Will interventions motivated by aliens, simulation arguments, acausal trade, etc, get $10m+ from EA funders before 2030?
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Updated 14 hours ago
StaleOct 31, 23, 6:54 PM UTCJan 2, 30, 6:59 AM UTC
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This is a catch-all category for "Cause X" ideas motivated by "train to crazytown"-style moral-philosophy / decision-theory / anthropic-shadow-related arguments, like "maybe we could impact civilizations in a vast number of parallel universes via acausal trade".
- It's naturally a fuzzy category, but if an intervention is primarily motivated by the Grabby Aliens hypothesis, or the idea that we're living in a simulation, or pascal's-mugging-esque interventions that only pay off if the Christian religion is literally true, or etc, then it will probably count.
- Two categories of things that don't count: - Patient Philanthropy, or interventions motivated by S-risk or stable totalitarianism (these have their own markets), or other things that are perfectly well-motivated by ordinary Longtermism. - if EA becomes so totally doomerish on AI that we start funding insane e/acc stuff like "create an AI that will be a slightly more worthwhile successor to humanity than the default misaligned outcome (since humanity will be wiped out either way)"
- To resolve this question, in 2030 I will look at publicly-available grantmaking documentation (like this Openphil website, for example), adding up all the grants between October 2023 and January 2030 that support the above-described projects, and resolve YES if the grand total exceeds ten million US dollars.
- "EA funders" means places like OpenPhil, LTFF, SFF, Longview Philanthropy, Founders Fund, GiveWell, ACX Grants, etc. Some example "EA-adjacent" funding sources that wouldn't count, even if their money goes directly to this cause area: Patrick Collison, Yuri Milner, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Elon Musk, Vitalik Buterin, Peter Thiel.
- This is obviously a fuzzy distinction (what if one of the aforementioned billionares becomes noticeably more EA-influenced by 2030? etc), but I'll try my best to resolve the question in the spirit of reflecting how the EA community has grown over time.
