Will interventions motivated by aliens, simulation arguments, acausal trade, etc, get $10m+ from EA funders before 2030?
Basic
8
Ṁ314
2030
14%
chance

This is a catch-all category for "Cause X" ideas motivated by "train to crazytown"-style moral-philosophy / decision-theory / anthropic-shadow-related arguments, like "maybe we could impact civilizations in a vast number of parallel universes via acausal trade". It's naturally a fuzzy category, but if an intervention is primarily motivated by the Grabby Aliens hypothesis, or the idea that we're living in a simulation, or pascal's-mugging-esque interventions that only pay off if the Christian religion is literally true, or etc, then it will probably count.

Two categories of things that don't count:
- Patient Philanthropy, or interventions motivated by S-risk or stable totalitarianism (these have their own markets), or other things that are perfectly well-motivated by ordinary Longtermism.
- if EA becomes so totally doomerish on AI that we start funding insane e/acc stuff like "create an AI that will be a slightly more worthwhile successor to humanity than the default misaligned outcome (since humanity will be wiped out either way)"

To resolve this question, in 2030 I will look at publicly-available grantmaking documentation (like this Openphil website, for example), adding up all the grants between October 2023 and January 2030 that support the above-described projects, and resolve YES if the grand total exceeds ten million US dollars.

"EA funders" means places like OpenPhil, LTFF, SFF, Longview Philanthropy, Founders Fund, GiveWell, ACX Grants, etc. Some example "EA-adjacent" funding sources that wouldn't count, even if their money goes directly to this cause area: Patrick Collison, Yuri Milner, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Elon Musk, Vitalik Buterin, Peter Thiel. This is obviously a fuzzy distinction (what if one of the aforementioned billionares becomes noticeably more EA-influenced by 2030? etc), but I'll try my best to resolve the question in the spirit of reflecting how the EA community has grown over time.

For markets about other cause-area-candidates (like cryonics and human intelligence augmentation!), check out the "New EA Cause Area?" tag!

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