19-05-20 Projects Worth Doing

1. Computational Memetics 2. Conceptual / Semantic Search Engine 3. Destroy the Oligarchy 4. Global Recommendation Engine 5. Website recommendation engine, a-la pandora. Same for articles cross website. 6. Technological Superforecasting 7. People matching in a city, creating an extremely strong tool for who should meet one another 8. Idea matching. Semantically understand a person’s idea, and let them search for that idea in the history of human speech / creation, as well as for people thinking similar things. 9. Hijacking Social Movements with Growthful Memes, Peterson Style 10. Accessible write ups of quality academic literature and research frontiers 11. Create a True Religion

Religify Canonical Success
Revive the Transhumanist (H+) Community
Make LibGen the public library
For every major research subfield, ask what the consequences (for technology, science and society) would be if that subfield achieved all of its major goals.

Foresight Vision Weekend Notes

Worthy Missions

Planing a trillion trees
Companies who can’t say they’re trying to increase lifespan
Developing a Cancer drug
Sustainably end extreme poverty
1. Otherwise, everything we do for climate change will be irrelevant
2. What’s changed is everything we know about energy
Most of the capital we need is siloed in financial instruments rather than going towards what the public needs or supports. Poor resource allocation.
VC Information Gap
Obvious idea: Create a meta-startup community that comes up with deeply worthy missions, funds them, collectively recruits for them (into the ecosystem of companies) and that is devoted to one another.
Meta-Level Institutions - Better processes for having conversations like this. For how to produce better decisions. Those need field experiments in real organizations to work out the details.
1. Get this list of bottlenecked improved mechanisms from Robin.
Improving the rationality / logic in the general population.

Give us

A mission
What has changed so that this is now possible
A first step that could be taken to accomplish it
Surrogate endpoints / proxies / targets

This is very important to me. Projects Worth Doing - what could I send an army of religiously devoted world changers after?

Checks & Balances in business.

My ideas, for this forum: Drone safety / defense

Central issue with global poverty is extending mundane legal infrastructure. Property, contracting. The call is the philanthropist who builds a mobile app that gives people simple enforcement of contracts. What we think of as courts don’t exist in these environments. Gillian Hadfield is fully general. I appreciate it. But she’s talking about what she wrote a book on, so unsurprising.

Brad - You have to get rid of small town corruption. Desiging reputation systems, ranking systems for people which are anonymous. Why haven’t these taken off? Ex., On the ballot, you write down the name of the most corrupt official in your town (because voting is anonymous)

Most of the capital we need is siloed in financial instruments rather than going towards what the public needs or supports. Poor resource allocation.

Todos:

Think deeply about how to design reputation systems

As people get access to more resources, they get addictions. They don’t avoid getting addicted to apps or to food. (Steve Downs - You have to swim upstream in order to be healthy.)

Information / educational gap between scientists + creative types and the investment community. Bringing investors into the global important problems world community would be very impactful.

May VCs have lost the capacity to do due diligence on non-tech opportunities.

Reducing childhood trauma or adverse childhood experiences. Proposals:

Create networks of theraputing teaching, doing therapies with each other so that parents can learn to do therapy.
Making it much easier for communities to start their own schools, especially when children are very young.

Organizing people who are in substance lifestyle, where there’s no margin in their work.

I’m surprised at the number of governance people here.

Redesigning the Union / Destroying the Oligarchy / Allowing other visions of futures to flourish. New infrastructure of law, smart contract, etc.

We spend 1/3rd of our working time on xyz.

The reason people don’t make themselves much more efficient / learn is a lack of slack in day-to-day life.

Ex., allowing college students to hold out for time.

Organizations / systems for college - real life transition that could use two interventions -

Money spring over life via Income Share Agreements conditional on taking on an important challenge that can acquire funding while accomplishing social good. Incredibly talented ivy league graduates with no real career oriented job for half a year to a year, who will with high probability eventually be in incredibly remunerative careers. Or, who take a job far below them because of college debt, making terribly short-term biased decisions. Who to call: VCs intersete in a talent pool.

Cause Prioritization .org

Copenhagen Consensus - if you had 50 bil, how would you spend it?

FTC / DOJ - Changing merger / acquisition guidelines.

Source: Original Google Doc