Filling the $100m funding gap in nuclear, since the MacArthur Foundation is pulling out of nuclear policy.

"Since 2015 alone, MacArthur directed 231 grants totaling >$100m in some cases providing more than half the annual funding for individual institutions or programs."
"MacArthur was providing something like 40 to 55 percent of all the funding worldwide of the non-government funding worldwide on nuclear policy”
https://t.co/srsq45ejc7?amp=1 

This is a weird one that is illustrative:

Taking over the US private prison system (described here).

Why:

• Benefits from returns to scale and seems suited/only available to a "mega project"
• Could literally make EA a profit (CEA is infinite, pretty much the only way to beat GiveWell?)
• It gives access to institutions, even political capital for reform aligned to social change cause areas
• Almost no one else would consider doing this
• Probably a lot of bad things going on inside of them EAs could improve

There's a ton of drawbacks, and without details this idea is "pie in the sky".  There are barriers to entry like regulations and related capture which could make this impractical. Once inside, implementation issues such as cultural/institutional challenges are going to be far outside the typical circle of competence of EA. 

But I think that's the point—this idea has a flavor orthogonal to "New R&D/policy institute for X".

Here's a few suggestions for near-term megaprojects: 

- Longevity research
- Meat-replacement mega-cost reduction investments (leapfrogging current tech) 
- Eliminating disease-bearing mosquitoes 
- Eliminating all vaccine-preventable diseases worldwide 
- Developing cheap, universal metagenomic scanning for biosecurity (Also see this slightly less ambitious version, mentioned by Alex in a different answer.)
- Large-scale governance reform initiatives 
- Universally available, validated, well-build apps for CBT to reduce depression / increase happiness 
- AI safety (We're doing this one already, so the key players may not have room for funding.)

Build up an institution that does the IGM economic experts survey with every scientific field, with paid editors, additionally probabilistic forecasts, monetary incentives for the experts maybe. https://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/

Finally get acceptable information security by throwing money at the problem.

Spend $100M/year to hire, say, 10 world-class security experts and get them everything they need to build the right infrastructure for us, and for e.g. Anthropic.

Developing new climate models has costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Useful longtermist climate modelling could include:

• nuclear winter modelling
• volcanic/asteroid impact modelling
• solar geoengineering modelling
• catastrophic (<5C) climate change modelling (note higher end warming is hugely underrepresented in the literature - as argued here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HaXxEtx4QdykBjJi7/betting-on-the-best-case-higher-end-warming-is )

Hard science funding seems able to absorb this scale of funding, though this might not count as 'EA-specific' projects:
On climate: carbon capture, new solar materials, new battery R&D, maybe even fusion as 'hits-based giving'?
On bio preparedness there's quite a lot, e.g. Cassidy Nelson recommendations, Andy Weber recommendations

Impact certificates. Announce that we will purchase NFT's representing altruistic acts created by one of the actors. (Starting now, but with a one-year delay, such that we can't purchase an NFT unless it's at least a year old.) Commit to buy $100M/year of these NFTs, and occasionally reselling them and using the proceeds to buy even more. Promise that our purchasing decisions will be based on our estimate of how much total impact the action represented by the NFT will have. 

Sentinel seems promising

Hire ~5 film-studios to each make a movie that concretely shows an AI risk scenario which at least roughly survives the rationalist fiction sniff test. Goal: Improve AI Safety discourse, motivate more smart people to work on this.

No idea what it would cost, but we should get to work on cloning John von Neumann: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/03/23/two-paths-to-the-future/

Take some EAs involved in public outreach, some journalists who made probabilistic forecasts on there own volition (Future Perfect people, Matt Yglesias, ?), and buy them their own news media organization to influence politics and raise the sanity- and altruism-waterline.

Something that could increase economic growth, dramatically reduce inequality of opportunity, and improve well-being of people worldwide:

Try to get as many people connected to the internet with a personal device as possible. 

The stat is that ~50% of the world is connected to the internet is misleading. To be connected you must have used a networked device once in three months, which is far from what most people would expect. 
 

The importance of internet connectivity is hard to understate. It's necessary to function as 21st-century citizens and is the backbone of our societies. It's also necessary for securing various human rights. 

Some quick reasons why internet access is important: 

• Grants access to free education on just about anything 
• Access to banking, communication technologies, etc.
• Increase economic growth, which well-being is somewhat a function of as internet access effectively increases the computational power of the economic system and can 'improve' the substrate upon which it runs (people).
• Increase awareness of EA in general  

Wrote this quickly so apologies for the brevity. I've been working on a longer post where I dive into this in a lot more detail. 

You can maybe make very good civilizational refuges for 100M/year, though this is probably considerably more capital than MVPs I'd like to consider.

What about creating academic institutes in reputable universities to tackle important problems, eg similar to FHI or CSER, creating research prizes, and sponsoring conferences. I'm mostly thinking about AI Safety, but it may be useful in other areas too.

Funding a „serious“ prediction market.

Not sure if 100M is necessary or sufficient if you want many people or even multiple organizations to seriously work full-time on forecasting EA relevant questions. Maybe could also be used to spearhead its usage in politics.

An institute for the science of suffering.

The Center for Election Science could easily make efficient use of greater than $50M a year with infrastructure and ballot initiatives. We've already laid out a plan on how we would spend it. We could also potentially build towards some hyper-aggressive $100M years by including lobbying in the remaining states that don't allow ballot initiatives. In any case, we are woefully underfunded relative to our goals and could at the very least surpass the $50M threshold in a couple of years with sufficient funding. If even greater funding were available, we could build in lobbying following more state-level wins.

For clarity, our lack of funding has already cost us approval voting campaign opportunities and is a big issue for us.

9 PACs have raised/spent more than $100m (source). So an EA PAC?

Although I guess Sam Bankman-Fried was the second-largest donor to Biden (coindesk, Vox), and Dustin Moskovitz gave $50m; and they're both involved with Future Forward and Mind The Gap, so maybe EA is already kinda doing this.

Challenge prize(s) to incentivise the development of innovative solutions in priority areas. These could be prizes for goals already suggested by people in this thread  (e.g. producing resilient food sources, drastic changes to diagnostic testing, meat alternatives underinvested in by the market) or others. 

Quotes from a Nesta report on challenge prizes (caveat that I haven't spent any time looking up opposing evidence/perspectives):
 

By guiding and incentivising the smartest minds, prizes create more diverse solutions. Because prizes only pay out when a problem has been solved, you can support long shots, radical ideas and unusual suspects while minimising risk...

The high profile of a prize can raise public awareness and shape the future development of markets and technologies. Prizes can help identify best practice, shift regulation and drive policy change...

For the Ansari XPRIZE, 26 teams spent $100 million chasing the $10 million prize, jump starting the commercial space industry.

See also Musk's $100m prize for carbon capture tech

Scaling up carbon removal and other promising climate-related technologies before governments are willing to fund them. A lot like what Stripe and Shopify have been doing, but about an order of magnitude bigger. If the timing is right (I'm not sure it is) this strategy could get a fair bit of leverage by driving costs down and accelerating even larger-scale deployments.

Launching a Nucleic Acid Observatory, as outlined recently by Kevin Esvelt and others here (link to paper). With $100m one could launch a pilot version covering 5 to 10 states in the US.

I have claimed that the first few hundred million dollars of preparation for agricultural and electricity disrupting GCRs is competitive with AGI safety for the longterm, and preparation for agricultural GCRs is more cost effective than GiveWell interventions. Since these catastrophes could happen right away, I think it does make sense to scale up quickly to $100 million per year to get the preparation fast. Beyond research, this money could be used for piloting new technologies and developing response plans and training. To maintain $100 million per year may then be lower cost effectiveness than AGI safety at the expected margin, but would still provide additional value and may be competitive with other priorities. Projects could include subsidizing resilient food sources such as seaweed, cellulosic sugar, methane single cell protein, etc. Or building factories flexibly such that they could switch quickly from producing animal feed or energy to human food. These could easily be many billions of dollars per year.

Activist investment fund which invests in large companies and then leans on them to change their policies. Examples abound in climate change, but other than that:

• Food related companies to stop factory farming
• Biotech companies to stop them from doing gain of function or mirror life research

Announce $100M/year in prizes for AI interpretability/transparency research. Explicitly state that the metric is "How much closer does this research take us towards, one day when we build human-level AGI, being able to read said AI's mind, understand what it is thinking and why, what its goals and desires are, etc., ideally in an automated way that doesn't involve millions of person-hours?"
(Could possibly do it as NFTs, like my other suggestion.)

Creating a new academic institute - the EA university - that houses a lot of EA research and (somehow) avoids the many issues seen in traditional academia. 

Proof of concept for a geoengineering scheme (could be controversial)

Buy up scarce resources which are being used for bad things and just sit on them. Like the thing where you buy rainforest to prevent logging. Coal mines, agricultural land used for animals, GPUs?!

As I alluded to in a comment to KHorton's related post, I believe SoGive could grow to spend something like this much money.

SoGive's core idea is to provide EA style analysis, but covering a much more comprehensive range of charities than the charities currently assessed by EA charity evaluators.

As mentioned there, benefits of this include:

• SoGive could have a broader appeal because we would be useful to so many more people; it could conceivably achieve the level of brand recognition achieved by charity evaluators such as Charity Navigator, which have high levels of brand recognition in the US (c50% with a bit of rounding).
• Lots of the impact here is the illegible impact that comes from being well-known and highly influential; this could lead to more major donors being attracted to EA-style donating, or many other things.
• There's also the impact that could come from donating to higher impact things within a lower impact cause area, and the impact of influencing the charity sector to have more impact

Full disclosure: I founded SoGive.

This short comment is not sufficient to make the case for SoGive, so I should probably right up something more substantial.

I think aligning narrow superhuman models could be one very valuable megaproject and this seems scalable to >= $100 million, especially if also training large models (not just fine-tuning them for safety). Training their own large models for alignment research seems to be what Anthropic plans to do. This is also touched upon in Chris Olah's recent 80k interview.

I don't know the area well, but I guess that one option would be to invest in relevant AI companies, to be able to influence their decision-making (and it could also be profitable). I guess that one could in principle invest very large sums in that. And unlike some other suggested projects, it is maybe not necessarily logistically complicated (though it depends on the set-up). Cf. Ryan's comment.

The Sustainable Development Goals - and their predecessor, the MDGs - are like a megaproject led by the UN. Some of these are already aligned with EA priorities, such as the following:

• Eradicating extreme poverty (Goal 1, Target 1.1)
• Ending hunger (Goal 2, Target 2.1) and malnutrition (Target 2.2)
  • Fortify Health aims to improve health by providing fortified wheat flour
• Good health and well-being (Goal 3)
• Clean water and sanitation (Goal 6)
• Ending energy poverty (Goal 7, Target 7.1)
  • One of the aims of the Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund
• Increasing the share of renewable energy (Target 7.2) and energy efficiency (Target 7.3)
• Promoting clean energy innovation (Target 7.A)
• Decent work and economic growth (Goal 8)

The Economist has written that Goal 1 (ending poverty) should be "at the head of a very short list." In my opinion, if we're going to do a megaproject, we should take a handful of the SDG targets (such as 1.1, ending extreme poverty) and spend billions of dollars aggressively optimizing them.

The Human Diagnosis Project (disclaimer: I currently work there). If successful, it will be a major step toward accurate medical diagnosis for all of humanity.

Creating a program like Birthright offering free, all inclusive 10 day trips to countries where EA global health/development programs are run (ie Malawi).

The trip could be targeted towards high achieving youth with a focus on helping make the abstract ideals of EA feel more "real", in addition to being loaded with all sorts of EA programming.

Qualia Research Institute

Doing something to democratize randomized controlled trials (RCTs) - thereby reducing the risk involved in testing new ideas and interventions.

RCTs are a popular methodology in medicine and the social sciences. They create a safety net for the scientists (and consumers) to test that the drug works as intended and doesn't turn people into mutants.

I think using this methodology in other fields would be a high-leverage intervention. For example startups, policy-making, education, etc. Being able to try out new ideas without facing a huge downside should be a feature of every field.  Big institutions already conduct similar tests before they release something. But I'm wondering how useful it would be to allow small institutions, startups, and maybe even individuals to do this.

Plus, adding an RCT into the launch pipeline of any intervention/product allows us to see the unintended consequences before they're out there. I think this would have at least been helpful for the social media companies.

Based on some googling, I've understood that RCTs are very costly. But if the reasoning makes sense, this is exactly the kind of thing others can't try out that a megaproject should.

Here's a paraphrased quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky, that is relevant in this context: If people could learn from their mistakes without dying from them, well actually, that in itself would tend to fix a whole lot of problems over time. [source]

P.S. I'm thinking on working on this idea full-time in 2022. It would be very helpful to hear whatever criticism/thoughts you have - It'll help me make sure my time is effectively spent.

(highly speculative and I see a lot of flaws, but I can see it scaled)

EA training institute/alternative university. Kind of like creating navy seals: highly selective, high dropout rate, but produces the most effective people (with a certain goal) in the world.

An organizational version of 80k, GiveWell, Project Drawdown for "incentives".That is, an organization that specializes in 1) solving incentive problems in the most effective way possible (ease of implementation, minimizing costs, minimizing side effects...), 2) identifying priority changes based on their research (in general or for specific public policies such as climate change or longtermism...)

Paul's "message in a bottle" for future civilisations

(extremely speculative) 

Promote global cooperation and moral circle expansion by paying people (/ incentivising them in some smarter way) to have regular video calls with a random other person somewhere on the planet.

We could finance ballot initiatives, lobbying, running our own candidates. Running US presidential primary candidates could shift conversations and bring attention to issues (although bringing attention to an issue can backfire). Bloomberg spent over $500 million on his own presidential primary campaign and was 4th.

Running presidential candidates could be risky for EA, though. Non-partisan ballot initiatives seem safer.

Maybe diet pledge programs like Veganuary and Challenge 22? They could spend a lot more on ads and expand to more countries. Maybe this would be better set up like the Open Wing Alliance, where The Humane League supports, trains and regrants to local organizations working on cage-free campaigns in different countries.

I'm not sure this could reach $100 million while still spending reasonably cost-effectively, though.

(idea probably stolen from somewhere else) create an organisation employing an army of superforecasters to gather facts and/or forecasts about the world that are vitally important from an EA perspective.

Maybe it's hard to get to $100million? E.g. 400 employees each costing $250k would get you there, which (very naively) seems on the high end of what's likely to work well. Also e.g. other comments in this post have said that CSET was set up for $55m/5 years.