Research I'd Like to See

Published 20 December 2021

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I have a backlog of half-baked ideas for potentially interesting research projects, and it doesn’t make much sense to keep them to myself. In part, I’ve written some of these ideas down as a kind of weak public commitment to write about them properly. But mostly, I hope this ends up being useful for others. I encourage others to share research ideas more — half-baked research ideas are not a precious commodity in fixed supply; it’s the doing something with them that’s valuable. And I think there is an unusually big ‘idea overhang’ in effective altruism and global priorities research. If you have a small garden but a windfall of seeds, (sidenote: Here are some other examples, from Logan Graham, Gwern, Rose Hadshar, Alexey Guzey, and Patrick Collison. Here is a doc and a spreadsheet compiled by Edo Arad. Michael Aird has a very impressive ‘central directory for open research questions’ which you can browse here. Effective thesis also has a great database of research ideas.)

Fee free to ask me for more specifics about something. I also expect I’ll occasionally revisit this and add things.

Existential risk

Representing future generations and longtermism

Philosophy of mind / psychology

Ethics

Ambitious / speculative / potentially stupid

Space

Random

Feel free to email me about any of these!



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