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The EA University

Status: Project Draft My long-term goal is to be working on the EA University Megaproject (idea from Will MacAskill). I believe that I could be a good fit for working on this, given exceptional training and feedback loops over the next <5 years. I also think this is the most impactful EA project I have found so far, as it’s about as “meta” as one could go.

Some loose thoughts of what I have in mind:

• From Wikipedia:
• The word university is derived from the Latin  universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars" and universitas = 'a whole'
• This means the EA University would be the holistic place where EA reasoning takes place, which includes:
• Learning and Education (corresponds to 📓Pre-Creation | in my How to solve problems framework)
• Academic work à la Bell Labs (📓Creation |)
• Publishing, peer review and company/charity spin-outs (📓Post-Creation |)
• Grant-making and priorities research (📓Impact)
• A physical space / retreats / a virtual network of operations, coaching and general support infrastructure (📓Life | )
• This is a very broad vision, so I am currently thinking a lot about what small MVP I can build for at least one of the components. But I am also trying to create a network of people who have been thinking about some part of this
• Basically we want a “football star attitude” towards researchers: the ratio of ops, coaches, trainers per researcher should be as high as possible. Scientific breakthroughs are tail end distributed, you don’t produce them equally distributed over a 40 hour work week. It’s more likely that something important happens if a team of top researches come together for a “football match” once in a while, perfectly prepared, undistracted. (We just don’t want a loud group of hooligans cheering them up, that’s where the metaphor breaks down 😅) (but maybe we want betting markets [impact certs] and youth scouts [atlas fellowship]?)
• Why do we need this?
• Learning is inefficient, I think we can upskill people a lot quicker and build very good teaching institutions based on evidence-based learning facilitations. (roughly: teaching is bad, learning facilitation is good)
• strong epistemic status
• Unclear how neglected, Training for Good, the fellowships, AI bootcamps
• Streamlining this more sounds helpful though
• Classical academic life can be very contrary to deep, cooperative work.
• unclear how true this is for EAs, more physical spaces that are optimized for explanation creation seem good though
• Publishing is ripe for a revolution anyway, paywalled pdfs have locked in human potential for far to long
• decent evidence, stronger claim is that journals might have been the biggest limiter of GDP growth in this century.
• unclear of how tractable, more experimentation seems good though
• Twitter for peer-review?
• Open science vs. security tradeoff. But paywalls aren’t a security solution
• Grant-making and evaluating science is hard. We should still try out a bunch of new ways like quadratic funding, retroactive funding, etc.
• weak evidence that we can improve much here within EA though. I still think PIs should not write grant applications, that seems terribly inefficient
• We can improve a LOT compared to non-EAs though, so if the university becomes reasonably prestigious, that would be huge
• What age to start? Ideally after Synthesis.io?
• Avoid signaling at all cost vs. start a traditional uni with undergrade programms? Takes to long, decentralized approach sounds a lot better
• Physical Place
• Harvard Square Coworking space
• First faculty should be “meta”
• Faculty for Problem solving: research on how to organize groups to solve hard problems, learning, publishing, creativity science
• PI brainstorm
• Dr. Barbara Oakley (learning)
• Effective Self-Help (coaching/ops)
• Alexandra Elbakyan (publishing)
• Who was behind Bell Labs / Cal Newport
• Altos Labs Ops team?
• Jürgen Klppp (yes, why not)
• Faculty for
• AI Safety (probably the hardest, as so many new orgs anyway. Umbrella org?)
• Biorisk (?)
• scalable altruism (VC/incubator)
• Global Priorities (Forethought, GPI)
• Altruistic Evaluation (GiveWell)
• legal representation of the future
• preventative medicine
• governance (Audrey Tang)
• weird stuff (Anders Sandberg)

Some To-Dos

• The EA University