarios are the most likely, and high uncertainty expressed by most individual researchers about their estimates.

This suggests that there is a lot of value in exploring the likelihood of different AI risk scenarios in more detail, especially given the limited scrutiny that most scenarios have received. This could look like:

Fleshing out and analysing the scenarios mentioned in this post which have received less scrutiny.

We welcome feedback on any aspects of the survey.

Motivation

It has been argued that AI could pose an existential risk. The original risk scenarios were described by Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky. More recently, these have been criticised, and a number of alternative scenarios have been proposed. There has been some useful work exploring these alternative scenarios, but much of this is informal. Most pieces are only presented as blog posts, with neither the detail of a book, nor the rigour of a peer-reviewed publication. For further discussion of this dynamic, see work by Ben Garfinkel, Richard Ngo and Tom Adamczewski.

The result is that it is no longer clear which AI risk scenarios experts find most plausible. We think this state of affairs is unsatisfactory for at least two reasons. First, since many of the proposed scenarios seem underdeveloped, there is room for further work analyzing them in more detail. But this is time-consuming and there are a wide range of scenarios that could be analysed, so knowing which scenarios leading experts find most plausible is useful for prioritising this work. Second, since the views of top researchers will influence the views of the broader AI safety and governance community, it is important to make the full spectrum of views more widely available. The survey is intended to be a first step in this direction.

The survey

We asked researchers to estimate the probability of five AI risk scenarios, conditional on an existential catastrophe due to AI having occurred. There was also a catch-all “other scenarios” option.

These were the five scenarios we asked about, and the descriptions we gave in the survey:

"Superintelligence"

A single AI system with goals that are hostile to humanity quickly becomes sufficiently capable for complete world domination, and causes the future to contain very little of what we value, as described in “Superintelligence”.

Part 2 of “What failure looks like”

This involves multiple AIs accidentally being trained to seek influence, and then failing catastrophically once they are sufficiently capable, causing humans to become extinct or otherwise permanently lose all influence over the future.

Part 1 of “What failure looks like”

This involves AIs pursuing easy-to-measure goals, rather than the goals humans actually care about, causing us to permanently lose some influence over the future (excluding cases where the “Superintelligence” scenario or Part 2 of “What failure looks like” also occur).

War.

Some kind of war between humans, exacerbated by developments in AI, ca...

Published on June 3, 2021 1:06 AM GMT

Hi everyone!

Managers of the EA Infrastructure Fund will be available for an Ask Me Anything session. We'll start answering questions on Friday, June 4th, though some of us will only be able to answer questions the week after. Nevertheless, if you would like to make sure that all fund managers can consider your question, you might want to post it before early UK time on Friday morning.

What is the EA Infrastructure Fund?

The EAIF is one of the four EA Funds. While the other three Funds support direct work on various causes, this Fund supports work that could multiply the impact of direct work, including projects that provide intellectual infrastructure for the effective altruism community, run events, disseminate information, or fundraise for effective charities.

Who are the fund managers, and why might you want to ask them questions?

The fund managers are Max Daniel, Michelle Hutchinson, and Buck Shlegeris. In addition, EA Funds Executive Director Jonas Vollmer is temporarily taking on chairperson duties, advising, and voting consultatively on grants. Ben Kuhn was a guest manager in our last grant round. They will all be available for questions, though some may have spotty availability and might post their answers as they have time throughout next week.

One particular reason why you might want to ask us questions is that we are all new in these roles: All fund managers of the EAIF have recently changed, and this was our first grant round.

What happened in our most recent grant round?

We have made 26 grants totalling about $1.2 million. They include:

Two grants totalling $139,200 to Emma Abele, James Aung, Bella Forristal, and Henry Sleight. They will work together to identify and implement new ways to support EA university groups – e.g., through high-quality introductory talks about EA and creating other content for workshops and events. University groups have historically been one of the most important sources of highly engaged EA community members, and we believe there is significant untapped potential for further growth. We are also excited about the team, based significantly on their track record – e.g., James and Bella previously led two of the globally most successful university groups.

$41,868 to Zak Ulhaq to develop and implement workshops aimed at helping highly talented teenagers apply EA concepts and quantitative reasoning to their lives. We are excited about this grant because we generally think that educating pre-university audiences about EA-related ideas and concepts could be highly valuable; e.g., we’re aware of (unpublished) survey data indicating that in a large sample of highly engaged community members who learned about EA in the last few years, about ¼ had first heard of EA when they were 18 or younger. At the same time, this space seems underexplored. Projects that are mindful of the risks involved in engaging younger audiences therefore have a high value of information – if successful, they could pave the way for many more projects of this type. We think that Zak is a good fit for efforts in this space because he has a strong technical background and experience with both teaching and EA community building.

$5,000 to the Czech Association for Effective Altruism to give away EA-related books to people with strong results in Czech STEM competitions, AI classes, and similar. We believe that this is a highly cost-effective way to engage a high-value audience; long-form content allows for deep understanding of important ideas, and surveys typically find books have helped many people become involved with EA (e.g., in the 2020 EA Survey, more than ⅕ of respondents said a book was important for getting them more involved).

$248,300 to Rethink Priorities to allow Rethink to take on nine research interns (7 FTE) across various EA causes, plus support for further EA movement strategy research. We have been impressed with Rethink’s demonstrated ability to successfully grow th...

Published on June 3, 2021 1:06 AM GMT

Hi everyone!

Managers of the EA Infrastructure Fund will be available for an Ask Me Anything session. We'll start answering questions on Friday, June 4th, though some of us will only be able to answer questions the week after. Nevertheless, if you would like to make sure that all fund managers can consider your question, you might want to post it before early UK time on Friday morning.

What is the EA Infrastructure Fund?

The EAIF is one of the four EA Funds. While the other three Funds support direct work on various causes, this Fund supports work that could multiply the impact of direct work, including projects that provide intellectual infrastructure for the effective altruism community, run events, disseminate information, or fundraise for effective charities.

Who are the fund managers, and why might you want to ask them questions?

The fund managers are Max Daniel, Michelle Hutchinson, and Buck Shlegeris. In addition, EA Funds Executive Director Jonas Vollmer is temporarily taking on chairperson duties, advising, and voting consultatively on grants. Ben Kuhn was a guest manager in our last grant round. They will all be available for questions, though some may have spotty availability and might post their answers as they have time throughout next week.

One particular reason why you might want to ask us questions is that we are all new in these roles: All fund managers of the EAIF have recently changed, and this was our first grant round.

What happened in our most recent grant round?

We have made 26 grants totalling about $1.2 million. They include:

Two grants totalling $139,200 to Emma Abele, James Aung, Bella Forristal, and Henry Sleight. They will work together to identify and implement new ways to support EA university groups – e.g., through high-quality introductory talks about EA and creating other content for workshops and events. University groups have historically been one of the most important sources of highly engaged EA community members, and we believe there is significant untapped potential for further growth. We are also excited about the team, based significantly on their track record – e.g., James and Bella previously led two of the globally most successful university groups.

$41,868 to Zak Ulhaq to develop and implement workshops aimed at helping highly talented teenagers apply EA concepts and quantitative reasoning to their lives. We are excited about this grant because we generally think that educating pre-university audiences about EA-related ideas and concepts could be highly valuable; e.g., we’re aware of (unpublished) survey data indicating that in a large sample of highly engaged community members who learned about EA in the last few years, about ¼ had first heard of EA when they were 18 or younger. At the same time, this space seems underexplored. Projects that are mindful of the risks involved in engaging younger audiences therefore have a high value of information – if successful, they could pave the way for many more projects of this type. We think that Zak is a good fit for efforts in this space because he has a strong technical background and experience with both teaching and EA community building.

$5,000 to the Czech Association for Effective Altruism to give away EA-related books to people with strong results in Czech STEM competitions, AI classes, and similar. We believe that this is a highly cost-effective way to engage a high-value audience; long-form content allows for deep understanding of important ideas, and surveys typically find books have helped many people become involved with EA (e.g., in the 2020 EA Survey, more than ⅕ of respondents said a book was important for getting them more involved).

$248,300 to Rethink Priorities to allow Rethink to take on nine research interns (7 FTE) across various EA causes, plus support for further EA movement strategy research. We have been impressed with Rethink’s demonstrated ability to successfully grow th...

Published on June 5, 2021 7:06 PM GMT

Inducement prizes are cash prizes awarded to people who accomplish a particular feat specified ahead of time. Inducement prizes offer advantages over traditional hiring practices since the prize is allocated according to a post-hoc evaluation of performance, rather than upfront to a specific worker. Here, I propose a specific model for a small inducement platform intended to facilitate the creation of high quality effective altruism research.

The problem

Inducement prizes have experienced a long history; accordingly, economics literature going back over a century has provided empirical evidence that inducement prizes can spur innovation more efficiently than hiring researchers or engineers directly in certain circumstances (for some examples see this paper and this one).

Many existing organizations, such as the X Prize Foundation, have enjoyed some success by facilitating the creation of large inducement prizes. However, most inducement prizes are not facilitated on content-specific platforms. Rather, companies, non-profits, governments, and rich individuals interested in creating inducement prizes generally go through their own media, such as for the Brain Preservation Technology Prize and the Methuselah Mouse Prize.

Facilitating your own inducement prize contest makes sense for large bounties, but I'm currently unaware of any specific platforms dedicated to the procurement of smaller prizes, such as those with sums less than $10,000.

The closest platform that I'm currently aware of is the private Facebook group Bountied Rationality. However, there are a number of problems I see with Bountied Rationality, which should provide some indication for how I think an alternative platform could be improved,

The group visibility is set to private, which makes it harder to share research value created inside the group.

The integrity of the group itself is held up by the personal trust of those within the rationalist/effective altruism community, rather than a market-driven model of reputation.

There is no means of arbitrating disputes, and therefore there is no guarantee that people will be paid fairly for accomplishing the task as specified.

I still think that the group Bountied Rationality creates a lot of value. But the issues I've outlined above plausibly limit its ability to grow larger, and hamper its status as a reliable engine for producing outsourced insights and research.

The proposal

My proposed alternative is a public, market-driven bounty system aimed at procuring small inducement prizes, targeted at the effective altruism community. Below, I'll list a specific set of features which I think could help the platform to thrive.

Public

The first main difference between my model and the group Bountied Rationality is that content on the platform would be public. This feature makes the platform less suitable for personal requests, but more suitable for public research, such as inducing mathematics results, well-crafted bibliographies, well-sourced research summaries for a given topic, and in-depth investigations into potential interventions.

The Effective Altruist Forum, Lesswrong and Stackexchange already allow for something similar, in that they allow users to ask public questions, and the community answers are then curated via upvotes and downvotes. This model has been helpful to many, but in my experience, people are often hesitant to provide long-form and well-sourced answers to questions, probably due to the lack of strong incentives offered to those who give good answers.

Escrow and arbitration

The second main feature I propose is a requirement that people put their money in escrow, and that they must name someone as the arbitrator for the bounty. Escrow ensures that the bounty offerers cannot simply keep their money long after someone has already satisfied the conditions of the bounty (a problem with which I have personally been acquainted with).

The purpose of requiring people to ...

Published on June 5, 2021 7:06 PM GMT

Inducement prizes are cash prizes awarded to people who accomplish a particular feat specified ahead of time. Inducement prizes offer advantages over traditional hiring practices since the prize is allocated according to a post-hoc evaluation of performance, rather than upfront to a specific worker. Here, I propose a specific model for a small inducement platform intended to facilitate the creation of high quality effective altruism research.

The problem

Inducement prizes have experienced a long history; accordingly, economics literature going back over a century has provided empirical evidence that inducement prizes can spur innovation more efficiently than hiring researchers or engineers directly in certain circumstances (for some examples see this paper and this one).

Many existing organizations, such as the X Prize Foundation, have enjoyed some success by facilitating the creation of large inducement prizes. However, most inducement prizes are not facilitated on content-specific platforms. Rather, companies, non-profits, governments, and rich individuals interested in creating inducement prizes generally go through their own media, such as for the Brain Preservation Technology Prize and the Methuselah Mouse Prize.

Facilitating your own inducement prize contest makes sense for large bounties, but I'm currently unaware of any specific platforms dedicated to the procurement of smaller prizes, such as those with sums less than $10,000.

The closest platform that I'm currently aware of is the private Facebook group Bountied Rationality. However, there are a number of problems I see with Bountied Rationality, which should provide some indication for how I think an alternative platform could be improved,

The group visibility is set to private, which makes it harder to share research value created inside the group.

The integrity of the group itself is held up by the personal trust of those within the rationalist/effective altruism community, rather than a market-driven model of reputation.

There is no means of arbitrating disputes, and therefore there is no guarantee that people will be paid fairly for accomplishing the task as specified.

I still think that the group Bountied Rationality creates a lot of value. But the issues I've outlined above plausibly limit its ability to grow larger, and hamper its status as a reliable engine for producing outsourced insights and research.

The proposal

My proposed alternative is a public, market-driven bounty system aimed at procuring small inducement prizes, targeted at the effective altruism community. Below, I'll list a specific set of features which I think could help the platform to thrive.

Public

The first main difference between my model and the group Bountied Rationality is that content on the platform would be public. This feature makes the platform less suitable for personal requests, but more suitable for public research, such as inducing mathematics results, well-crafted bibliographies, well-sourced research summaries for a given topic, and in-depth investigations into potential interventions.

The Effective Altruist Forum, Lesswrong and Stackexchange already allow for something similar, in that they allow users to ask public questions, and the community answers are then curated via upvotes and downvotes. This model has been helpful to many, but in my experience, people are often hesitant to provide long-form and well-sourced answers to questions, probably due to the lack of strong incentives offered to those who give good answers.

Escrow and arbitration

The second main feature I propose is a requirement that people put their money in escrow, and that they must name someone as the arbitrator for the bounty. Escrow ensures that the bounty offerers cannot simply keep their money long after someone has already satisfied the conditions of the bounty (a problem with which I have personally been acquainted with).

The purpose of requiring people to ...