FHI Essay Prize

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FHI Essay Prize

Postby Gedusa on 2011-11-09T20:43:00

Those of you following Less Wrong or FHI's website religiously will already know about this but for everyone else...
Can philosophical research contribute to securing a long and prosperous future for humanity and its descendants?

What would you think about if you really wanted to make a difference?

Crucial considerations are questions or ideas that could decisively change your entire approach to an issue. What are the crucial considerations for humanity’s future? These could range from deep questions about population ethics to world government, the creation of greater than human intelligence, or the risks of human extinction.

The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University wants to get young philosophers thinking about these big questions. We know that choosing a PhD thesis topic is one of the big choices affecting the direction of your career, and so deserves a great deal of thought. To encourage this, we are running a slightly unusual prize competition. The format is a two page ‘thesis proposal’ consisting of a 300 word abstract and an outline plan of a thesis regarding a crucial consideration for humanity’s future.

It's open to philosophy students. They clarified to me that it wasn't just students at Oxford - so I'm pretty sure they'll accept submissions from any university. First prize is £2000 - and the "best" get abstracts posted on their website.

I'm planning to submit several in the hope that at least one will be good enough to get a mention on the site. In case you're wondering I'm considering topics like: what computations we decide to care about - game theory applied to "interactions" between us and future civs - singletons etc. Ideas and further discussion are welcome!
World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimization
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Re: FHI Essay Prize

Postby Arepo on 2011-11-11T14:56:00

I have one thought that anyone's welcome to nick if they like the sound of it - modelling the spread of happiness and suffering using epidemiological methods. Ie how can we create successful happiness-causing memes and once we do, how can we give them the best chance of thriving.

It's something I've been kicking arond for a while, and never really seen discussed, and is an alt to the ER arugments, in that it gets a similar benefit out of Pascal's wager as they do - if there's a tiny chance of vast amounts of consciousness, then a tiny increase in its happiness level is potentially enormous.
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Re: FHI Essay Prize

Postby Gedusa on 2011-11-12T21:11:00

Hmmm. Interesting. Has anyone ever done work modeling the spread of any type of meme? Because that would be a) very interesting and b) a prerequisite for modeling the spread of a particular type of meme.

The only stuff I've seen on it was stuff saying that memes are best if they can be effectively passed on by parents, institutions or friends. That's pretty obvious though.

This seems like a topic which utilitarians (*cough* Alan Dawrst *cough*) who want to make future civs do more good should know lots about, or (if the field is crap and there's nothing to see) be wanting to see/funding research into this sort of stuff.
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Re: FHI Essay Prize

Postby Arepo on 2011-11-13T10:46:00

I'd be amazed if there's no research on it anywhere, but I've not seen it. I'm not sure whether memetics is the right angle to look at it from, though. Might it be more useful to a) conceive of hedons/antihedons as forms of self-replicator in their own right or b) dispense with the gene analogy altogether, which never seems to have achieved any predictive success?

Maybe that would be part of the project.
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Re: FHI Essay Prize

Postby Arepo on 2011-11-17T13:49:00

I am kind of tempted to have a go at this, since I do think it's an important angle that no-one seems to have considered, but I don't have any experience with submitting proposals. Anyone want to help out?
"These were my only good shoes."
"You ought to have put on an old pair, if you wished to go a-diving," said Professor Graham, who had not studied moral philosophy in vain.
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Re: FHI Essay Prize

Postby Arepo on 2011-11-17T15:18:00

Oh well, they told me to bugger off since I'm not a current student. Anyone who is agree with the topic enough to put together a proposal on it?
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Re: FHI Essay Prize

Postby Gedusa on 2011-12-11T12:47:00

Sorry I didn't write up your proposal :( For the record it did look interesting but I just couldn't knock it together.

For anyone who's interested, I submitted a proposal entitled: How much (dis)utility could future civilizations have?

It's here. I'm fairly confident that it won't win, but I do think that FHI has kind of a gap in their reasoning about x-risks - namely they don't account for really horrible futures.
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