The FTX Foundation's Future Fund is a philanthropic fund making grants and investments to ambitious projects in order to improve humanity's long-term prospects.
We have a longlist of project ideas that we’d be excited to help launch.
We’re now announcing a prize for new project ideas to add to this longlist. If you submit an idea, and we like it enough to add to the website, we’ll pay you a prize of $5,000 (or more in exceptional cases). We’ll also attribute the idea to you on the website (unless you prefer to be anonymous).
All submissions must be received in the next week, i.e. by Monday, March 7, 2022.
We are excited about this prize for two main reasons:
- We would love to add great ideas to our list of projects.
- We are excited about experimenting with prizes to jumpstart creative ideas.
To participate, you can either
- Add your proposal as a comment to this post (one proposal per comment, please), or
- Fill in this form
Please write your project idea in the same format as the project ideas on our website. Here’s an example:
Early detection center
Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophes
By the time we find out about novel pathogens, they’ve already spread far and wide, as we saw with Covid-19. Earlier detection would increase the amount of time we have to respond to biothreats. Moreover, existing systems are almost exclusively focused on known pathogens—we could do a lot better by creating pathogen-agnostic systems that can detect unknown pathogens. We’d like to see a system that collects samples from wastewater or travelers, for example, and then performs a full metagenomic scan for anything that could be dangerous
You can also provide further explanation, if you think the case for including your project idea will not be obvious to us on its face.
Some rules and fine print:
- You may submit refinements of ideas already on our website, but these might receive only a portion of the full prize.
- At our discretion, we will award partial prizes for submissions that are proposed by multiple people, or require additional work for us to make viable.
- At our discretion, we will award larger prizes for submissions that we really like.
- Prizes will be awarded at the sole discretion of the Future Fund.
We’re happy to answer questions, though it might take us a few days to respond due to other programs and content we're launching right now.
We’re excited to see what you come up with!
(Thanks to Owen Cotton-Barratt for helpful discussion and feedback.)
Hi, Greg. Thank you for your question. I'm very interested in exploring this idea further. First, I want to say that I have not done deep research on the topic. But I know some stuff, and I suspect some stuff. I could be wrong. Here are some of my thoughts:
1) My first point is that it is very plausible that paid leave period has a substantial effect on birth rates. I would sort of have a null hypothesis that there is a large effect, rather than zero/small effect.
2) I'm a statistician, and normally don't put too much weight on personal experience. But before all my three pregnancies a thorough analysis with the conclusion "this is doable financially", was very important in my decision-making. This N=1 (or N=3 if counting three kids), partly forms my opinion on the null hypothesis above. My impression is that most responsible adults have similar thought processes before getting pregnant. Further, after graduating, I was very motivated to have an impactful career. The apparent lack of job security and paid parental leave made sure I was 0% interested in any job at an EA org. Not the end of the world in this specific case, but there are probably a lot of more talented women out there, who also have a 0% interest for the same reasons.
3) I wrote Scandinavian-like because these are countries with generous parental leaves, and I know the setup well, as I'm Norwegian. Again, I have not researched in detail, but all three Scandinavian countries have birth rates well above the average in Europe. I also know France is on top of the birth statistics, and have generous set-ups. If I was French, the headline would maybe point to France instead of Scandinavia :)
4) Apart from (3), it is not straightforward to see a direct effect on leave times and birth rates in Scandinavia. Policies change very slowly over time (might add 1 week every now and then), and changes go hand-in-hand with other policies as free/subsidized kindergardens.
5) It seems to be a bit under-researched whether these policies have effect or not, and it is hard to analyze because of (4). That is at least my impression. So this could be really interesting and valuable as an experiment as well. It could provide insight into the effect of the Trillions (++??) governments use to support the systems today.
6) In Norway I have seen an interesting development over the last 10 years or so. Here, the social security covers 100% of your salary for 49 weeks, but with a max limit of about 60,000 $. About 10 years ago a few companies began to pay any salary above 60K to their employees during the leave. Now, 10 years later, this is standard in the market, and expected from any decent employer. This supports the opportunity to lead the way and affect what other companies might do in the future.
Does this make any sense? :) Happy to discuss this further, and to hear from others who might have more thoughts/research on the topic.