Fwd: Which LessWrong projects are the highest value?

[John Salvatier]

(open access to the list now allowed)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Alicorn <ali...@elcenia.com>
Date: Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 10:42 AM
Subject: Re: Which LessWrong projects are the highest value?
To: John Salvatier <jsal...@u.washington.edu>


My attempt to send a reply to the address you specified resulted in a
mailer demon failure notification.  Text of my reply follows:

For reference, I would have strongly preferred to receive this survey
as a LW PM rather than an e-mail.

Items 3 and 6c seem particularly cheap.  Given the availability of
qualified volunteers (like lukeprog for the Science of Winning at Life
or maybe Kaj for the book reviews, and anyone natively fluent in the
target language for the written translations) others could also be.
Items 2 and 4 are underspecified so I don't know about them.  I think
9 was done - there were at least links to calibration test sites - and
did not make much of a splash.  Items 1 and 12 seem particularly high
value.

On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 9:05 AM, John Salvatier
<jsal...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
> Dear Alicorn,
>
> I hope I find you well!
> Many projects would benefit people interested in living rationally but no
> individuals are motivated enough to execute them (more). The Public
> Goods Team is trying to encourage and facilitate systematic and organized
> work on such projects. One of our first steps is to identify the projects
> that are the lowest hanging fruit: those projects which are high value, and
> inexpensive (in terms of time, motivation, money etc.). We have come up with
> a preliminary list of such projects.
>
> We are especially interested in your judgment of which projects are most
> attractive, because we think the judgments of smart people who have thought
> about this sort of thing are especially informative. Thus we are conducting
> a small survey of the LessWrong top 10 contributors list and others who seem
> relevant. We will use the results of the survey to help us focus our efforts
> on the most valuable projects. We will also write up our results and post
> them to LessWrong.
>
> We have two questions:
>
> What projects not on the list seem low cost and high value?
> What projects seem like they are especially high value and low cost?
>
> If you would like to reply publicly (very much appreciated), please send
> your reply to lw-public-...@googlegroups.com
>
> Cheers,
> John Salvatier