This page describes progress on this wiki starting 2018-04-14 (for 80 hours).

Plan

There are several choices I am trying to decide between:

1. A continuation of summarizing views in AI safety, as described in progress report 2018-03-08 to 2018-03-29.
2. More reading in philosophy, e.g. population ethics.
3. Think more about a possible website or tool in cause prioritization (similar to the websites I have been building/helping to build, like AIW, DDDP, DLW, and CDP).
4. I am interested in exploring arguments about the “great stagnation”, which might not be a cause area in itself but is relevant to several causes.
5. I also want to explore “institution design” as a cause area. Paul Christiano and Robin Hanson come to mind as two people in/peripheral to EA/rationality who have written about this topic. The academic term might actually be “mechanism design”.
6. I’m also interested in general world exploration.
7. Vipul has suggested trying to classify cause areas better, and to take a look at other cause area lists (e.g. YC’s RFS).

What was accomplished

Most of the time was spent on classifying cause areas. I spent a lot of time exploring and trying to think up ways to classify causes.

The main concrete outputs are:

• List of classifications of philanthropy which tries to answer “What has been done so far?”
• Cause area classification which tries to answer “What more could be done?”
  • Sub-cause digraph prototype
  • Form of altruism vs beneficiary group prototype which crosses two of the possible classifications to get a table
• Some additions to general questions for causes

External links

• Git commits during this period