What are the most important questions to answer? What are the most important problems to solve? Various people and organizations in the effective altruist community have compiled lists of such questions and problems. This post provides links and brief descriptions of all the lists I’m currently aware of. (Note that many of these lists are confined to specific causes or disciplines, such as AI or moral philosophy.)

80,000 Hours

A ranking of the top 10 most pressing global problems, rated by scale, neglectedness, and tractability.

AI Impacts

A list of empirical questions of relevance to AI forecasts.

Foundational Research Institute

A comprehensive ranking of open research questions, rated by importance.

Future of Life Institute

A survey of research questions for robust and beneficial AI.

Open Philanthropy Project

A list of technical and philosophical questions that could influence OpenPhil’s grantmaking strategy.

Nick Beckstead

A list of valuable research questions, with a focus on the far-future. See also Nick’s presentation on ‘Jobs I wish EAs would do‘.

Robin Hanson

A list of important problems that are also highly neglected.

Will MacAskill

A list of the most important unresolved problems in moral philosophy.

Luke Muehlhauser

A comprehensive list of potential studies that could, if carried out, illuminate our strategic situation with regard to superintelligence.

Anders Sandberg

A short list of the best problems to work on, intended as a supplement to 80,000 Hours’ ranking.

In addition, the final answer in this interview mentions some research questions that Anders believes are most relevant to space colonization.

On July 9th, 2014, Nick Bostrom gave a talk on ‘Crucial Considerations and Wise Philanthropy’  (audio|slides) at Good Done Right, a conference on effective altruism held at All Souls College, Oxford.  I found the talk so valuable that I decided to transcribe it.

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I’ve been helping some friends create a syllabus for a course on effective altruism, and as part of this effort I compiled a list of existing reading lists on the topic. Am I missing anything?

Syllabi

• Richard Yetter Chappell (University of York)
• Theron Pummer (University of California, San Diego)
• Theron Pummer & Tim Mulgan (University of St Andrews)
• Rohin Shah and others [more details] (University of California, Berkeley)
• Peter Singer (Coursera)
• Kerry Vaughan (Rice University)
• Kristine West & Jeff Johnson (St. Catherine University)

Other reading lists

• Tyler Alterman
• Richard Batty & Oisin Moran
• Ben Kuhn
• Stefan Schubert and others
• Pablo Stafforini
• Students for High-Impact Charity

Gregory Lewis is a public health doctor training in the east of England. He studied medicine at Cambridge, where he volunteered for Giving What We Can and 80000 hours. He blogs at The Polemical Medic. This interview was conducted as part of the research I did for Will MacAskill’s book, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference. Greg’s inspiring story is discussed in chapters 4 and 5 of that book.

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To encourage others to give and to keep myself accountable, I’ve decided to start a log of my charitable donations. This report covers donations made during the period 2013-2016, and will be updated at the end of each new year. I may also start tracking money moved in addition to direct donations, as Peter does, and might provide information about donations made prior to 2013, if I find the relevant records.

Note that the amounts I donate are very modest relative to those donated by some of the effective altruists I most admire, such as Brian, Peter, Jeff, and Michael. At some point in the past, I considered earning to give, but ultimately decided that I could have a much bigger impact through direct work, in particular by multiplying the impact of other, highly impactful EAs. I estimate that my current impact through direct work, counterfactually adjusted, is maybe 100 times my impact through donations (the EA I work for, who moves hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to cost-effective charities and has considerable direct impact through public advocacy and outreach, believes that I make him ~⅓ more impactful and that I’m largely irreplaceable).

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Ben Kuhn is a data scientist and engineer at a small financial technology firm. He previously studied mathematics and computer science at Harvard, where he was also co-president of Harvard College Effective Altruism. He writes on effective altruism and other topics at his website.

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Paul Christiano is a graduate student in computer science at UC Berkeley. His academic research interests include algorithms and quantum computing. Outside academia, he has written about various topics of interest to effective altruists, with a focus on the far future.  Christiano holds a BA in mathematics from MIT and has represented the United States at the International Mathematical Olympiad. He is a Research Associate at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and a Research Advisor at 80,000 Hours.

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