People and Things I Would Fund If I Were a Billionaire

Science / Education

• The development of new scientific tools and hardware for doing science
  • For a recent example of how this can be useful, see Open Philanthropy’s funding of Edward Boyden lab’s expansion microscopy, which was rejected by government funding bodies multiple times
• Expansion of human senses, e.g.
  • North Paw
  • North Sense
  • NeoSensory
  • Rewiring the Brain to Create New Senses
  • infrared, ultraviolet, … AR
  • hearing prostheses
• edX
  • edX is a joint nonprofit by Harvard and MIT. They produce absolutely amazing courses but due to the need to be financially sustainable closed off graded exercises from people who don’t pay for certificates in December 2018.
  • This is horrific, as graded exercises are essential for learning and upgrading to a verified certificate is a giant friction point
• My research ideas
• Chelsea Hotel for science
• Center for Open Science

Speculative research

• Sarah Constantin’s The Longevity Research Institute
• Throwing money at scientists and designers in search of vastly better teaching materials, as described in the Addendum on motivation of Michael Nielsen’s Reinventing explanation

Speculative businesses / services

• Fund Twitter alternatives (since Mastodon sucks)
  • Also, pay someone to create a service that would show me 20 best tweets from people who I tweet cool stuff, but whom I can’t follow, because they tweet way too much, e.g. Artir, Venkatesh Rao, reiver

Non-profits / charities

• Create the new ACLU
• Fight modern slavery
  • See an interview with a man who freed more than 300 people from slavery in Russia here

Translations from Russian

• Many of Andrei Movchan’s facebook posts (I translated one myself)
• Занимательная Греция, Михаил Гаспаров — this is the best book on Ancient Greece I’ve ever read
• И возвращается ветер, Владимир Буковский — an autobiography of a famous Soviet dissident. There is an English translation but for some reason it skips parts of the book.

Personal fancies

• Create archive of my twitter timeline with archived pictures, videos, and links from it.
  • Same for RSS.
• Pay someone to make Hugo generate TOC and render KaTeX simultaneously (right now it’s TOC with .md or KaTeX with .mmark)
• Randomly anonymously donate to people maintaining open source projects (not stating what the donation is for, so that not to mess up their incentives)
• Fund somebody to create a wearable compass à la North Paw / feelSpace