Also relevant: EA Funds say "You can also suggest that we give money to other people, or let us know about ideas for how we could spend our money. Suggest a grant."

So people submitting bounties to Emerson should maybe also suggest the same / similar ideas to EA Funds, and/or maybe Emerson should pass ideas on to EA Funds.

(Obviously bounty ideas and grant ideas are different, but there's probably still a fair bit of overlap or easy ways to modify one into the other in many cases.)

Offer the world's best mathematicians  (e.g. Terence Tao) a lot of money to work on AGI Safety. Say $5M to work on the problem for a year. Perhaps have it open to any Fields Medal recipient.

I imagine that they might not be too motivated by personal consumption, but with enough cash they could forward goals of their own. If they'd like more good math to be done, they could use the money to offer scholarships, grants, and prizes, or found institutes, of their own. (If $5M isn't enough -- I note Tao at least has already won $millions in prizes -- I imagine there is enough capital in the community to raise a lot more. Let them name their price.)

[Previously posted as a comment on MIRI’s Facebook page here.]

This is insufficiently meta. Consider that this very simple and vague payout scheme is probably not optimal for encouraging good bounty suggestions. I suggest going one level up and putting out a bounty for the optimal incentive structure of bounty bounties. A bounty bounty bounty, if you will.

(This is mostly a joke, but I’m not adverse to getting paid if you actually decide to do it)

Edit: now that I’ve thought about it more, something in this space is probably worthwhile. A “bounty bounty bounty” is, funnily enough, both too specific and too abstract. However, a general “bounty on optimal bounty schemes” may be very valuable. A detailed investigation into the optimal bounty payouts for different goals, how best to split bounties among multiple participants, how best to score proposals, etc are all important questions for bounty construction. A bounty to answer such questions makes sense.

Are you looking for shovel ready bounties (eg write them up and you are good to go) or things which might need development time (eg figuring out exactly what to reward, working out the strategy of why the bounty might be good etc)?

(Note: Maybe some of the following projects I suggest already have been done. I haven't thoroughly researched that. If you know that something like I suggest to do has already been done, please comment!)

Some ideas for bounties (or grants) for projects or tasks:

1. An extremely good introduction to "Why should you care about AI safety?" for people who are not stupid but have no idea of AI. (In my opinion preferably as video, though a good article would also be nice.) (I think of a rather short introduction, like 10min-20min)
2. An extremely good explanation for "Why is AI safety so hard?" for people who have just read or watched the (future) extremely good introduction to "Why should you care about AI safety?". (For people who have little idea about what AI safety is actually about.) (Should be an easily understandable introduction to the main problems in AI safety.) (I was thinking of something like 15-30 min read or video, though additionally a longer and more detailed version would probably be useful as well.)
3. A project that tries to understand what the main reasons for are why people reject EA after hearing about it. (through a survey and explicit questioning of people)
4. (A bit related to 3) A project that examines the question "To which degree is effective altruism innate?" and the related question "How many potential (highly, mid or slightly) EA-engaged people are there in the world?". And perhaps also the related question "What life circumstances or other causes cause people to become effective altruists?
5. A study that examines what the best way to introduce EA is. (E.g Is it better to not use the term "effective altruism"?;  Is The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle a good introduction to EA ideas or is it rather deterrent?; For spreading longtermism, should I rather first recommend the Precipice or HPMoR (to spread rationality first)?) (Maybe make it something like a long-term study to which many people throughout the world can contribute.)
6. Make a good estimation of the likelihood that some individual or a small group can significantly (though often indirectly) raise x-risk (for example by creating a bioengineered pandemic, triggering atomic war, triggering an economic crisis (e.g. through hacking attacks), triggering an AI weapons armsrace, triggering a bad political movement etc.). 

I would also love to see people funded, who are just thinking about how the EA community could coordinate better, how efficiency of research in EA-aligned causes can be increased, how EA should be developed in the future, what possible good (mega-)projects are, how to increase the bottleneck of EA (e.g. how to integrate good leadership into EA).

About 1&2: I don't think that should be done just by someone, but by one or more AI researchers who have an extremely good overview about the whole field of AI safety and are able to explain it well to people without prior knowledge. I think it should be something like by far the best introduction. Something which is clearly the thing you would recommend something who is wondering about what AI safety is.

Those are all quite big and important tasks. I think it would be better to advertise those tasks and reach out to qualified people and then fund interested people so they do those tasks, instead of creating bounties, but bounties could work as well.

Of course, you could also create a bounty like "for every 100k$ you raise for EA, you get 5k$" or so. (Yes just totally convince Elon Musk of EA and become a billionaire xD.) But I'm not sure if that would be a good idea, because there could be some downside risk to the image of EA fundraisers.

I like this! I'm curious why you opted for the submissions to be private instead of public (ie. submitting by posting a comment)?

1. What do you forecast is the chance that at least one of the bounties you receive by Nov 15th will get funded by the end of February 2022?

2. If you get multiple ideas you like, do you expect to try to get multiple of them funded?

3. If yes to 2, what's your median forecast for the number of bounties you expect to get funded by the end of February 2022?

Introduce important people* to the most important ideas by way of having seminars they are paid to attend. I recommend Holden Karnofsky’s Most Important Century series for this as it is highly engaging, very readable, and has many jumping off points to go into more depth; but other things are also very good. The format could be groups of 4, with a moderator (and optionally the authors of the pieces under discussion on the side lines to offer clarity / answer questions). It could be livestreamed for accountability (on various platforms to diversify audience). Or not livestreamed for people who care about anonymity, but under the condition that anonymised notes of the conversations are made publicly available. And it should be made clear that the fee is equivalent to a “speakers fee” and people shouldn’t feel obliged to “tow the party line”, but rather speak their opinions freely. The fee should be set at a level where it incentivises people to attend (this level could be different for different groups). In addition to (or in place of) the fee, there could be prestige incentives like having a celebrity (or someone highly respected/venerated by the particular group) on the panel or moderating, or hosting it at a famous/prestigious venue. Ideally, for maximum engagement with the ideas and ample time for discussion, the seminar should be split over multiple weeks (say one for each blog post), but I understand this might be impractical in some cases given the busy schedules important people tend to have.

(Note that this is in a similar vein to another other one of my ideas, but at a much lower level.)

*important people would include technical AI/ML experts, AI policy experts, policy makers in general, public intellectuals; those of which who haven’t significantly engaged with the ideas already.

What's the price range for the bounty?