What EA projects could grow to become megaprojects, eventually spending $100m per year?

Filling the $100m funding gap in nuclear, since the MacArthur Foundation is pulling out of nuclear policy.

"Since 2015 alone, MacArthur directed 231 grants totaling >$100m in some cases providing more than half the annual funding for individual institutions or programs."
"MacArthur was providing something like 40 to 55 percent of all the funding worldwide of the non-government funding worldwide on nuclear policy”
https://t.co/srsq45ejc7?amp=1 

This is a weird one that is illustrative:

Taking over the US private prison system (described here).

Why:

• Benefits from returns to scale, maybe only available as a "mega project"
• Could literally make a profit (CEA is infinite, pretty much the only way to beat GiveWell?)
• It gives access to institutions, even political capital for reform aligned to social change cause areas
• Almost no one else would do this
• Probably a lot of bad things going on inside of them EAs could improve

There's a ton of drawbacks. These include barriers to entry like regulations and capture which could make this impractical. Once inside, implementation issues such as cultural/institutional challenges will be far outside the typical circle of competence of EA. 

But I think that's the point—this idea has a flavor orthogonal to "New R&D/policy institute for X".

Build up an institution that does the IGM economic experts survey with every scientific field, with paid editors, additionally probabilistic forecasts, monetary incentives for the experts maybe. https://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/

The Center for Election Science could easily make efficient use of greater than $50M a year with infrastructure and ballot initiatives. We've already laid out a plan on how we would spend it. We could also potentially build towards some hyper-aggressive $100M years by including lobbying in the remaining states that don't allow ballot initiatives. In any case, we are woefully underfunded relative to our goals and could at the very least surpass the $50M threshold in a couple of years with sufficient funding. If even greater funding were available, we could build in lobbying following more state-level wins.

For clarity, our lack of funding has already cost us approval voting campaign opportunities and is a big issue for us.

Finally get acceptable information security by throwing money at the problem.

Spend $100M/year to hire, say, 10 world-class security experts and get them everything they need to build the right infrastructure for us, and for e.g. Anthropic.

Here's a few suggestions for near-term megaprojects: 

- Longevity research
- Meat-replacement mega-cost reduction investments (leapfrogging current tech) 
- Eliminating disease-bearing mosquitoes 
- Eliminating all vaccine-preventable diseases worldwide 
- Developing cheap, universal metagenomic scanning for biosecurity (Also see this slightly less ambitious version, mentioned by Alex in a different answer.)
- Large-scale governance reform initiatives 
- Universally available, validated, well-build apps for CBT to reduce depression / increase happiness 
- AI safety (We're doing this one already, so the key players may not have room for funding.)

I just want to flag that "megaprojects" are notoriously problematic. They seem to fail more often than other projects and run to be far more expensive than initially predicted. 

There's a whole field of study now into why they go so poorly.

Some articles I was able to find very quickly:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/construction/news/2020/feb/why-megaprojects-go-wrong-ucl-research-finds-main-causes-and-solutions-project-failure
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200214084902.htm

The alternative is to have many projects start out small and just help them to scale up quickly. This is what Silicon Valley does, and it often works in spades. Basically all of the most successful companies started as tiny ventures, not megaprojects.

Starting and funding megaprojects from scratch is something you generally only do when you have no other option.

So if the question is, "which existing projects should scale to get $100m+", that's fine, but if the expectation is that these will be totally new projects, I'd suggest hesitancy.

Impact certificates. Announce that we will purchase NFT's representing altruistic acts created by one of the actors. (Starting now, but with a one-year delay, such that we can't purchase an NFT unless it's at least a year old.) Commit to buy $100M/year of these NFTs, and occasionally reselling them and using the proceeds to buy even more. Promise that our purchasing decisions will be based on our estimate of how much total impact the action represented by the NFT will have. 

Hire ~5 film-studios to each make a movie that concretely shows an AI risk scenario which at least roughly survives the rationalist fiction sniff test. Goal: Improve AI Safety discourse, motivate more smart people to work on this.

Sentinel seems promising

What about creating academic institutes in reputable universities to tackle important problems, eg similar to FHI or CSER, creating research prizes, and sponsoring conferences. I'm mostly thinking about AI Safety, but it may be useful in other areas too.

Hard science funding seems able to absorb this scale of funding, though this might not count as 'EA-specific' projects:
On climate: carbon capture, new solar materials, new battery R&D, maybe even fusion as 'hits-based giving'?
On bio preparedness there's quite a lot, e.g. Cassidy Nelson recommendations, Andy Weber recommendations

Something that could increase economic growth, dramatically reduce inequality of opportunity, and improve well-being of people worldwide:

Try to get as many people connected to the internet with a personal device as possible. 

The stat is that ~50% of the world is connected to the internet is misleading. To be connected you must have used a networked device once in three months, which is far from what most people would expect. 
 

The importance of internet connectivity is hard to understate. It's necessary to function as 21st-century citizens and is the backbone of our societies. It's also necessary for securing various human rights. 

Some quick reasons why internet access is important: 

• Grants access to free education on just about anything 
• Access to banking, communication technologies, etc.
• Increase economic growth, which well-being is somewhat a function of as internet access effectively increases the computational power of the economic system and can 'improve' the substrate upon which it runs (people).
• Increase awareness of EA in general  

Wrote this quickly so apologies for the brevity. I've been working on a longer post where I dive into this in a lot more detail. 

Developing new climate models has costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Useful longtermist climate modelling could include:

• nuclear winter modelling
• volcanic/asteroid impact modelling
• solar geoengineering modelling
• catastrophic (<5C) climate change modelling (note higher end warming is hugely underrepresented in the literature - as argued here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HaXxEtx4QdykBjJi7/betting-on-the-best-case-higher-end-warming-is )

Take some EAs involved in public outreach, some journalists who made probabilistic forecasts on there own volition (Future Perfect people, Matt Yglesias, ?), and buy them their own news media organization to influence politics and raise the sanity- and altruism-waterline.

I have claimed that the first few hundred million dollars of preparation for agricultural and electricity disrupting GCRs is competitive with AGI safety for the longterm, and preparation for agricultural GCRs is more cost effective than GiveWell interventions. Since these catastrophes could happen right away, I think it does make sense to scale up quickly to $100 million per year to get the preparation fast. Beyond research, this money could be used for piloting new technologies and developing response plans and training. To maintain $100 million per year may then be lower cost effectiveness than AGI safety at the expected margin, but would still provide additional value and may be competitive with other priorities. Projects could include subsidizing resilient food sources such as seaweed, cellulosic sugar, methane single cell protein, etc. Or building factories flexibly such that they could switch quickly from producing animal feed or energy to human food. These could easily be many billions of dollars per year.

No idea what it would cost, but we should get to work on cloning John von Neumann: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/03/23/two-paths-to-the-future/

The Sustainable Development Goals - and their predecessor, the MDGs - are like a megaproject led by the UN. Some of these are already aligned with EA priorities, such as the following:

• Eradicating extreme poverty (Goal 1, Target 1.1)
• Ending hunger (Goal 2, Target 2.1) and malnutrition (Target 2.2)
  • Fortify Health aims to improve health by providing fortified wheat flour
• Good health and well-being (Goal 3)
• Clean water and sanitation (Goal 6)
• Ending energy poverty (Goal 7, Target 7.1)
  • One of the aims of the Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund
• Increasing the share of renewable energy (Target 7.2) and energy efficiency (Target 7.3)
• Promoting clean energy innovation (Target 7.A)
• Decent work and economic growth (Goal 8)

The Economist has written that Goal 1 (ending poverty) should be "at the head of a very short list." In my opinion, if we're going to do a megaproject, we should take a handful of the SDG targets (such as 1.1, ending extreme poverty) and spend billions of dollars aggressively optimizing them.

An institute for the science of suffering.

You can maybe make very good civilizational refuges for 100M/year, though this is probably considerably more capital than MVPs I'd like to consider.

Funding a „serious“ prediction market.

Not sure if 100M is necessary or sufficient if you want many people or even multiple organizations to seriously work full-time on forecasting EA relevant questions. Maybe could also be used to spearhead its usage in politics.

I hope it’s ok to mention something I’d like to do at Foresight Institute:

Crowdsource + Crowdfund Civilization Tech Map

Goals: 

• Build on this map for Civilizational Self-Realization (scroll to end of article) to create an interactive technology map for positive long-term futures that is crowdsourced (Wikipedia-style) and allows crowdfunding (Kickstarter-style)
• The map surveys the ecosystem of areas relevant for civilizational long-term flourishing, from health, AI, computing, biotech, nanotech, neurotech, energy, space tech, etc.  
• The map branches out into milestones in each area, and either lists projects solving them, or requests projects to solve them, including options to fund either
• Crowdsourcing of milestones and requests for projects will get it very wrong at first but can get continuously course corrected, e.g. via prediction markets 
• Crowdfunding makes more and more people have skin in the game for the long-term future, e.g. via tokenization, retroactive public goods funding, or a similar mechanism
• In sum, the map can serve as a north star to coordinate those seeking to work toward positive futures and those seeking to fund such work.

Challenge prize(s) to incentivise the development of innovative solutions in priority areas. These could be prizes for goals already suggested by people in this thread  (e.g. producing resilient food sources, drastic changes to diagnostic testing, meat alternatives underinvested in by the market) or others. 

Quotes from a Nesta report on challenge prizes (caveat that I haven't spent any time looking up opposing evidence/perspectives):
 

By guiding and incentivising the smartest minds, prizes create more diverse solutions. Because prizes only pay out when a problem has been solved, you can support long shots, radical ideas and unusual suspects while minimising risk...

The high profile of a prize can raise public awareness and shape the future development of markets and technologies. Prizes can help identify best practice, shift regulation and drive policy change...

For the Ansari XPRIZE, 26 teams spent $100 million chasing the $10 million prize, jump starting the commercial space industry.

See also Musk's $100m prize for carbon capture tech

Buy up scarce resources which are being used for bad things and just sit on them. Like the thing where you buy rainforest to prevent logging. Coal mines, agricultural land used for animals, GPUs?!

Scaling up carbon removal and other promising climate-related technologies before governments are willing to fund them. A lot like what Stripe and Shopify have been doing, but about an order of magnitude bigger. If the timing is right (I'm not sure it is) this strategy could get a fair bit of leverage by driving costs down and accelerating even larger-scale deployments.

Launching a Nucleic Acid Observatory, as outlined recently by Kevin Esvelt and others here (link to paper). With $100m one could launch a pilot version covering 5 to 10 states in the US.

Activist investment fund which invests in large companies and then leans on them to change their policies. Examples abound in climate change, but other than that:

• Food related companies to stop factory farming
• Biotech companies to stop them from doing gain of function or mirror life research

Responding as a member of the ALLFED team.

A network of reliable, long distance shortwave radio systems that do not depend on external sources of electricity and are unable to be disabled by widespread cyber attack, EMP, or most other threats to the global communication infrastructure.

In a wide range of catastrophes, communication systems are a critical vulnerability which, if disrupted, delay societal recovery from the disaster. A highly resilient and reliable system is HAM shortwave radio, which allows reliable, low cost communication to a significant fraction of
the global population. Maintaining key high speed communication
channels during a catastrophe would greatly increase disaster resilience beyond flyer distribution, potentially at relatively little additional cost. A backup shortwave radio communication system would facilitate the timely advice on where to locate clean water sources, identify sensible relocation options, allow improved international cooperation, and allow
coordination about the nature and likely duration of the outage.

We’ve identified HAM shortwave radios as key electronic equipment that is both likely to be highly resilient to global communication disruption on large or small scales, and as relatively easy to distribute. Another interesting use for these radios is distribution to power grid stations
for use to aid blackstart communications after large scale electrical grid collapse.

While several network configurations may serve GCR reduction purposes, our preliminary network design involves around a dozen central stations receiving and broadcasting globally, a network of several hundred two-way NVIS transceiver networks operated by trained personnel, and a few
thousand distributed receiver-only radios. The network would utilize SSB communications to lower power requirements. To cover the entire earth’s population we estimate the total construction and shipping cost at between USD $2 million and $10 million, scaling roughly proportionally with the fraction of global population able to be reached by the network. 

Total costs would therefore reasonably reach into the tens to hundreds of millions for this sort of mega project, depending on the spatial density of the network.

Announce $100M/year in prizes for AI interpretability/transparency research. Explicitly state that the metric is "How much closer does this research take us towards, one day when we build human-level AGI, being able to read said AI's mind, understand what it is thinking and why, what its goals and desires are, etc., ideally in an automated way that doesn't involve millions of person-hours?"
(Could possibly do it as NFTs, like my other suggestion.)

As Stefan notes, Khorton's post on this is worth reading. She argues something that even larger projects like Givewell have <$100m annual budgets (most is regifting) and so finding good projects to spend $100m a year in the long term may be even more difficult.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Kwj6TENxsNhgSzwvD/most-research-advocacy-charities-are-not-scalable

I think each idea should be a seperate answer so it can be upvoted/downvoted seperately.

If you disagree, let me know why.

I don't know the area well, but I guess that one option would be to invest in relevant AI companies, to be able to influence their decision-making (and it could also be profitable). I guess that one could in principle invest very large sums in that. And unlike some other suggested projects, it is maybe not necessarily logistically complicated (though it depends on the set-up). Cf. Ryan's comment.

Proof of concept for a geoengineering scheme (could be controversial)

9 PACs have raised/spent more than $100m (source). So an EA PAC?

Although I guess Sam Bankman-Fried was the second-largest donor to Biden (coindesk, Vox), and Dustin Moskovitz gave $50m; and they're both involved with Future Forward and Mind The Gap, so maybe EA is already kinda doing this.

On Twitter I noted that when it comes to GCRs, its hard to spend $100m on a policy research organisation. Note CSET was $55m/5 years: in the 10m range. OpenPhil's grants to CHS & NTIbio similar.

Anthropic raised $124m - so they might be the most recent EA megaproject.

Create global distributed governments.

Governments as they exist today seem antiquated to me as they are linked to particular geographic regions, and the particular shapes and locations of those regions are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Meanwhile some governments are good at providing for their people – social security, health insurance, enforcement of contracts, physical protection, etc. – so that’s fine, but there are also a lot of governments that are weak in one or more of these critically important departments.

If there were a market of competing global governments, we’d get labor mobility without anyone actually having to move. The governments that provide the best services for the cheapest prices would attract the most citizens.

These governments could draw on something like Robin Hanson’s proposal for a reform of tort law to incentivize a market for crime prevention, could use proof of stake (where the stake may be a one-time payment that the government holds in escrow or a promise of a universal basic income to law-abiding citizens) for some legal matters, and could use futarchy for legislation.

They could also provide physical services, such as horizontal health interventions and physical protection in countries where they can collaborate with the local governments.

An immediate benefit would be the reduction of poverty and disease, but they could also serve to unlock a lot of intellectual capacity by giving people the spare time to educate themselves on matters other than survival. They could define protocols for resolving conflicts between countries and lock in incentives to ensure that the protocols are adhered to. (I bet smart contracts can help with this.)

That way, they could form a union of autonomous parts sort of like the cantons of Switzerland. Such a union of global distributed governments could eventually become a de-facto world government, which may be beneficial for existential security and for enabling the Long Reflection.

Such a government could be bootstrapped out of the EA community. A nonpublic web of trust could form the foundation of the first citizens. If the system fails even when the citizenry is made up largely of highly altruistic, conscientious people who can pay taxes and share a similar culture, it’s probably not ready for the real world. But if it proves to be valuable, it can be gradually scaled up to a broader population spanning more different cultures.

As I alluded to in a comment to KHorton's related post, I believe SoGive could grow to spend something like this much money.

SoGive's core idea is to provide EA style analysis, but covering a much more comprehensive range of charities than the charities currently assessed by EA charity evaluators.

As mentioned there, benefits of this include:

• SoGive could have a broader appeal because we would be useful to so many more people; it could conceivably achieve the level of brand recognition achieved by charity evaluators such as Charity Navigator, which have high levels of brand recognition in the US (c50% with a bit of rounding).
• Lots of the impact here is the illegible impact that comes from being well-known and highly influential; this could lead to more major donors being attracted to EA-style donating, or many other things.
• There's also the impact that could come from donating to higher impact things within a lower impact cause area, and the impact of influencing the charity sector to have more impact

Full disclosure: I founded SoGive.

This short comment is not sufficient to make the case for SoGive, so I should probably right up something more substantial.

The Human Diagnosis Project (disclaimer: I currently work there). If successful, it will be a major step toward accurate medical diagnosis for all of humanity.

Creating a new academic institute - the EA university - that houses a lot of EA research and (somehow) avoids the many issues seen in traditional academia. 

OK, throwing out an idea here… could somebody cobble together a massive direct cash transfer fund? It’s not like there’s a lack of global poor to receive funding…

(Submitted without knowing a whole lot of details about cash transfers; I just know they are a thing.)

Paul's "message in a bottle" for future civilisations

Creating a program like Birthright offering free, all inclusive 10 day trips to countries where EA global health/development programs are run (ie Malawi).

The trip could be targeted towards high achieving youth with a focus on helping make the abstract ideals of EA feel more "real", in addition to being loaded with all sorts of EA programming.

How can we foster longterm global trust and status as a social movement? In order to foster global backing for some of the movement's non-normative or 'creative' ideas (e.g., build post-apocalyptic bunkers to help re-build society in case of nuclear war) that may actually be highly impactful in the longterm future, we likely need to first prove ourselves as a movement that can actually create large-scale global impact. 

Here's one idea for a megaproject that could help to foster global trust/status by proving our ability to use evidence and reason to make a positive impact on the world:

• Part 1: Survey representative samples of most (or all) countries and ask them “if you had 100 million dollars and wanted to use this money to make the world a better place, how would you spend it?”, giving open-ended text and a rank order option of some of the things we’re considering
  • Getting cross-cultural responses to this question could produce the most amount of global backing for EA, and it could look *very good* if we made the movement more democratic! But the latter is an empirical question (I.e., perceived trust in a social movement when the movement relies on experts only, the masses only, or a mix of experts and the masses, vs. a no-mention control)
• Part 2: Create a list of top 10 or so most cared about global issues, and have EA researchers rank each of them in terms of total impact and effectiveness
• Part 3: run a RCT again on nationally representative samples globally and compare the globally top ranked cause area to the EA most effective cause within the top 10 (if these two aren’t the same) to look at trade offs between indirect movement building impact and direct cause area impact --> after this RCT, choose which cause area will produce the most total impact as the "winner" of the $100 million grant.
• Part 4: run a large grant competition to find the best approaches to solving whatever cause area is selected globally (note: I’d hypothesize that it’s very important to solve big issue *globally* to facilitate a new norm of collective global action and foster obligation perceptions towards EA from all countries), and aim to R&D for about 5-10 years (rough estimate), and then roll out the most effective intervention(s) based on these findings
• (Repeat this every X years to maintain longterm support of EA)

Samo Burja said at a meetup the other day that he thinks Vitalik Buterin should give a medium university 10 million dollars to put ten top tier internet bloggers on tenure. No idea if that's a good idea or anywhere near possible, but it could use a decent amount of money for a while.

Educate, empower, and enable diverse talent to work on solutions for the world’s biggest issues.

What is it?

A remote school offering tuition-free education and job placement for vital roles (data scientist, researcher, engineer, etc.) in areas of crucial need (climate, economics, healthcare, etc.).

Process

• Identify important areas where key talent is lacking.
• Establish tuition-free online school led by top thinkers.
• Dispense task-oriented knowledge in short period of time.
• Create post-graduation job placement program for sectors in need.

Effect

• Remove barriers to higher education.
• Create access to opportunities, regardless of location, language, background, etc.
• Lift people out of poverty.
• Funnel talent into organizations and projects that need the most support.
• Solve range of vital issues.
• Grow pool of world problem solvers.
• Inspire next generation of doers and founders.

Growth

• Open up to more students, more languages, more education levels, more areas of speciality.
• Create accelerator program to invest in alum startups.

Closing

Two things that scale well are knowledge and technology. So, rather than attempt to choose a single area of focus, create a megaproject that both democratizes pursuits and crowdsources solutions. This has the potential to produce a network effect on a variety of problems, while removing hierarchal barriers. Scaling continues until new talent declines to join and/or roles disappear, or problems are solved (due to lack of new focus areas and/or some yet-to-be realized superior option i.e. ML/AI).

Inspiration

• Lambda School https://lambdaschool.com
• Y Combinator https://www.ycombinator.com

How about Qualia Research Institute?

https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/history-2021-strategy#what-we-would-do-with-more-funding

(extremely speculative) 

Promote global cooperation and moral circle expansion by paying people (/ incentivising them in some smarter way) to have regular video calls with a random other person somewhere on the planet.

I think aligning narrow superhuman models could be one very valuable megaproject and this seems scalable to >= $100 million, especially if also training large models (not just fine-tuning them for safety). Training their own large models for alignment research seems to be what Anthropic plans to do. This is also touched upon in Chris Olah's recent 80k interview.

Doing something to democratize randomized controlled trials (RCTs) - thereby reducing the risk involved in testing new ideas and interventions.

RCTs are a popular methodology in medicine and the social sciences. They create a safety net for the scientists (and consumers) to test that the drug works as intended and doesn't turn people into mutants.

I think using this methodology in other fields would be a high-leverage intervention. For example startups, policy-making, education, etc. Being able to try out new ideas without facing a huge downside should be a feature of every field.  Big institutions already conduct similar tests before they release something. But I'm wondering how useful it would be to allow small institutions, startups, and maybe even individuals to do this.

Plus, adding an RCT into the launch pipeline of any intervention/product allows us to see the unintended consequences before they're out there. I think this would have at least been helpful for the social media companies.

Based on some googling, I've understood that RCTs are very costly. But if the reasoning makes sense, this is exactly the kind of thing others can't try out that a megaproject should.

Here's a paraphrased quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky, that is relevant in this context: If people could learn from their mistakes without dying from them, well actually, that in itself would tend to fix a whole lot of problems over time. [source]

P.S. I'm thinking on working on this idea full-time in 2022. It would be very helpful to hear whatever criticism/thoughts you have - It'll help me make sure my time is effectively spent.

An organizational version of 80k, GiveWell, Project Drawdown for "incentives".That is, an organization that specializes in 1) solving incentive problems in the most effective way possible (ease of implementation, minimizing costs, minimizing side effects...), 2) identifying priority changes based on their research (in general or for specific public policies such as climate change or longtermism...)

We could finance ballot initiatives, lobbying, running our own candidates. Running US presidential primary candidates could shift conversations and bring attention to issues (although bringing attention to an issue can backfire). Bloomberg spent over $500 million on his own presidential primary campaign and was 4th.

Running presidential candidates could be risky for EA, though. Non-partisan ballot initiatives seem safer.

(highly speculative and I see a lot of flaws, but I can see it scaled)

EA training institute/alternative university. Kind of like creating navy seals: highly selective, high dropout rate, but produces the most effective people (with a certain goal) in the world.

This isn't really a megaproject, but I'm a bit busy to make a top-level post of it so I'm dropping it in here.

An evidence clearinghouse informed by Bayesian ideas and today's political mess.

One of humanity's greatest sources of conflict in the modern area is disagreement about (1) the facts, and (2) how to interpret them. Even basic facts are often difficult to distinguish from severe misinterpretations. I used to be hugely interested in climate misinformation, and now I'm looking at anti-vax stuff, but the problem is the same and has real consequences, from my unvaccinated former legal guardian dying of Covid (months after I questioned popular anti-vax evidence), to various genocides that were fueled by popular prejudices.

To me, a central problem is that (1) most people believe it is easy to figure out what the truth is, so do not work very hard at verifying facts, (2) don't actually have enough time to verify facts anyway (doing it well is hard and very time-consuming!), and (3) are wasting a lot of effort by doing it because there is no durable place where the information you discover can be permanently stored, shared, and cross-referenced by others. The multi-millionaire antivaxxer Steve Kirsch has a dedicated substack with "thousands" of customers paying $5/mo. or $50/year to hear his latest Gish Gallop, while debunkings of Steve Kirsch are randomly scattered around and (AFAIK) unprofitable. If I personally discover something, I might mention it to someone on ACX and/or dump it in the old thread I linked to above, and here's a guy who got 359 "claps" on Medium for his debunking. The response is disorganized and not nearly as popular as the original misinformation.

Another example: I spent 27 years in a religion I now know is false.

Or consider what happened on the extremely popular Joe Rogan program that inspired this meme (a joke, but some believe it was a true story):

Joe Rogan: hamburgers are good but I am trying to eat less pork
Guest: hamburgers are made with beef
Joe Rogan: ham is from pork it says ham in hamburger
Guest: it is beef
Joe Rogan: that’s not what I’ve heard Jamie look that up
Jamie: it beef
Guest: it beef
Joe: ok but can we really trust hamburger makers and butchers and grocery stores when the word ham is in hamburger and ham means pork 
Joe Rogan Fans: this is why I like him he is good at thinking

There are studies (Singer et al., Patone et al. 2021) that say there is a small risk of myocarditis in young people who catch Covid, and a much smaller risk of myocarditis in young people who take a mRNA Covid vaccine. Naturally, since he often listens to anti-vaxxers, Rogan had it backwards and thought the risk was higher in those who had a vaccine. If you watched this program, you'd probably come away confused about whether vaccines are worse than the disease or not.

Obviously a web site isn't going to solve this whole problem, but the absence of such a web site is a serious problem that we can solve.

Another way of framing the central problem is as a matter of distrust of institutions. My sense is that a large minority of the population doesn't trust government organizations and doesn't trust scientific research if it is done with money from the government or big companies, yet at the same time they do seem to trust random bloggers and political pundits who have the "right" opinions. But it's worse than that: anybody can put up a PDF and say "this is a peer-reviewed paper", or put up a web site and call it a peer-reviewed journal. For instance, consider the Walach paper that was retracted for various errors, such as the antivax cardinal sin of ignoring base rates of disease and death—see if you can spot this error in action:

...there were 16 reports of severe adverse reactions and 4 reports of deaths per 100,000 COVID-19 vaccinations delivered. According to the point estimate [...] for every 6 (95% CI 2-11) deaths prevented by vaccination in the following 3–4 weeks there are approximately 4 deaths reported to Lareb that occurred after COVID-19 vaccination. Therefore, we would have to accept that 2 people might die to save 3 people.

But antivax scientists have their own "peer-reviewed journal", which republished the paper with no mention of the earlier retraction, and Kirsch simply linked to that instead. Right now, to figure out that this paper is garbage, you have to suspect that "something is wrong" with it and its journal, and to know what's wrong with it exactly, you have to comb through it looking for the error(s). But that's hard! Who does that? No, in today's world we are almost forced to rely on a more practical method: we notice that the conclusion of the paper is highly implausible, and so we reject it. I want to stress that although this is perfectly normal human behavior, it is exactly like what anti-science people do. You show them a scientific paper in support of the scientific consensus and they respond: "that can't be true, it's bullsh**!" They are convinced "something is wrong" with the information, so they reject it. If, however, there were some way to learn about the fatal flaws in a paper just by searching for its title on a web site, people could separate the good from the bad in a principled way, rather than mimicking the epistemically bad behavior of their opponents.

So I envision a democratization of evidence evaluation, as an alternative to the despised "ivory towers". A site where anyone can go to present evidence, vote on its significance, and construct arguments. Something that uses Wikipedia and other well-sourced articles as a seed, and eventually grows into something hundreds of times larger. Something that has an automated reputation system like StackOverflow. Something that has a network of claims, counterclaims, and evidence for each. Where no censorship is necessary, as false claims are shown not to be credible under the weight of counterevidence. Where people recursively argue over finer and finer points, and recursively combine smaller claims ("greenhouse gases can increase average planetary surface temperature", "humans are causing a net increase of greenhouse gases") to build larger claims ("humans are causing global warming via greenhouse gas emissions"). Where vague or inaccurate claims get replaced over time for clearer and more precise claims. Where steelmen gain more prominence than strawmen.  Where offline and paywalled references must be cited with a quote or photo so users can verify the claim. Where people don't "like or dislike" statements, but vote on epistemically useful questions like "this is a fair summary of the claim made in the source" and "the conclusion follows from the premises", and where the credibility of sources is itself an entire universe of debate and evidence.

This site is just one idea I have under my primary cause area, "Improving Human Intellectual Efficiency" (IHIE), which, taken as a whole, could be a megaproject. I have been meaning to publish an article on the cause area, but haven't found the time and motivation to do it in the last year. Anyway, while it's possible to figure out the truth in today's world, it's only via luck (e.g. good teachers) or a massively inefficient and unreliable search process. Let's improve that efficiency, and maybe fewer people will volunteer to kill and die, and more people will understand their world better.

I think this relates to the top-rated answer too, since the lack of support for nuclear power is driven by unscientific myths. After Fukushima, it seemed like no one in the media was even asking the question of how dangerous X amount of radiation is, as if it made sense to forcibly relocate over 100,000 people without checking the risk first. The information was so hard to find that I ended up combing through the scientific literature for it (and I didn't find it there either, just some information that I could use as input for my own back-of-envelope calculation indicating that 100 mSv of radiation might yield a 0.05% chance of death by leukemia IIRC, less than normal risks of air pollution. Was my conclusion reasonable? If this site existed, I could pose my question there.)

Technological developments in the biotech / pharma industry are notoriously expensive, and my (fairly subjective) impression is that the industry is riddled with market failures.

Especially when applied to particularly pressing problems like pandemic prevention / preparedness, infectious diseases in LMICs, vaccines, ageing and chronic pain, I think EA for-profits and non-profits in this industry could absorb 100 million dollars of annual funding while providing high expected value in terms of social impact.

Universal flu vaccine development and testing  

(idea probably stolen from somewhere else) create an organisation employing an army of superforecasters to gather facts and/or forecasts about the world that are vitally important from an EA perspective.

Maybe it's hard to get to $100million? E.g. 400 employees each costing $250k would get you there, which (very naively) seems on the high end of what's likely to work well. Also e.g. other comments in this post have said that CSET was set up for $55m/5 years.

Qualia Research Institute