The Future of Humanity Institute could make use of your money

.impact is a volunteer task force of effective altruists who take upon projects not linked to any one organization. .impact deals in particular with implementing open-source software resources that are useful to effective altruists. Well, that's what it's trying to specialize in; the decentralized coordination of remote volunteers is very difficult.

Anyway, on the effective altruism forum, I was involved with a discussion about building an interactive visual map that updates on what the status of projects, and funding, for effective altruist organizations. Anybody trying to reduce existential risk would fall under effective altruism, so ostensibly, they'd be included on such a map, too. This would solve most of the problem I myself posed above.

I'll update Less Wrong in the future if I get wind of any progress on such a project. Anyone: send me a private message if you want more information.

I see.

I take it that this is a damned if you do and damned if you don't kind of situation.

I'm not able to find the source right now (that criticized the MIRI on said grounds), but I'm pretty certain it wasn't a very authentic/respectable source to begin with. As far as I can recall, it was Stephen Bond, the same guy who wrote the article on "the cult of bayes theorem", though there was a link to his page from Yudkowsky's wikipedia page which is not there anymore.

I simply brought up this example to show how easy it is tarnish an image, something I'm sure you're well aware of. Nonetheless, my point still stands. IMAGE MATTERS.

It doesn't make a difference that the good (and ingenious) folk at MIRI are doing some of the most important work, that may at any given moment solve a large number of headaches for the human race. There are others out there making that same claim. And because some of those others are politicians wearing fancy suits, people will listen to them. (Don't even get me started on the saints and the priests who successfully manage to make decent hard working folk part with large portions of their lifetime's worth of savings, but those cases are a little bit beyond the scope of this particular argument).

A real estate agent can point to a rising skyscraper as evidence of money being put to good use. A NASA type of organisation (slightly tongue in cheek, just indicating a cluster) can point to a satellite orbiting Mars. A biotech company may one day point to a fully lab grown human with perfect glowing skin. A nanotech company can one day point to the world's smallest robot to "do the robot".

The above examples have two things in common, one that they are visible in the most literal sense of the word. The second is (I believe) that most people have a ready intuition by which they can see how achieving any of the above would require a large amount of cash/funding.

Software is harder to impress people with. Even harder if the software is genuinely complicated. To make matters worse, the media has flooded the imagination of newspaper readers all over the world with rage to riches stories of entrepreneurs who made it big and were ok with being only ramen profitable for long years.

And yet institutions that are ostensibly purely academic and research oriented also require funding. And I don't disagree. I've read HPMoR and I've read portions of the LW site as well. I know that this is likely for real, and that there is more than enough credibility built up by the proponents for research into these areas.

Unfortunately, I'm in the minority. And as of now, I'm a far cry from being financially sound. If the MIRI/FHI have to accelerate their research and they need funding for it, then it is not a bad idea to make their progress seem more tangible, even if they can't deliver every single detail every single time.

One possible major downside of this approach of course is that it might eat into valuable time which could otherwise be spent making the real progress that these institutions were created for in the first place.

Yeah, I was actually trying to say that they need to do other stuff too, not cut down on publishing papers.

You might wanna weigh in on this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/l13/the_future_of_humanity_institute_could_make_use/be4o

Before dismissing blog posts keep in mind the Sequences were blog posts. And they are probably much more useful and important than all but the best academic papers. If current donations happened to lead to blog posts of that caliber the donations would be money well spent.

It will be the job of my new Institute for Verifiably Estimating, Guessing, and Extrapolating the Most Important Thing Ever (Subject to Availability of a Nutritious Diet, with Wholesome Ingredients in Culturally and Historically Expedient Servings) to figure out what that is.

ETA of course, we shall be affiliated with the University of Woolloomooloo