EA - Wild animal welfare? Stable totalitarianism? Predict which new EA cause area will go mainstream! by Jackson Wagner

The Nonlinear Library: EA Forum

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Wild animal welfare? Stable totalitarianism? Predict which new EA cause area will go mainstream!, published by Jackson Wagner on March 13, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Long have I idly whiled away the hours browsing Manifold Markets, trading on trivialities like videogame review scores or NASA mission launch dates. It's fun, sure -- but I am a prediction market advocate, who believes that prediction markets have great potential to aggregate societally useful information and improve decision-making! I should stop fooling around, and instead put my Manifold $Mana to some socially-productive use!!So, I've decided to create twenty subsidized markets about new EA cause areas. Each one asks if the nascent cause area (like promoting climate geoengineering, or researching space governance) will receive $10,000,000+ from EA funders before the year 2030.My hope is that that these markets can help create common knowledge around the most promising up-and-coming "cause area candidates", and help spark conversations about the relative merits of each cause. If some causes are deemed likely-to-be-funded-by-2030, but little work is being done today, that could even be a good signal for you to start your own new project in the space!Without further ado, here are the markets:Animal WelfareWill farmed-invertebrate welfare (shrimp, insects, octopi, etc) get $10m+ from EA funders before 2030?Will wild-animal welfare interventions get $10m+ from EA funders before 2030?[embed most popular market]Global Health & DevelopmentWill alcohol, tobacco, & sugar taxation... ?Mental-health / subjective-wellbeing interventions in developing countries?Institutional improvementsApproval voting, quadratic funding, liquid democracy, and related democratic mechanisms?Georgism (aka land value taxes)?Charter Cities / Affinity Cities / Network States?Investing(Note that the resolution criteria on these markets is different than for the other questions, since investments are different from grants.)Will the Patient Philanthropy Fund grow to $10m+ before 2030?Will "impact markets" distribute more than $10m of grant funding before 2030?X-RiskCivilizational bunkers?Climate geoengineering?Preventing stable totalitarianism?Preventing S-risks?Artificial IntelligenceMass-movement political advocacy for AI regulation (ie, "PauseAI")?Mitigation of AI propaganda / "botpocalypse" impacts?TranshumanismCryonics & brain-emulation research?Human intelligence augmentation / embryo selection?Space governance / space colonization?Moral philosophyResearch into digital sentience or the nature of consciousness?Interventions primarily motivated by anthropic reasoning, acausal trade with parallel universes, alien civilizations, simulation arguments, etc?I encourage you to trade on these markets, comment on them, and boost/share them -- put your Manifold mana to a good use by trying to predict the future trajectory of the EA movement! Here is one final market I created, asking which three of the cause areas above will receive the most support between now and 2030.Resolution details & other thoughtsThe resolution criteria for most of these questions involves looking at publicly-available grantmaking documentation (like this Openphil website, for example), adding up all the grants that I believe qualify as going towards the stated cause area, and seeing if the grand total exceeds ten million dollars.Since I'm specifically interested in how the EA movement will grow and change over time, I will only be counting money from "EA funders" -- stuff like OpenPhil, LTFF, SFF, Longview Philanthropy, Founders Fund, GiveWell, etc, will count for this, while money from "EA-adjacent" sources (like, say, Patrick Collison, Yuri Milner, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Elon Musk, Vitalik Buterin, Peter T...